Relying overwhelmingly on people making the maximum allowable contributions, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney amassed an $18 million haul that dwarfs other Republican presidential candidates, second-quarter financial disclosures released Friday show.

Yet two firebrands mounted last-minute campaigns that seemed to effortlessly raise funds in small increments in weeks while requiring little spending, leaving significant amounts stored away as candidates prepare for the Iowa straw poll next month.

Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian-leaning Republican from Texas, raised $4.5 million and has $3 million on hand. Rep. Michele Bachmann, his third-term colleague in Congress,  from Minnesota, focusing all resources on a newly created presidential campaign rather than her House seat, was in a similar position.

Though former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s haul of $4.5 million beat that of Mrs. Bachmann, he seemed to use up most of the take as soon as it reached his bank account, leaving him with less money heading into the third quarter.

Early financial measures of support for other official Republican candidates also were not bright.

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum had a poor showing of $580,000 raised and $230,000 in the bank. He focused much of his spending on Iowa. Wealthy businessman Herman Cain raised $2 million, but spent nearly all of it, and loaned his campaign half a million dollars in personal funds to have cash on hand.

The flailing campaign of onetime House speaker Newt Gingrich raised $2 million, but spent nearly all of it, and closes the quarter heavily in debt. In the past three months, the Gingrich campaign, which endured an exodus of key staffers last month, racked up unpaid debts of $100,000 in legal fees and $90,000 in communications services.

And in the final days of the quarter, donations slowed to a trickle, with Mr. Gingrich receiving fewer donations per week than in the early spring. The campaign lists $47,000 owed to the candidate himself to compensate or reimburse him for “direct mail list/travel.”

Jon Huntsman Jr., former Utah governor and former ambassador to China, did not file a financial report Friday because of his late entry into the presidential race. As with Mr. Romney, money raised is more a sign of voter enthusiasm than a necessity, as both men have their own means to fund their campaigns.

With the primaries still months away, the nomination race is open, and federal rules allow politicians to raise and spend money through other accounts to “test the waters” without declaring a candidacy.

A fund controlled by one such undeclared politician, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, was highly active, spending nearly all of the $1.6 million it raised, overwhelmingly from small donors. Though most could not be transferred to a campaign, it closes the period with more than $1 million dollars in the bank.

The committee set up by Rudolph W. Giuliani for his 2008 presidential run saw activity last quarter, spending $60,000 on administrative costs. The former New York City mayor did not close the account by paying down any outstanding debts, including a $350,000 phone bill, $275,000 for airfare, $215,000 in rent and utilities, and a $141,000 debt to Giuliani Security Safety, a division of the consulting firm he oversees. Earlier this year, he donated about $1 million to the account, taking it closer to being in the black, and loaned it $300,000.

Such activity is not a sure sign that a politician will run for office, however. The old presidential campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton, now secretary of state under President Obama, has been actively raising money in the past three months, forms filed Friday show, long after it went into debt in a protracted competition against Mr. Obama in 2008.

Despite a $127,000 haul between April and June, the Clinton campaign applied less than a third to paying down a $330,000 debt to pollster Mark Penn.

© Copyright 2011 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

BEIJING (AP) — China on Sunday slammed President Obama’s meeting with the Dalai Lama as an act that has “grossly interfered in China’s internal affairs” and damaged Chinese-American relations.

The strident statement from China’s Foreign Ministry came hours after Mr. Obama met with the Tibetan spiritual leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who was in Washington for an 11-day Buddhist ritual.

China earlier called on the United States to stop Saturday’s meeting, warning it could hurt relations between the two countries.

After the 45-minute private session at the White House, China said the Foreign Ministry and the Chinese Embassy had lodged objections with U.S. representatives in Beijing and Washington.

“Such an act has grossly interfered in China’s internal affairs, hurt the feelings of the Chinese people and damaged Sino-American relations,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said in the statement.

“We demand the U.S. side seriously consider China’s stance, immediately adopt measures to wipe out the baneful impact, stop interfering in China’s internal affairs and cease to connive and support anti-China separatist forces that seek ‘Tibetan independence,’” Mr. Ma said.

China considers the Dalai Lama a separatist intent on ending Chinese rule over Tibet. The Nobel laureate says he seeks only a high level of autonomy for Tibet.

The meeting came less than 10 days before U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is due to visit the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen and meet with Chinese State Councilor Dai Bingguo, Beijing’s top foreign policy official.

“It’s difficult to say at the moment whether this meeting will be affected,” said Jin Canrong, an international affairs expert at Renmin University. “But this meeting is quite important, and whether it takes place or is canceled will give us an indication of what the follow-up impact will be.”

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. also is scheduled to visit China this summer, followed by a trip to Washington by his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping.

China Central Television showed Mr. Xi visiting Tibet on Sunday to attend festivities marking the 60th anniversary of communist rule, which occurred in May.

Mr. Obama last met with the Dalai Lama in February 2010, infuriating Beijing during a tension-filled year in which China and the U.S. also feuded over online censorship and arms sales for Taiwan. Relations were considered back on track in January when President Hu Jintao visited Washington.

“I think after this meeting Sino-U.S. relations will be rather cold over the next few months,” Mr. Jin said. “It may lead to the suspension of high-level official exchanges and therefore impact on the strategic mutual trust and cooperation between China and the U.S. in some fields, including military ties.”

The White House said that during Saturday’s meeting Mr. Obama “underscored the importance of the protection of human rights of Tibetans in China.” Mr. Obama restated U.S. policy that it does not support Tibetan independence.

Tibet has been a source of controversy for decades, since Beijing sent troops to occupy the country following the 1949 Communist revolution. It insists the region has been part of Chinese territory for centuries, a claim disputed by many Tibetans, who say their Himalayan region has a long history of autonomous rule led by a series of Buddhist leaders.

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The campaign fundraising efforts of President Obama raised $86 million in the past three months from 500,000 people — but at least $35 million of it can be traced to just 244 well-connected supporters who collected contributions from wealthy friends.

Just 634 donations from people giving $30,000 or more to the Obama Victory Fund comprise $23 million, while the 1,335 donations the fund received from those giving $250 add up to about $336,000, a Washington Times analysis shows.

The campaign has branded itself as a new type of political operation and touted its reliance on a grassroots network of everyday people writing reasonably sized checks.

“Ninety-eight percent of all donations that came in were $250 or less, and our average donation was about $69,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said in a video to supporters.

And the dramatic reach is, in part, a testament to the power of personal relationships, among the moneyed elite as with the population at large: The mathematics of the ranges collected by the bundlers and the number of large donations given suggest that nearly every maximum donation came after personal contact with one of the 244 emissaries who received credit for shepherding it.

But the list, which was voluntarily disclosed by Mr. Obama and includes 27 people who brought in more than half a million dollars each — at least $13.5 million between them — is made up of many of the same people who have had outsized influence on American politics for years.

While the figures released by Mr. Obama include only names and locations, a Times analysis found 25 that likely bundled contributions for John Kerry in 2004. At least 90 worked as bundlers for Mr. Obama when he was a freshman senator mounting a bid for the presidency in 2008, but others were betting on his opponents: Ten were raising money for Hillary Rodham Clinton and seven bundled for John Edwards.

Federal donor histories of the half of the 244 that could be traced by The Times show that that segment alone, with their immediate families, has personally donated $21 million to U.S. elections in more than 7,800 checks between 2007 and 2010.

Fred Eychaner of media company Newsweb Corp., for example, made 73 federal-level political donations totaling $700,000 during the 2008 and 2010 elections before joining the ranks of Mr. Obama’s lowest tier of bundlers, those raising between $50,000 and $100,000. Mr. Obama appointed Mr. Eychaner a Kennedy Center trustee in September.

Azita Raji, meanwhile, a retired investment banker from Belvedere, Calif., raised more than half a million dollars for Mr. Obama from associates. Mr. Raji and family members personally gave $70,000 in the last two election cycles.

And Robert Wolf of UBS Americas, who in 2008 bundled $100,000 for Mr. Kerry, raised between $200,000 and $500,000 for Mr. Obama this cycle. He and family members have given 115 donations totaling some $185,000 in the last two cycles.

The money has made up significant chunks of the wider Democratic machine, with $6.3 million of the personal donations by bundlers identified by The Times going to the Democratic National Committee, $2.4 million to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and $1.9 million to its House counterpart.

Spread their wealth

The business leaders often spread their wealth freely, as if hedging their bets to maintain favor with whoever may be in power. In that figure are 118 donations to Republicans totaling $210,000, including $100,000 to the Republican National Committee.

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The No. 2 Democrat in the Senate on Sunday called for a congressional investigation into the phone-hacking scandal that has rocked Rupert Murdoch’s media behemoth News Corp.

Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,”Sen. Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, said Congress should join an FBI investigation into whether News Corp. — the parent company of Fox News, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal — engaged in illegal activity.

“What’s going on in England is startling. We need to follow through” with a congressional inquiry, Mr. Durbin said.

His comments came only hours after Rebekah Brooks, Mr. Murdoch’s former British CEO, was arrested in London. Ms. Brooks, 43, is being questioned on suspicion of phone hacking and suspicion of corruption, the Associated Press reported. She is the former editor of Mr. Murdoch’s News of the World, which published its final edition July 10, just days after it was revealed journalists working for the tabloid hacked into hundreds of voicemail accounts of celebrities, politicians and the victims of crimes.

The FBI investigation was launched to find out if 9/11 victims or their families were also the targets of News Corp. journalists.

There have also been allegations that high-level law enforcement officials received bribes from journalists and other News Corp. employees. London Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson resigned Sunday over those claims, according to the AP.

Last week, Les Hinton, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal and CEO of Dow Jones, also resigned, becoming the first significant casualty of the episode on this side of the Atlantic.

Beyond Mr. Hinton’s resignation, Mr. Murdoch’s American outlets have not yet been tied directly to the scandal.

“They’ve not been touched by it, they’ve told me,” said Ohio Gov. John Kasich, referring to Fox News, for which Mr. Kasich, a Republican, worked as a host and commentator before returning to politics.

Mr. Durbin said the congressional investigation, if opened, would focus on whether Mr. Murdoch or other News Corp. employees violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits payments to foreign officials designed to influence their actions.

Republicans appear less interested in an investigation. Also speaking on “Meet the Press,” Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican, said Congress should simply “let law enforcement work here” and not get involved, instead focusing on more pressing matters like the national debt.

Regardless of whether the scandal touches American companies, Mr. Kasich said it’s a “terrible thing” that will “change journalism” throughout the world, not just in the U.K.

The affair has already cost Mr. Murdoch dearly by sinking his bid to take over British Sky Broadcasting. Along with Ms. Brooks and his son, James, Mr. Murdoch is set to answer questions before a parliamentary committee on Tuesday, though Ms. Brooks may be able to avoid answering questions directly related to her arrest and the ongoing police investigation.

As the spotlight grows hotter, Mr. Murdoch is trying to stop the bleeding and restore faith in his company. He ran full-page ads in his U.K. papers on Saturday that began by saying, “We are sorry.”

“It may take some time for us to rebuild trust and confidence but we are determined to live up to the expectations of our readers, colleagues and partners,” the ad continued.

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As Washington stares at rising national debt and projected deficits for years to come, many states are faced with the opposite problem: whether to spend their budget surpluses and, if so, on what.

At least a dozen states ended fiscal 2011 with surpluses. Indiana reported one of the largest, with an extra $1.2 billion in its accounts. Gov. Mitch Daniels, a Republican, on Friday authorized bonus payments of up to $1,000 for state employees. An employee who “meets expectations” will get $500, those who “exceed expectations” will receive $750 and “outstanding workers” will see an extra $1,000 in their August paychecks.

“No state anywhere comes close to Indiana’s record of spending tax dollars carefully, with total savings over the last six years in the billions. Your spending efficiency has enabled us to stay in the black even as revenues plummeted,” said Mr. Daniels, who recently flirted with a run for the White House but ultimately stayed out of the race.

While Indiana decided to reward its employees, other states are redirecting surplus funds into cash-strapped areas such as education. Idaho ended the year with an $85 million surplus, the majority of which will be funneled to public schools and colleges, Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter, a Republican, said in a statement last week.

Other states are bulking up their savings accounts. Maine finished the year with a surplus of nearly $50 million. About half will go to the state’s reserve, the Bangor Daily News reported. Iowa closed its books with $480 million left over, on top of an already healthy “rainy day fund.”

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican, on Sunday touted the fact that since taking office in January, he has helped the Buckeye State turn its deficit into a surplus.

“In my state, where we faced an $8 billion deficit, we wiped it out. We eliminated it,” he said on “Meet the Press.”

“We’ve been able to cut taxes, improve [and] reform government. And you know why? We looked [the fiscal problems] square in the eye. … That is what they’re not doing here in D.C. right now.”

Arkansas, South Carolina and other states also ended their fiscal terms firmly in the black. During the depths of the Great Depression a few years ago, states emptied reserve accounts or raised taxes to make ends meet. Unlike Washington, nearly all states are required by law to balance their budgets each year. Only Vermont lacks such a requirement, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The biggest drivers of surpluses are higher-than-expected tax collections. Thirteen states have reported revenue higher than anticipated, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers. Only two states reported less tax revenue than expected, and another 31 states were on target. Four states have not finished the 2011 budget cycle.

Last year, 46 states reported revenue at lower-than-expected rates, and the tax turnaround is, to some, an indication that the economy has begun to turn around.

“But the thing we’re stressing is … they’re still not back to the levels they were before the recession,” said Brian Sigritz, director of state fiscal studies at the budget officers association.

Spending reductions also played a big role. Many states made major cuts to education and other parts of their budgets. Even with better-than-expected tax revenue, those cuts were still necessary, partly because federal stimulus dollars, which propped up many state budgets over the past two years, have been fully expended.

Despite ending the fiscal year on a high note, governors are aware of how quickly the rosy financial picture can change. They are cautioning taxpayers and lawmakers that a little extra cash doesn’t mean the state should embark on a spending spree.

“I’m grateful for the revenue growth. But I still think that we’re a long way from out of the woods,” Mr. Otter of Idaho said in his statement “You need to remember that this is about half a billion dollars less than we had in my first year as governor. So we’re going to keep working hard.”

© Copyright 2011 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

Some pundits and Republican naysayers contend that former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. is too moderate to win the GOP presidential nomination.

And that’s a claim he denies with vigor and a hint of anger.

During a recent interview with The Washington Times, Mr. Huntsman checked off his accomplishments as Utah governor from 2005 to 2009: making record tax cuts, signing into law the first school voucher program and overseeing the rise of his state’s economy to first-in-the-nation status.

He is confident that the race won’t turn on his religion and downplays whispers from evangelical Protestants who vow not to support a Mormon.

“These presidential nomination contests aren’t about religion; they’re about leadership,” Mr. Huntsman told The Times in the kitchen of his home in Washington’s tony Kalorama neighborhood.

Mr. Huntsman, 51, is proud of his leadership, which he predicts conservatives will respect despite his tenure as President Obama’s ambassador to China and his positive comments about what Republican voters see as an overly liberal president.

“All people have to do is look at the record. Sometimes they don’t, and they just rely on tags,” he said.

“When you look at what we did on record tax cuts, being pro-life and pro-Second Amendment, passing the largest tax cuts in the history of our state. We went to the No. 1 position economically,” he said. “Education reform, the first governor to sign a voucher program, we did it around special education.”

He noted that the Pew Research Center named Utah the “best managed state in America.”

Mr. Huntsman said he won’t stand a chance if voters allow the 2012 Republican presidential nomination to revolve around religion.

“If it’s about religion, I’ll always come up short anyway,” said Mr. Huntsman, a Mormon who until April 30 was Mr. Obama’s hand-picked ambassador to China.

Mr. Huntsman steers conversation away from one of his obvious advantages. If elected, he would be the only U.S. president with an intimate, firsthand knowledge of the culture, language and economy of China, the one country capable of eventually challenging U.S. economic and military supremacy.

He speaks fluent Mandarin and has spent much of his adult life on the communist mainland and in non-communist Taiwan, making a President Huntsman less likely to miss cultural nuances during critical trade and security talks.

But he and chief campaign strategist John Weaver know that few voters choose the nation’s chief executive on the basis of China planks, or foreign policy generally. Instead, he said, he will run on what former governors normally do — his record as a manager of a state — at a time when the nation is in dire need of successful management.

Mr. Huntsman declined to reveal his money-raising target for the end of this year, though he did say, “If the money comes in, it will be because we have a message of leadership people want. If we don’t raise the money, then we’re not on a winning trajectory.”

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The campaign fundraising efforts of President Obama raised $86 million in the last three months from 500,000 people — but at least $35 million of it can be traced to just 244 well-connected supporters who collected contributions from wealthy friends.

And just 634 donations from people giving $30,000 or more to the Obama Victory Fund comprise $23 million, while the 1,335 donations the fund received from those giving $250 add up to about $336,000, a Washington Times analysis shows.

The campaign has branded itself as a new type of political operation and touted its reliance on a grassroots network of everyday people writing reasonably-sized checks.

“Ninety-eight percent of all donations that came in were $250 or less, and our average donation was about $69,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said in a video to supporters.

And the dramatic reach is, in part, a testament to the power of personal relationships, among the moneyed elite as with the population at large: The mathematics of the ranges collected by the bundlers and the number of large donations given suggest that nearly every maximum donation came after personal contact with one of the 244 emissaries who received credit for shepherding it.

But the list, which was voluntarily disclosed by Mr. Obama and includes 27 people who brought in more than half a million dollars each — at least $13.5 million between them — is made up of many of the same people who have had outsize influence on American politics for years.

While the figures released by Mr. Obama include only names and locations, a Times analysis found 33 that likely bundled contributions for John Kerry in 2004. At least 90 worked as bundlers for Mr. Obama when he was a freshman senator mounting a bid for the presidency in 2008, but others were betting on his opponents: Roughly 13 were raising money for Hillary Rodham Clinton and about six bundled for John Edwards.

Federal donor histories of the half of the 244 who could be fingerprinted by The Times show that that segment alone, with their immediate families, has personally donated $21 million to U.S. elections in more than 7,800 checks between 2007 and 2010.

Fred Eychaner of media company Newsweb Corp., for example, made 73 federal-level political donations totaling $700,000 during the 2008 and 2010 elections before joining the ranks of Mr. Obama’s lowest tier of bundlers, those raising between $50,000 and $100,000. Mr. Obama appointed Mr. Eychaner a Kennedy Center trustee in September.

Azita Raji, meanwhile, a retired investment banker from Belvedere, Calif., raised more than half a million dollars for Mr. Obama from associates. Mr. Raji and family members personally gave $70,000 in the last two election cycles.

And Robert Wolf of UBS Americas, who in 2008 bundled $100,000 for Mr. Kerry, raised between $200,000 and $500,000 for Mr. Obama this cycle. He and family members have given 115 donations totaling some $185,000 in the last two cycles.

The money has made up significant chunks of the wider Democratic machine, with $6.3 million of the personal donations by bundlers identified by The Times going to the Democratic National Committee, $2.4 million to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and $1.9 million to its House counterpart.

Spread their wealth

And the business leaders often spread their wealth freely, as if hedging their bets to maintain favor with whoever may be in power. In that figure are 118 donations to Republicans totaling $210,000, including $100,000 to the Republican National Committee.

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AUSTIN, Texas — Should Rick Perry conclude that voter discontent has left an opening for him to enter the presidential race, the longtime Texas governor would be among the GOP field’s most conservative candidates.

Primary voters would get a skilled politician with TV anchorman looks, a Southern preacher’s oratory and a cowboy’s swagger, matched by a disarming candor and sense of humor. The former cotton farmer from the village of Paint Creek in West Texas has never lost an election in nearly three decades as a politician.

What they wouldn’t get is a candidate whose politics are positioned to unite a Republican electorate that stretches from moderate pro-business fiscal conservatives to evangelical social conservatives, with the tea party falling somewhere along the spectrum.

“Texans, God love them, have that bigger-than-life persona about politics and that doesn’t necessarily play everywhere,” said Christopher Nicholas, a Republican political consultant who has worked extensively in the Northeast and Midwest. “I haven’t heard a lot of Republicans call Social Security a disease.”

Mr. Perry has. He branded Social Security and other New Deal programs “the second big step in the march of socialism,” according to a book published last year. The “first step” was a national income tax, which he has said stands alongside the direct election of U.S. senators as a major mistake among the amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Mr. Perry has said he likely will decide in two or three weeks whether he’ll run for president.

Mr. Perry told the Des Moines Register that he’s “getting more and more comfortable every day that this is what I’ve been called to do. This is what America needs.”

In the just-completed Texas legislative session, Mr. Perry’s “emergency items” included laws that require a photo ID in order to vote, a sonogram before a woman has an abortion and enforcement of federal immigration laws by local police.

He rejects the idea of climate change and the theory of evolution, arguing for natural climate variations and intelligent design of the universe.

In fact, he said last year when promoting his book, “Fed Up: Our Fight to Save America From Washington,” which was a state’s rights treatise that railed against the federal government, that he’s too conservative to run for national office.

“The best concrete evidence that I’m really not running for president is this book, because when you read this book, you’re going to see me talking about issues that for someone running for public office, it’s kind of been the third rail if you will,” Mr. Perry told the Associated Press shortly after winning re-election in 2010.

In the few polls that have included Mr. Perry, he ranks high among Republican primary voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Gov. Terry Branstad, Iowa Republican, told the AP on Saturday that he thinks it’s very likely that Mr. Perry will jump into the race and reshape the state’s caucuses.

“I get the definite impression he’s very likely to run,” Mr. Branstad said, basing his opinion on a conversation the governors had Friday.

“I think he becomes a significant factor if he becomes a candidate,” Mr. Branstad said. “It could change the whole complexion of the Iowa caucus race.”

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While Congress and the White House still have more than two weeks to raise the debt ceiling before the Treasury Department’s early August deadline, the financial markets are getting jittery, fearing they won’t reach a deal in time.

“They’re starting to get spooked,” said Ward McCarthy, chief financial economist at Jefferies Co.

Two major rating agencies have warned that the government’s credit rating could be downgraded if, by Aug. 2, it fails to increase its $14.29 trillion debt ceiling — the nation’s legal limit on how much it can borrow. Treasury says failing to do so would cause the suspension of some of its debt payments, a scenario experts say could lead to a major financial crisis.

And while the financial markets generally have been steady in recent days, Wall Street hasn’t overflowed with bullish confidence either.

“With the credit agencies beating a drum in the background, the parallels of certain parts of Europe are beginning to become somewhat disconcerting” to investors, Mr. McCarthy said.

Negotiations between Democrats and Republicans to raise the debt ceiling have been stalled for months. Republicans have insisted such action be coupled with significant spending cuts and no tax increases. Democrats say they are OK with some spending cuts but also want to raise taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals.

President Obama, who has been meeting congressional leaders to try to hammer out a compromise, has said he wants a deal by Friday in order to avoid a possible downturn in the financial markets.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said that while he doesn’t characterize the markets as “spooked,” there is “growing unease” on Wall Street about the delay in Congress to raise the debt limit.

“It’s not a reason to sell stocks or bonds, but it surely is a reason not to buy,” he said. “There are stress lines developing.”

Mr. Zandi said as each day passes without an agreement, “those stress lines will turn into fissures and ultimately cracks.”

“It’s one of those things that the markets are OK until they’re not, and there’s no telling what the catalyst will be,” he said. “And when it happens, it will be very rapid and very significant.”

The House this week is poised to vote on the Republican “cut, cap and balance” proposal, which would immediately cut federal spending, cap it going forward and call for a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution.

Senate Republicans on Sunday voiced support for the plan.

“The real deal to limit spending and get us in balance would be an amendment to our Constitution. Without that we’re just going to talk to each other and run America into the ground,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Mr. Obama and Senate Democrats have criticized the proposal, and Republicans admit the amendment, which must be ratified by three-fourths of the states, wouldn’t be implemented until years from now.

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Rep. Michele Bachmann’s latest campaign finance report shows she has a strong network of small-dollar donors backing her presidential bid but, for now, she lacks the support of the big-money bundlers.

The report, which covers April to June, showed that Mrs. Bachmann collected more than $4.2 million and had $3.6 million in the bank — putting her neck-and-neck with Texas Rep. Ron Paul for second place in the early money chase and in the rearview mirror of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who raised $18 million and has $12.7 million in the bank.

With six months until the caucuses and primaries next year, the financial reports provide a glimpse into candidates’ abilities to draw the kind of support needed to win the partys nomination and put up a strong fight in the general election against President Obama, who raised $86 million in the three months that ended June 30.

Mrs. Bachmann raised $2.2 million over the past two weeks and transferred $2 million from her congressional campaign committee account. Her88,000 donations averaged $48 a pop.

The three-term congresswoman, though, has struggled to gain the backing of the all important high-dollar bundlers who can tap financial networks for hundreds of thousands of dollars for a campaign.

The challenge in front of Mrs. Bachmann is clear: Can the tea party favorite translate the grass-roots support that helped her raise almost $14 million for her re-election last year into the kind of mainstream credibility necessary to attract the major fundraisers who are crucial to a serious White House run.

“Presidential campaigns are obviously phenomenally expensive, and you have to raise the money in relatively small chunks,” said Dirk Van Dongen, president of the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors and a bundler who remains uncommitted in the race. “Even when you are talking about maximum contributions, $2,500 seems like a lot of money until you think of the hundreds of millions of dollars that these candidates need to raise, and bundlers are absolutely critical to that process for any serious candidate.”

Former Ambassador Mel Sembler, a Romney supporter, said that in order to survive the grueling presidential fight, candidates must have both small donors and bundlers.

“You need both sides of the equation,” Mr. Sembler said. “I think Michele at this point is doing the small-donor side, but she has to get out and get more of the national fundraisers and people across the United States, like myself, who have been at this for so many years, who are dedicated to this. She is learning how to do this and I’m sure she will get better and better.”

He added, “Do I think she’s going to be our nominee? No, but I like her out there talking.”

The Bachmann camp on Friday announced it is beefing up efforts to court major donors by forming a finance team of veteran fundraisers, including Guy Short, who helped her take in $13.5 million for her re-election last year; Mary Heitman, former finance director for the Republican National Committee; and Jody Thomas, onetime political director and fundraiser for former Rep. J.C. Watts of Oklahoma.

GOP insiders, though, say the odds are against Mrs. Bachmann.

“She won’t be able to raise money from big donors because they don’t really like her,” said John Feehery, a Republican consultant.

Though Mrs. Bachmann appears poised to win the Iowa caucuses, there’s doubt about whether a win there translates into success in New Hampshires first-in-the-nation primary or elsewhere.

One big money bundler put it bluntly: “Iowa is theater — pure unadulterated theater.

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ANALYSIS/OPINION:

A statement President Obama made halfway through his news conference last week was so unfathomable, so utterly incomprehensible, that befuddled White House stenographers simply gave up and tacked a “[sic]” next to it.

Here is what the president said: “If the American people looked at this, theyd say, boy, some of these decisions are tough, but they dont require us to gut Medicare or Social Security. They dont require us to stop helping young people go to college. They dont require us to stop helping families who’ve got a disabled child. They dont require us to violate our obligations to our veterans. And they dont require ‘job-killing tax cuts.’ [sic]”

That’s right, the Harvard graduate said tax cuts kill jobs. But then again, he did study law, not economics. So let’s turn to a man who studied the economy, albeit at little ol’ Eureka College.

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the top tax rate in America was 70 percent. Reagan cut that to 50 percent in 1982, then to 38.5 percent in 1987, and finally to 28 percent in 1998. What happened? Unemployment dropped from 9.2 percent (exactly what it is today) to 5.3 percent and inflation plummeted from 13.5 percent to 4 percent. At the same time, real income for Americans grew by an average $4,000.

But wait. Mr. Obama said it’s better today. “Our tax rates are lower now than they were under Ronald Reagan,” he said. “They’re much lower than they were under Dwight Eisenhower.”

For Reagan, not true. (Mr. Obama knows that. Still, Reagan inherited that 70 percent rate and it took his entire presidency to get it down to 28 percent, so Mr. Obama can technically make the claim.) But for Eisenhower, Mr. Obama’s right on. Still, is that really something to brag about? In 1953, the top tax rate was 92 percent! So, yeah, it’s lower now.

Nevertheless, Reagan has nothing on another tax-cutting president, whose record is among the very best. He knew what Mr. Obama does not, and enunciated it in the simplest terms: “Our true choice is not between tax reduction, on the one hand, and the avoidance of large federal deficits on the other,” he said. “It is increasingly clear that an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance our budget just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits.”

“In short,” he said, “it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.”

Yes, John F. Kennedy — a Democrat! — had the right idea. He slashed the capital gains tax in 1962 and dropped the top tax rate to 70 percent. Federal tax revenues went up 50 percent, from less than $100 billion in 1961 to more than $150 billion in by 1968.

Reducing taxes, historically, has driven up federal revenue. In the 1920s, Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge dropped the top tax rate from 70 percent to 25 percent; revenue rose from just more than $700 million in 1921 to $1.1 billion by the end of the 1920s.

Reagan proved it again. In 1980, Americans paid $517 billion in taxes, but after eight years of cutting taxes, revenue nearly doubled to just shy of $1 trillion — $991 billion. George W. Bush’s tax cuts had the same effect: Revenue was $1.9 trillion when he took office and $2.5 trillion when he left in 2008.

Since then, though, it has been stagnant, even as Mr. Obama runs up trillion-dollar deficits. Revenue was $2.1 trillion in 2009, but Mr. Obama spent $3.5 trillion. Last year, $2.16 trillion in, $3.45 trillion out. (Pretty clear here that his Harvard education didn’t exactly teach him how to balance a checkbook.)

But Mr. Obama says it’ll all get better if he can just get more money from those private-jet owners. Those damn rich are just not paying their share. The facts, though, tell another story. During the Coolidge/Harding years, the “rich,” who then made about $50,000, went from paying about 45 percent of all tax revenue to pouring in more than three-quarters of all the cash the federal government collected. During Reagan’s years, the top 5 percent paid 37 percent of all taxes; today, they pay 57 percent. (So no, the tax bills for “the wealthy” didn’t go down during the Bush years, they went up — by $100 billion in 2005 alone.)

One of the real problems is the tax-paying base. A whopping 43 percent (some say nearly 50 percent) of Americans — 66 million “lucky duckies” out of 151 million taxpayers — don’t pay a cent, according to the Tax Policy Center. That’s a far cry from the past: From 1950 to 1990, that number averaged 21 percent, dropping to 18 percent in 1986, according to the Tax Foundation.

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DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — A home invasion at Rep. Leonard L. Boswell’s Iowa farm ended when his 22-year-old grandson fetched a shotgun and aimed it at the intruder, according to a statement from the congressman’s office. No one was seriously injured.

The incident started about 10:45 p.m. Saturday when an armed man came in through the front door, attacked Mr. Boswell’s daughter, Cindy Brown, and demanded money, the statement said. Mr. Boswell, 77, heard his daughter’s screams, came into the entryway and attempted to disarm the intruder.

As they struggled, Mr. Boswell’s grandson, Mitchell Brown, got a shotgun from another room. When he pointed the shotgun at the intruder, the man fled into the fields around the house outside Lamoni.

Mr. Boswell’s wife, Dody Boswell, 75, also was home during the attack. His spokesman, Grant Woodard, said the whole family is safe and unhurt, aside from some scrapes and bruises.

The family is shaken up, but “they’re dealing with it pretty well,” Mr. Woodard said Sunday morning.

He deferred other questions to the Decatur County Sheriff’s Office, which is investigating along with the FBI and other agencies. Sheriff Herbert Muir wasn’t available for comment Sunday morning.

Mr. Boswell, a Democrat, has represented Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District for eight terms in the House. He is expected to face a challenge next year from Republican Rep. Tom Latham, who is moving into the district to avoid running against Republican Rep. Steve King after their territories were merged during the once-per-decade redistricting that follows each census.

Iowa is going from five to four congressional seats because its population growth hasn’t kept pace with the rest of the nation. The new 3rd District will include Des Moines and 16 counties in southwest Iowa.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

With the debt-limit deadline only 16 days away, congressional Republicans on Sunday reiterated their support for a balanced-budget amendment as the answer to the nation’s fiscal woes.

“Neither party is going to balance the budget unless there’s some discipline in the system,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

In exchange for a constitutional amendment, Mr. Graham said he would be open to closing tax loopholes or identifying other ways to raise revenues, but only if those revenues go toward debt reduction. He rejected President Obama’s assertion on Friday that lawmakers can balance the budget without such an amendment, as evidenced by the spending binges of recent years.

“There is no plan to achieve [a balanced budget] unless the Constitution is changed,” Mr. Graham said.

But congressional Democrats and administration officials are rejecting the House’s “cut, cap and balance” plan, which likely will come up for a vote this week. The proposal would call for major spending cuts, capping federal spending and the balanced-budget amendment. In exchange for those three things, the debt ceiling would be raised.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen, Maryland Democrat, said Republicans simply want to “manipulate the Constitution” and impose their own budget priorities through the amendment process.

“The framers would be turning in their graves … [the cut, cap and balance plan] is not going to become law,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”

White House Budget Director Jacob Lew called the proposal “draconian” and said it would necessitate cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama held a White House meeting Saturday with the Dalai Lama, a fellow Nobel Peace laureate, hours after China called on the U.S. to rescind an invitation that could sour relations with Beijing.

The Tibetan spiritual leader has been in Washington for an 11-day Buddhist ritual. Thousands of expatriate Tibetans joined a 76th birthday celebration Wednesday for the Dalai Lama, who’s just relinquished leadership of Tibet’s government-in-exile.

The White House said that during the 45-minute private session in the Map Room, Obama “underscored the importance of the protection of human rights of Tibetans in China.” In a statement issued after the meeting, the White House also said Obama reiterated his support for the preservation of Tibet’s religious, cultural and linguistic traditions.

Obama restated U.S. policy that it does not support Tibetan independence, a goal that the Dalai Lama said he also does not seek.

In a nod to the criticism from Beijing, Obama also stressed to the Dalai Lama that he considers a cooperative relationship between the United States and China to be important, according to the White House statement.

In remarks after the meeting forwarded by Kate Saunders from the International Campaign for Tibet, the Dalai Lama said of his visit with Obama: “Firstly we developed a very close sort of feeling for each other.” He said Obama expressed his concern over basic human values, such as human rights and religious freedoms. “So naturally he shows genuine concern about suffering in Tibet and other places.”

A Chinese crackdown led the Dalai Lama to flee into exile in India in 1959. China says he’s welcome to return if he drops his separatist activities, accepts Tibet as an inalienable part of China and recognizes Taiwan as a province of China.

Hours before the Dalai Lama’s arrival, the Chinese Foreign Ministry urged the White House to cancel the visit.

“We firmly oppose any foreign official to meet with the Dalai Lama in any form,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said in a statement posted on the ministry’s website.

“We request the U.S. side to honor its serious commitment that recognizes Tibet as part of China and opposes Tibet independence,” Hong said.

The White House kept the meeting low-key, closing it from news reporters and photographers. It chose the Map Room for the visit instead of the Oval Office, which is reserved for visiting heads of state.

The visit comes less than 10 days before U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to visit the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. Vice President Joseph Biden is also scheduled to visit China this summer, followed by a trip to Washington by his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping.

Obama had been criticized by pro-Tibetan activists for putting off an invitation during the Dalai Lama’s stay in the capital. White House officials said the president’s schedule had been occupied with debt-limit negotiations with congressional leaders.

Obama last met the Dalai Lama in February 2010.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Racing the debt clock, Congress is working on dual tracks while President Barack Obama appeals to the public in hopes of influencing a deal that talks have failed to produce so far.

“We have to ask everyone to play their part because we are all part of the same country,” Obama said Saturday, pushing a combination of spending cuts and tax increases that has met stiff resistance from Republicans. “We are all in this together.”

In his weekly radio and Internet address, Obama said the wealthiest must “pay their fair share.” He invoked budget deals negotiated by GOP President Ronald Reagan and Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill, and Democratic President Bill Clinton and Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich.

“You sent us to Washington to do the tough things, the right things,” he said. “Not just for some of us, but for all of us.”

As a critical Aug. 2 deadline approached, the chances that Obama would get $4 trillion or even $2 trillion in deficit reduction on terms he preferred were quickly fading as Congress moved to take control of the debate.

At a news conference Friday, Obama opened the door to a smaller package of deficit reductions without revenue increases.

A weekend deadline that the president gave congressional leaders to choose one of three deficit reduction options became a moot point after House and Senate leaders made it clear to the White House on Friday that they were moving ahead with their own plans.

House Republicans prepared to vote this coming week on allowing an increase in the government’s borrowing limit through 2012 as long as Congress approved a balanced-budget constitutional amendment, which is highly unlikely.

In the Senate, the Republican and Democratic leaders worked on a bipartisan plan that would allow Obama to raise the debt limit without a prior vote by lawmakers. The talks focused on how to address long-term deficit reduction in the proposal in hopes of satisfying House Republicans.

In the Republicans’ address Saturday, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah argued for passage of a balanced-budget amendment. He blamed Democrats for failing to embrace adequate budget cuts and said “the solution to a spending crisis is not tax increases.”

An amendment that requires a balanced budget, he said, “would put us on a path to fiscal health and would prevent this White House or any future White House from forcing more debt on the American people.”

The government said Friday it was using its last stopgap measure to avoid exceeding the current $14.3 trillion debt limit. Administration officials, economists and the financial markets have warned that missing the Aug. 2 deadline and precipitating a government default would send convulsions through an already weakened economy.

Obama had held five straight days of meeting with congressional leaders at the White House, but none of the three options he proposed — deficit cuts of $4 trillion, $2 trillion or $1.5 trillion over 10 years — were unlocking enough support to increase the debt ceiling by the $2.4 trillion Obama wants to make it last beyond the 2012 elections.

Essentially declaring those discussions over, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said Friday: “”Now the debate will move from a room in the White House to the House and Senate floors.”

In search of a deal, Obama has used a combination of private meetings with congressional leaders and high visibility press conferences, radio addresses and public statements in an effort to win the public to his side. His pitch is also aimed at independent voters, to whom he is presenting himself as a willing compromiser.

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Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Mitt Romney leads all Republicans in the contest for campaign cash, cementing his frontrunner status among contenders hoping to go up against President Barack Obama in 2012.

While Romney’s $12.7 million in the bank far outdistanced a spread-out GOP field, dollars don’t always translate to votes. The chasm between Romney and his rivals suggested many Republican donors are waiting on the sidelines, watching the topsy-turvy campaign foment and the candidates finally start to engage one another.

“It’s a little unsettling that people have so underperformed expectations,” said Dave Carney, an adviser to Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who is weighing joining the race. “Clearly, there’s some … concern about either economics or about the candidates. I don’t know the reason.”

Romney, a ferocious fundraiser who spent weeks on the road collecting pledges and checks, added more than $18.4 million to his account during the April-to-June fundraising period. That sum outpaced his closest rival to announce numbers so far, Rep. Michele Bachmann, by a 3-to-1 margin in banked cash. Yet he still came up short for his campaign’s internal $50 million goal for the first half of this year.

Unlike four years ago when he hoped to help his first presidential bid with $44.6 million from his own personal fortune, Romney so far has not opened his wallet to help his second White House bid.

Bachmann, a darling among tea partyers, said she would report $3.6 million in the bank, a blend of fundraising and a transfer from her congressional campaign fund. She brought in a total of $4.2 million since formally beginning her campaign in June.

It was not immediately clear how many of those dollars she could spend in a primary and how many of them were accessible only if she were the nominee.

A potent fundraiser, Bachmann relied on small donors to raise $13.5 million for her 2010 re-election campaign and recently brought on board veteran high-dollar fundraising consultants to help build a national operation.

Tim Pawlenty, the former two-term governor of Minnesota, raised just around $4 million during the April-to-June period and has about $1.4 million available for his primary contest and some $600,000 more available if he were to capture the nomination.

The reports also detailed problems for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose campaign was carrying more than $1 million in debt. The former Georgia lawmaker — whose bid has struggled since 18 staff members, consultants and advisers resigned en masse — raised $2.1 million for the quarter but spent $1.8 million. Gingrich listed about $322,000 in the bank.

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who lost re-election in 2006, reported taking in $582,000, with less than $225,000 banked for the primaries.

The financial picture for the 2012 presidential nominating race slowly came into clearer focus with the reports. While money doesn’t guarantee success, it does pay for crucial television ads, polling to measure whether a message is working and staff to run the mechanics of a national election.

The numbers are one of the first measures of the campaigns’ early strength as they look to take on Obama’s well-funded re-election bid. On Wednesday, Obama’s team announced it had raised $86 million during the second quarter of the year for his campaign and the Democratic Party.

Georgia businessman Herman Cain has said he raised almost $2.5 million in the first weeks of his White House bid, but some of that came out of his own pocket. His report due Friday would detail how much the talk show host and Godfathers Pizza CEO invested in his effort.

Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, a tea party favorite, was expected to report a strong fundraising quarter.

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Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

The quarterly campaign finance reports that will give the first real insight into fledgling machines of 2012 presidential candidates, and the relative strength of House and Senate incumbents and their challengers, are beginning to arrive in earnest this Friday afternoon in Washington, hours before a midnight filing deadline.

Reporters and pundits will dive deep into these reports this weekend, but The Washington Times is obtaining the reports within 10 minutes after they arrive, and for the political junkies who need to know now, here are some nuggets of first-glance observations:

The Barack Obama campaign raised $22 million from people giving less than $250, and $12 million from larger donors. It did not accept donations from political action committees, but did rely on about 250 well-connected “bundlers” who collected at least $50,000. About 30 collected $500,000 or more each.

The Obama Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee working with the president and the national party, brought in $40 million, transferring half to the Democratic National Committee and about $12 million to the president’s reelection campaign. And that’s where the big-money donors directed their wealth. The overwhelming majority of donors to the OVF gave $10,000 or more.

The fund returned about half a million dollars to donors. It spent $67,000 at the N9NE Steakhouse. The DNC has more than $20 million on hand, but has debts of about $10 million.

A similar joint fundraising committee between House Speaker John A. Boehner and the National Republican Congressional Committee raised $1 million in the last three months.

Mr. Boehner’s campaign itself filed seconds ago and raised $1.8 million, spending $1.1 million. It has more than $3 million in the bank.

Minnesota Republican Tim Pawlenty raised $4.4 million and has $2 million remaining in the bank. Lobbyist James Hyland bundled $18,000 for the campaign. The haul dwarfs Rick Santorum, who attracted a mere $582,000.

In the House after Boehner, Florida Republican Alan West leads in funds raised in the last three months with $1.5 million, besting even leaders such as Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, Maryland Democrat.

The fundraising of Joe Wilson, South Carolina Republican, who famously shouted “You lie!” at the president during the State of the Union address, lags, and he spent more than he raised.

The fund preparing for the Republican National Convention has $1 million in debts.

And Sarah Palin’s PAC raised $1.3 million, overwhelmingly from small individual donors. She spent even more, but still closes the period with more than a million dollars.

Some campaigns from cycles long gone are still active, or at least have ledgers that aren’t closed out. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s old presidential committee raised $127,000 this quarter, but still owes the firm of consultant Mark Penn $290,000. The campaign did not pay down any of that debt despite its intake.

© Copyright 2011 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

WASHINGTON — Horror stories are flying about the damage that might be wreaked should Congress and President Barack Obama fail to cut a deal by the Aug. 2 deadline to increase America’s borrowing limit. Nearly every American is in harm’s way, either directly or indirectly.

Absent a deal by then, the government would find itself tight on cash and unable to borrow — and have to start deciding which of the 80 million bills due in August it should pay and which it should put off.

Tough decisions would come immediately: On Aug. 3, some $23 billion in Social Security benefit payments are due to be processed. On Aug. 4, the Treasury Department must pay $87 billion to investors to redeem maturing Treasury securities. On Aug. 15, more than $30 billion in interest payments come due.

In addition to those costs, the government normally pays $5 billion to $10 billion daily to defense contractors, Medicare providers, federal employees and others.

Obama has said he can’t guarantee Social Security checks and payments to veterans and the disabled will go out on schedule in the absence of a deal: “There may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it.” He could be challenged on that, however, because some legal and congressional budget experts question whether he can unilaterally decline to pay Social Security benefits if there are still assets in the program’s trust fund.

Regardless of how that issue is resolved, there’s no question that government services, programs and benefits could take an enormous hit.

No one knows exactly what choices Obama and his top officials would make if the crisis comes. The White House Office of Budget and Management is the agency charged with reviewing possible cuts in benefits and payments while the Treasury Department handles cash flow. All have been mum about their crisis plans, apparently to avoid market speculation or panic.

But Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has insisted the deadline is real. “There is no credible way to give Congress more time,” he said recently.

One analysis, by the Bipartisan Policy Center, suggests that once the government runs out of cash and lacks the power to further borrow, it would need to slash spending at once by as much as a whopping 44 percent. The U.S. now borrows more than 40 cents for every dollar it spends.

So long as the Treasury has tax revenues coming in, it can still make interest payments to technically avoid default. Some analysts think it would lean that way at first, so as to do less harm to the country’s long-term credit rating. Default would be a “major crisis” that would radiate “shockwaves” through the financial system, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress recently.

But putting a priority on paying interest on maturing debt to avoid a default would simply force spending cuts instead — some of them more likely to hit ordinary people.

Parks and monuments can be temporarily shut. That’s been done before.

But is it worth taxpayers’ money to pay the costs of pursuing a second trial against former baseball star Roger Clemens if the judge who declared a mistrial in his perjury case this week clears the way? And what about clinical trials on new drugs or other scientific research projects? Or completing half-finished highway construction projects?

The government is even weighing the prospect of selling off some of its assets — gold in Fort Knox, buildings, property, even some national parklands — to make ends meet, if absolutely necessary.

Government contractors are likely to be among the early victims, says Paul Light, professor of public policy at New York University. “No new contracts. Delayed payments. Stop work orders. I can’t imagine that Obama would ever touch soldiers’ pay. But you’d get closing of parks, as we’ve seen in Minnesota, the national monuments, freezes on discretionary spending including Medicaid.”

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Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Fighting back against Republican calls for greater spending cuts, President Obama said Friday that the government doesn’t need to make major changes to get its budget back on track and called for that solution to include some trims coupled with tax increases.

“Here’s the good news: that it turns out we don’t have to do anything radical to solve this problem. Contrary to what some folks say that — we’re not Greece. You know, we’re not Portugal,” Mr. Obama said at his third press conference in three weeks, using his most powerful public relations tool to take his arguments directly to voters.

Mr. Obama and congressional leaders are negotiating over whether and how to raise the federal government’s borrowing limit, which early next month will bump up against the $14.29 trillion limit set in law. The administration, Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and leading business groups have all warned of major damage to the U.S. economy if the federal government cannot pay its bills.

The GOP wants to couple any debt increase to spending cuts in both discretionary and entitlement programs such as Medicare, while Mr. Obama wants tax increases to be part of the mix. That stance is actually an about-face from earlier this year, though, when Mr. Obama had called for the debt limit to be raised without any conditions at all.

The president said there are three options on the table: a big deal that total $4 billion in tax increases and potential spending cuts; a plan about half that size; and a “fallback position” that would increase the debt limit but push off action on the deficit.

House Republicans have said they’ll put together a bill with spending cuts, and hold a vote on it next week, essentially putting down a very public marker for where they stand.

“We want to be able to go home to the people that elected us and show them that we’re not going to allow this kind of spending to continue. We don’t have the money, they don’t have the money,” said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Virginia Republican.

But Mr. Obama rejected the outlines of House Republicans’ spending-cuts plan as an effort “just to make political statements,” and said it would require slashing too deeply from domestic spending.

Still, the president insisted he’s open to a deal — “If they show me a serious plan, I’m ready to move,” he said — and added he wants to hear from congressional leaders by the middle of the weekend on whether they are willing to compromise.

Even as Mr. Obama tried to strike an optimistic tone, he said the consequences of not raising the debt limit would be “Armageddon.”

Friday marks the first day this week that that White House and Hill negotiators have not met.

© Copyright 2011 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

Big issues are piling up in Congress, but halfway through the year, the Senate is on pace for its least productive legislative session since records were first kept, and the House is also operating at a clip well below normal, according to an analysis of floor activity by The Washington Times.

Congressional analysts say the action regularly stalls when power is shared between the two parties, but this year’s slow pace, particularly in the Senate, is at a historic low even by standards of divided government.

Through June 30, the upper chamber had passed the fewest bills since the Congressional Record started keeping monthly data in 1947. The Senate had also amassed the second-fewest total number of pages in the Record — a measure of floor action — and notched the sixth-fewest number of floor votes.

One senator called the pace of activity “glacial,” and the nadir may have come this month, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, canceled the chamber’s Independence Day vacation to work on debt reduction, only to hold two meaningless votes and then adjourn early.

Much of the real action has been shunted behind closed doors, where big deals are worked out and then offered to lawmakers in all-or-nothing votes.

Analysts said Senate Democrats are likely trying to shield the chamber from having to take difficult votes ahead of what’s expected to be a tough election cycle next year.

“Harry Reid has been facing a major problem of arithmetic,” said David Mayhew, a political science professor at Yale with whom The Times shared its findings. “He has only 53 Democrats; he cannot count on any Republicans at all; and a dozen or so of those Democrats must be terrified by the election results of last November. So it’s hard for Reid to mobilize floor majorities. Given that problem, why move measures along at all?”

Across the Capitol, the Republican-run House is doing only slightly better. Through June 30, it had passed the second-fewest bills on record, but was above average in both time spent in session and number of recorded votes held, earning it a tie for 10th least productive session overall in The Times‘ analysis.

Together, the House and Senate combine to account for the third least productive Congress on record, trailing only 1981 and 1989.

Measuring futility

The Times analysis looked at five yardsticks for legislative activity: the amount of time each chamber has spent in session; the total number of bills that have passed; the number of floor votes each chamber has taken; the total pages amassed in the Congressional Record; and the number of bills originating in each chamber that have been signed into law.

Using the Resume of Congressional Activity, printed in the official Congressional Record at the end of each month, The Times ranked each chamber’s activity on all five measures through June 30 for each year, then combined the rankings into a “legislative futility” index.

By that reckoning, 2011 is the worst year for the Senate since complete records were first compiled in 1947. It has passed just 28 bills, the worst in the 65 years on record, and compiled 4,308 pages of activity in the Congressional Record, which was second worst. The nine bills it has seen signed by President Obama are the sixth-worst total, while the 104 votes rank 15th and the 541 hours in session is 19th.

Asked for comment on the analysis, Mr. Reid’s office requested that The Times provide the data used. The Times provided the information, but Mr. Reid’s office did not respond to repeated follow-up messages this week.

Mr. Mayhew, the Yale political scientist, said the Senate is in a position it hasn’t been in for nearly a century, after last year’s elections turned over House control to the GOP but left the upper chamber under Democratic control.

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WASHINGTON — President BarackObama said Friday Congress has a “unique opportunity to do something big” and stabilize the U.S. economy for decades by cutting deficits even as it raises the national debt limit ahead of a critical Aug. 2 deadline. But, he declared, “We’re running out of time.”

Obama said he was ready to make tough decisions — such as on Medicare costs — and challenged Republicans to do the same. He attempted to turn the Republicans’ opposition to any tax increases back against them, warning starkly that failure to raise the debt ceiling would mean “effectively a tax increase for everybody” if the government defaults, sending up interest rates.

Still, Obama said that “it’s hard to do a big package” in deadlocked Washington, acknowledging Republicans are opposed to any new tax revenue as part of a deficit-cutting deal.

“If they show me a serious plan I’m ready to move,” he said.

The president spoke at the White House Friday after five days straight of meetings with congressional leaders failed to yield compromise, and amid increasingly urgent warnings from credit agencies and the financial sector about the risks of failing to raise the government’s borrowing limit.

Administration officials and private economists say that if the U.S. fails to raise its borrowing limit and begins to stop paying its bills as a result, the fragile U.S. economy could be cast into a crisis that would reverberate around the globe. Democratic and Republican congressional leaders agree on the need to avert that outcome, but that hasn’t been enough to get Republicans to agree to the tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy sought by Obama — or to convince Obama and Democrats to sign onto the steep entitlement cuts without new revenue that Republicans favor.

The president spoke at his third news conference in two weeks on an issue that is increasingly consuming Washington and his presidency.

The president said he was ready to make tough decisions such as restructuring Medicare so that very wealthy recipients would have to pay slightly more. He said he had stressed to Republicans that anything they looked at should not affect current beneficiaries, and he said providers such as drug companies could be targeted for cuts.

On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, Democrats and Republicans in the House emerged from closed-door meetings to reiterate their hardened stances. Republicans announced plans to call a vote next week on a balanced budget constitutional amendment that would force the government to balance its books.

Obama dismissed the idea, saying, “We don’t need a constitutional amendment to do that. What we need to do is do our jobs.”

Failure to reach compromise has focused attention on a fallback plan under discussion by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. That plan would give Obama greater authority to raise the debt ceiling while setting procedures in motion that could lead to federal spending cuts.

Obama insisted the public was on his side in wanting a “balanced approach” that would mix spending cuts and the tax increases opposed by Republicans.

“The American people are sold,” he said. “The problem is that members of Congress are dug in ideologically.”

He renewed his pitch for a major package of some $4 trillion, about three-quarters of which would be spending cuts along with about $1 trillion in new revenue.

“We have a chance to stabilize America’s finances for a decade or 15 years or 20 years if we’re willing to seize the moment,” the president said, adding later that everyone must be “willing to compromise.”

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Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Amid the uncertainty and bickering over how to raise the debt limit, congressional Republicans are pushing ahead with balanced-budget proposals that could further complicate — or serve as a key bargaining chip to — a final deal.

HouseGOP leaders have scheduled a vote next week on a bill that calls for a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. Senate Republicans, who last month proposed a similar measure, also hope for a floor vote on their version next week.

While Republicans overwhelming back the measures — which would require the support of two-thirds of each chamber of Congress — the proposals face stiff Democratic opposition.

But Republican leaders have suggested a balanced-budget amendment could be part of a compromise with Democrats and President Obama to raise the nation’s $14.3 trillion debt ceiling, saying it would be counterproductive to do so without also taking steps to rein in spending.

“The balanced-budget amendment does just that,” said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Virginia Republican. “It accomplishes what we want, which is to change the system and finally begins to get the fiscal house in order.”

Republicans say a balanced-budget amendment is a necessary component of an overall strategy to curb government spending and reduce the nation’s ballooning debt and deficit.

“The amendment that we vote on next week, frankly, it’s just common sense,” said House Speaker John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican. “It says the government can only spend what it takes in, and places real limits on the ability of politicians to increase taxes or to increase spending.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, called the proposal “the single most effective way” to “get our house fiscal in order.”

“If the president and Democrats in Congress won’t agree to cut back, let’s force them to,” Mr. McConnell said on the Senate floor Thursday. “Let’s pass a constitutional amendment that actually requires Congress to live within its means.”

Both Republican versions would require Congress to balance the federal budget each year, cap spending at 18 percent of the gross domestic product and require a two-thirds vote of the House and Senate to increase taxes.

If a joint measure passed Congress, it then would require ratification of three-fourths of the states before it could be added to the Constitution.

But Democratic leaders have vowed to fight the GOP proposals, saying they would lead to cuts in popular entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

“By enshrining Republican policy priorities in the Constitution — and by making it historically difficult to raise revenue or raise the debt ceiling in order to pay our bills — the Republican amendment would impose severe hardship on millions of Americans,” said House Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer, Maryland Democrat.

“It is not a solution to our nation’s pressing fiscal challenges.”

Meanwhile Thursday, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner met with Senate Democratic leaders at the Capitol, and reiterated his warning that failing to raise the debt limit by Aug. 2 would result in the government defaulting on some payments, which he says could trigger another economic crisis.

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For budget hawks, federal farm-subsidy programs have long been a huge but elusive target, but critics say the time might finally be right to reap a harvest of savings by cutting payments to farmers as lawmakers gear up for a massive fight next year on a new long-term farm bill.

The federal deficit crisis, combined with a new class of House GOP lawmakers who have shown a willingness to attack sacred spending cows throughout the budget, has changed the equation on Capitol Hill.

“It has become impossible to justify these programs,” said Rep. Ron Kind, Wisconsin Democrat, “especially right now, with record-high commodity prices.”

A study by the antisubsidy Environmental Working Group puts the total payments to farmers from dozens of programs at $260 billion since 1995, and even senior House Republicans such as Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia have cited farm program cuts as a potential area of agreement with the White House.

“This farm bill is going to be one where the budget will dictate policy,” predicted National Cotton Council Vice President Gary Adams, according to a report in the Delta Farm Press.

It may sound like a familiar tune. Farm subsidies, many dating back to the Great Depression, have been criticized for years as programs that benefit relatively few farmers but cost taxpayers billions of dollars, paying out in both good and bad crop years. But politically, cutting farm payments has proven an uphill struggle.

The conservative American Enterprise Institute, in a study released Tuesday, says the government could save $100 billion over 10 years without affecting the nation’s food supply or the viability of U.S. agriculture. The study also criticizes the direct-payments program, a per-acre payment given to farmers and landowners that costs taxpayers $5 billion a year.

“In the current fiscal environment, spending substantial federal funds on farm programs that have no real economic or equity justification is highly problematic,” the AEI report says.

Barry Goodwin, one of the study’s authors, attacked a number of arguments used to defend farm payments, contending that farms do well as businesses and the rate of farm failures is “very, very low.”

“Farm households tend to be much wealthier than nonfarm households by a considerable amount. And this has been shown over and over again,” Mr. Goodwin said.

The building debate of the next farm bill, which must be passed in 2012, is far from Congress’ first attempt to strip subsidies. Republicans in the mid-1990s launched an ambitious drive to wean farmers from guaranteed crop subsidies and other federal programs, with very limited success.

“We tried to move away from farm programs in the mid-‘90s, and people were willing to sign on to that since the commodity prices of farm products were pretty good,” said Bruce Jones, an agricultural economist at the University of Wisconsin. “Reversal of market conditions led to the price of grains falling, and then farmers started hurting.”

The new study calls for eliminating direct payments and subsidies for crop insurance and disaster aid, a slashing of programs that troubles powerful agricultural lobbies. Mary Kay Thatcher, a spokeswoman for the American Farm Bureau Federation, said lawmakers should not be misled by the current strength of the agricultural economy into thinking it’s time for subsidy cuts.

“When prices go up, they always go back down,” Ms. Thatcher said. “The reason we write a farm bill is for the bad years.”

Ms. Thatcher added that although most farmers would not feel an immediate hit from losing subsidies, that would change as food prices and markets fluctuate.

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Just as Republican leaders on Capitol Hill are splintered on strategy over the debt limit, so is the party’s presidential field, with the tea-party wing saying an increase should be rejected and the more moderate elements taking a wait-and-see approach.

U.S. Reps. Ron Paul of Texas and Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Atlanta businessman Herman Cain are calling on Congress to scrap any deal to raise the nation’s borrowing power beyond the current $14.3 trillion cap.

Several former governors in the field, however, including Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Jon Huntsman Jr. of Utah, are taking a more cautious course, offering general guidance about how they view the debate but letting the negotiations play out between congressional leaders and President Obama.

“They are playing exactly to type,” said Mark J. Rozell, a political science professor at George Mason University. “I don’t see where Bachmann, Cain and Paul have any room to offer flexibility on the debt limit at all, given their ideologies and constituencies that they’re cultivating – which are on the political right of the GOP.

“Whereas Romney and Huntsman are both trying to reach out to the conservative wing of the party, but at the same time, each wants to be seen as having the responsible-leader-type personality and being more politically centrist than much of the rest of the field,” he concluded.

Then there is former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who holds up the role he played in a 2005 state government shutdown as a symbol of his commitment to fiscal caution.

Mr. Pawlenty has said he doesn’t believe the debt limit needs to be increased because the federal government has enough revenue to continue to make payments on the debt, and that could buy time for Congress to tackle the biggest drivers of national spending: Social Security, Medicare and other entitlements and the military.

Complicating matters is the fact that Mr. Obama, who is up for re-election next year, is involved with the high-level negotiations but none of his potential opponents is. That has freed them to take differing stands – and in the case of the House members, to flex legislative muscle because they eventually will get a vote on any final deal.

The Paul campaign rolled out a new television ad Thursday touting his “conviction” and posing the question of whether Republican leaders will “repeat the mistakes of the past.”

“Will they choose compromise or conviction?” the narrator asks. “One candidate has always been true: Ron Paul – cut spending, balance the budget, no deals. Standing up to the Washington machine, guided by principle.”

The ire even has been turned on Republicans’ own negotiators.

This week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, warned that the party would be blamed if the government defaults on its debt and offered a complex proposal that would free Mr. Obama to raise the nation’s debt limit while enabling Republicans to dodge much of the political blame.

In a news conference Wednesday, Mrs. Bachmann said his plan was little more than “smoke and mirrors.”

“I am ‘No’ on raising the debt ceiling right now because I’ve been here long enough that I’ve seen a lot of smoke and mirrors in the time that I’ve been here,” she said, while also arguing that there’s plenty of time and money left in federal coffers to make payments on the debt.

Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, agreed with Mrs. Bachmann that anything other than a refusal to increase the nation’s borrowing capacity would be “smoke and mirrors.”

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Big issues are piling up in Congress, but halfway through the year, the Senate is on pace for its least productive legislative session since records were first kept, and the House is also operating at a clip well below normal, according to an analysis of floor activity by The Washington Times.

Congressional analysts say the action regularly stalls when power is shared between the two parties, but this year’s slow pace, particularly in the Senate, is at a historic low even by standards of divided government.

Through June 30, the upper chamber had passed the fewest bills since the Congressional Record started keeping monthly data in 1947. The Senate had also amassed the second-fewest total number of pages in the Record – a measure of floor action – and notched the sixth-fewest number of floor votes.

One senator called the pace of activity “glacial,” and the nadir may have come this month, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, canceled the chamber’s Independence Day vacation to work on debt reduction, only to hold two meaningless votes and then adjourn early.

Much of the real action has been shunted behind closed doors, where big deals are worked out and then offered to lawmakers in all-or-nothing votes.

** FILE PHOTO ** Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (left), Nevada Democrat, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican (Associated Press)

Analysts said Senate Democrats are likely trying to shield the chamber from having to take difficult votes ahead of what’s expected to be a tough election cycle next year.

“Harry Reid has been facing a major problem of arithmetic,” said David Mayhew, a political science professor at Yale with whom The Times shared its findings. “He has only 53 Democrats; he cannot count on any Republicans at all; and a dozen or so of those Democrats must be terrified by the election results of last November. So it’s hard for Reid to mobilize floor majorities. Given that problem, why move measures along at all?”

Across the Capitol, the Republican-run House is doing only slightly better. Through June 30, it had passed the second-fewest bills on record, but was above average in both time spent in session and number of recorded votes held, earning it a tie for 10th least productive session overall in The Times‘ analysis.

Together, the House and Senate combine to account for the third least productive Congress on record, trailing only 1981 and 1989.

Measuring futility

The Times analysis looked at five yardsticks for legislative activity: the amount of time each chamber has spent in session; the total number of bills that have passed; the number of floor votes each chamber has taken; the total pages amassed in the Congressional Record; and the number of bills originating in each chamber that have been signed into law.

Using the Resume of Congressional Activity, printed in the official Congressional Record at the end of each month, The Times ranked each chamber’s activity on all five measures through June 30 for each year, then combined the rankings into a “legislative futility” index.

By that reckoning, 2011 is the worst year for the Senate since complete records were first compiled in 1947. It has passed just 28 bills, the worst in the 65 years on record, and compiled 4,308 pages of activity in the Congressional Record, which was second worst. The nine bills it has seen signed by President Obama are the sixth-worst total, while the 104 votes rank 15th and the 541 hours in session is 19th.

Asked for comment on the analysis, Mr. Reid’s office requested that The Times provide the data used. The Times provided the information, but Mr. Reid’s office did not respond to repeated follow-up messages this week.

Mr. Mayhew, the Yale political scientist, said the Senate is in a position it hasn’t been in for nearly a century, after last year’s elections turned over House control to the GOP but left the upper chamber under Democratic control.

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Former New York Gov. George E. Pataki said Thursday he is concerned about the electability of the current GOP presidential field, as he prepares to visit Iowa next week before deciding whether to make a late entry into the race.

“I think it’s very important not just that we choose a nominee who has the right vision but choose a nominee who has the ability to win the election,” Mr. Pataki said. “It’s wonderful to make a philosophical statement, but our country is at the point where we need a real change in direction and that’s what it comes down to.”

Referring to his three gubernatorial wins in strongly Democratic New York, he said, “I look back with pride on my ability to get conservatives, Republicans, independents and enlightened Democrats to vote for me.”

The 66-year-old Mr. Pataki, who flirted with a 2008 White House bid, said he was disappointed that Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels had chosen not to run. He declined repeatedly to reveal his own plans but acknowledged he could not wait forever.

“I don’t have a deadline, but obviously there isn’t a great deal of additional time,” he said. “My family and I are doing a personal assessment as to the best way to change this country for the better, and we’ll make that decision sometime in the near future.

“I certainly don’t intend to just enjoy the private-sector life and not be involved in some capacity.”

Mr. Pataki said he would be speaking at several venues in Iowa Thursday and Friday next week. Meanwhile, his nonprofit outfit, “No American Debt,” has been airing a television ad in New Hampshire, the other early nomination battleground state.

Veteran political consultant Mike Murphy, who masterminded John McCain’s 2000 New Hampshire victory over George W. Bush, wrote in Time magazine last month that he “saw [the ad] and had to smile.”

“My bet?” Mr. Murphy wrote. “Pataki is going to try to steal the New Hampshire primary.”

Backed by a strong television ad campaign, Mr. Murphy wrote, the New Yorker could turns heads around the country with a quiet rise in the polls in New Hampshire.

“With that national attention, reboot the once-massive Pataki money machine in New York State and start attracting more national money and support. Light the right match, and if it combusts correctly, stand back and watch the fire grow,” the consultant wrote.

Mr. Pataki would be the fifth former governor in the race, joining Massachusetts’ Mitt Romney, Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty, Utah’s Jon Huntsman Jr. and New Mexico’s Gary Johnson. Texas Gov. Rick Perry is also reportedly leaning toward running, while former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has said she is still weighing a bid.

While few political analysts think the increasingly conservative GOP primary voters would nominate Mr. Pataki – a supporter of abortion rights, gun control and the “cap-and-trade” energy policy – his candidacy could alter the dynamics of the race, particularly in the more independent-minded New Hampshire, where both Mr. Romney and Mr. Huntsman are banking on victory.

If Mr. Pataki were to take away votes from them in New Hampshire, it could open a door for Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, the tea party favorite now leading Iowa surveys by double-digits and polling second in the Granite State.

Mr. Pataki is not the only New Yorker who could yet jump into the race. Also citing doubts about the electability of the current field, former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani told the Associated Press in an interview in New Hampshire on Thursday that he would decide by mid-September whether to run again.

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The Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which receives about $1 million a day in taxpayer funds, should be investigated by Congress, a group of House Republicans said in a Capitol Hill event Thursday.

“We have got to shine light on this situation and get the facts out to the American people,” said Rep. Renee L. Ellmers, North Carolina Republican, adding that a 174-page report by Americans United for Life on the “scandal and abuse” in Planned Parenthood sparked interest in such an investigation.

The report is “a blueprint for action,” said Rep. Christopher H. Smith, New Jersey Republican and a longtime pro-life leader in the House. Planned Parenthood is “ripe for investigation,” he said.

“It should not be a sacrosanct organization or a politically correct organization that evades that kind of scrutiny.”

A House hearing has not been set, the members said. However, Rep. Cliff Stearns, Florida Republican and chairman of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on oversight and investigations, said in a statement that he is considering holding a hearing on Planned Parenthood.

The ranking Democrat on that panel, Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado, is co-chairwoman of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus and a staunch supporter of Planned Parenthood.

The organization has dismissed the Americans United for Life report, saying it recycled “discredited charges” and drew “unfounded and inaccurate conclusions from select pieces of data often taken out of context.”

The reproductive health care organization, founded more than 90 years ago, also rejects claims that it wastes or misuses taxpayer money.

“Planned Parenthood undergoes routine audits to ensure proper use of public funds,” it said.

But Charmaine Yoest, president and chief executive of Americans United for Life, said there were even questions about the total amount of funding Planned Parenthood receives from the federal government.

The Government Accountability Office has reported that Planned Parenthood spent $657.1 million in federal funds from 2002 to 2008, but Americans United for Life researchers found that Planned Parenthood reported more than $2 billion in “government grants and contracts” during that time, she said.

“That’s a remarkable discrepancy,” Mrs. Yoest said. “Which is it? And what was the money used for?”

House Republicans said these and other claims in the report should not be ignored.

“This is absolutely the type of work the American people have sent us here to Washington to do – to ask these kinds of questions” about how their money is being spent, said Rep. Randy Hultgren, Illinois Republican.

Other concerns raised by House Republicans, including Reps. John Fleming of Louisiana, Steve Chabot of Ohio, Jean Schmidt of Ohio, Bill Huizenga of Michigan and Diane Black of Tennessee, were Medicaid fraud and violations of state laws on parental involvement in abortion and mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse.

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ANALYSIS/OPINION:

As Benjamin Franklin was leaving Constitution Hall on Sept. 17, 1787, he heard a lady ask, “Well, Doctor, what have we got – a republic or a monarchy?” To which he replied: “A republic, madam – if you can keep it.”

Dr. Franklin called it a republic, not a democracy, creating an interwoven fabric of beauty and endurance based on the Constitution of the United States. It represented all the interests: the states and the people; nation and individuals; and executive, legislative and judicial powers.

The Founding Fathers, with a deep distrust of an elite, centralized government, created a system of “checks and balances,” including leaders dependent on the states for their existence. James Madison, in Federalist 45, stated:

“The state governments may be regarded as constituent and essential parts of the federal government; whilst the latter is nowise essential to the operation or organization of the former. Without the intervention of the state legislatures, the president of the United States cannot be elected at all. They will … in most cases … determine it.”

Equally, the founders were deeply distrustful of the passions of self-interested and irrational people. Therefore, they crafted the 10th Amendment to the Constitution: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Notice: States are mentioned first (and twice), and then the people. Thats federalism. After all, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were themselves chosen by the states that ratified the Constitution.

The founders’ grim experience with both kings and mobs led them to create a Congress, with the House representing the people, and the Senate representing the states (U.S. senators were originally elected by the state legislatures.) In both cases, the people were the same, but senators represented all of the local interests: land, resources, commerce, long-term investment, growth, immigrants, history, fallen comrades, future children, culture, vision and much more. It was genius.

However, the reformers of the late 19th and 20th centuries had a narrower view – one that involved only people. The passing of the 17th Amendment (providing for direct election of senators) in 1913 severed the senators from the states, thereby beginning the unraveling of the 10th Amendment.

One institution, however, that remains solidly republican (small “r”) is the little-understood Electoral College. And abolishing or bending it in ways never envisioned in the Constitution is a dangerous move with consequences far more grave than the occasional election of a president who gets fewer popular votes than his opponent.

Forcing electors to the Electoral College to vote for whoever gets the most popular votes nationally (the “National Popular Vote” movement, or NPV) is fraught with peril. Its proponents do not understand the genius of our republic. Electors are chosen on a state-by-state basis, representing both states (one elector per U.S. senator) and people (one elector per congressional district). While this may give North Dakotas three electors a slight advantage out of proportion to its tiny population, California, with 56 electoral votes, probably isnt losing any sleep over the situation.

This ensures that one candidate for president wins a majority that balances the interests of both the people and the states.

Making the Electoral College simply a ratifier of the popular vote will destroy its purpose. Since only the popular vote will matter, 12 states can decide presidential elections. The rest of the 50 states will just watch.

It is the Electoral College – standing alone – that prevents us from becoming a European-style, popular-vote, multi-party country with weak, coalition governments. By their very definition, that tells the world that no one really won, creates uncertainty, and tempts the country’s enemies. If we were Germany, President Clinton (43 percent vote) would have had to take Republicans and/or small parties into a weak, do-nothing coalition. Instead, he won a majority in the Electoral College.

In something so fundamental as the Constitution, unintended consequences are dangerous, even deadly. Bypassing the process to amend the Constitution as the NPV would – thumbing ones nose at the Constitution itself – is arrogant, shortsighted and foolish. And, the absolutely inevitable court cases – because NPV violates the constitutional amendment process – will never end, throwing into question the legitimacy of every election while the dispute travels through multiple courts multiple times over multiple years.

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ST. PAUL, Minn. — Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton and Republican legislators say they have reached a deal to end a budget impasse that led to the longest state government shutdown in recent history.

The deal came after a three-hour negotiating session Thursday that followed major concessions by Dayton, a Democrat. It ends a two-week shutdown.

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WASHINGTON — Testy lawmakers and President Obama headed back for a fifth day of debt-limit negotiations Thursday, pointing fingers at each other while trying to stave off a government financial default. No “hallelujah moment” was likely by day’s end, White House spokesman Jay Carney said, with Friday shaping up as an important decision day.

As the negotiations entered a perilous endgame. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned of economic damage and an anxious Wall Street envisioned catastrophe if the U.S. defaulted on its obligations.

As legislators squabbled, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner served notice there was no finessing the Aug. 2 deadline for solving the debt crisis.

“We have looked at all available options and we have no way to give Congress more time to solve this problem,” he said. “We’re running out of time.”

But the president’s blunt declaration that “enough is enough” as the previous evening’s talks ended did nothing to quell the rancor as a new day of positioning and posturing played out.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid stood on the Senate floor and sniped that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor shouldn’t even be part of the talks anymore, noting that the Virginia Republican has been called “childish.”

Cantor shrugged off the criticism, and drew a show of support from Speaker John Boehner, despite evident differences between the two men over the course of negotiations.

“We have been in this fight together,” Boehner said at a news conference, placing his arm around Cantor for emphasis. “We’re in the foxhole.”

At the White House, Carney for the first time indicated that the administration was prepared to move beyond the negotiations on deficit reduction and seek some other path toward increasing the debt limit, with Friday looming as a decision day.

“The president views Friday as an important moment where we can make an assessment about whether we are moving toward a significant bipartisan agreement on deficit reduction or not,” Carney said. “And if we are moving in that direction, and he sincerely hopes we are, then we will continue toward that goal. “

“If we’re not, then we have to begin looking at making sure that we fulfill our obligations to uphold the credit rating of the United States.”

He did not elaborate.

For his part, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said the debt problem belonged squarely in Obama’s lap

“Republicans will not be reduced to being the tax collectors for the Obama economy,” McConnell said. “Don’t expect any more cover from Republicans on it than you got on health care. None.”

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, testifying on Capitol Hill, warned legislators that failing to raise the debt limit in time to avoid default would only end up increasing the federal deficit, calling that a “self-inflicted” wound.

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GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (AP) — Mourners continued to file past the casket of former first lady Betty Ford at the Gerald R. FordPresidential Museum on Thursday morning, and hundreds of people who admired the forthright Mrs. Ford are expected to gather along the route from the museum to the Episcopal church where she will be memorialized for a final time.

Mrs. Ford will be buried Thursday in the city where she grew up and wed the man who became the only president from Michigan. On Wednesday, hundreds filed past her flower-draped casket during a public viewing at the museum.

Mrs. Ford died Friday at age 93 and will be interred on the museum grounds next to her husband on what would have been his 98th birthday.

Lynne Cheney, wife of former Vice President Dick Cheney, was to speak at the service at Grace Episcopal Church, where the Fords married and where Mr. Ford also was memorialized following his death in 2006. Former first lady Barbara Bush and former President Bill Clinton also were expected to attend.

A smaller service was held Wednesday after Mrs. Ford‘s casket arrived at Gerald R. FordInternational Airport and was escorted in a procession to the museum. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and other dignitaries attended that service with the Ford family before the public viewing. On Tuesday, a service at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church in Palm Desert, Calif., was attended by 800 people, including former President George W. Bush and first lady Michelle Obama.

At least 300 mourners paid their respects Wednesday, some carrying flags and others sharing thoughts about the importance of the Fords to Grand Rapids and Michigan. The four-hour viewing followed a similar, and sometimes tearful, send-off by thousands of well-wishers in California earlier in the day.

Edna Jungers, 95, of Stillwater, Okla., and her 78-year-old niece, Yvonne Locker, drove from Ms. Locker’s summer home in Milwaukee to greet the casket as it arrived at the museum. They then joined hundreds of other mourners who slowly walked by Mrs. Ford‘s mahogany casket covered in pink and white flowers, with a presidential seal alight overhead and an honor guard standing in attendance.

“It’s wonderful to give her that much honor. She was worthy of it,” Ms. Jungers said.

On the way out, those paying their respects were handed a card with a photo of Mrs. Ford and a note of appreciation from the Ford family. A Ford granddaughter, 30-year-old Tyne Vance, shook hands with those leaving.

“Thank you for coming,” she said to each one.

Wednesday’s crowd wasn’t as large as that when Mr. Ford‘s funeral and memorial services were held over two icy winter days four years ago. But Betty Ford, who gave dance lessons in Grand Rapids and worked as a fashion coordinator and clothing buyer at the local Herpolscheimer’s department store before marrying Mr. Ford, was remembered fondly by those who came to pay homage.

“She really reached out to all the people who struggled … with drug and alcohol addiction,” said John Patrick Jr., a 38-year-old Grand Rapids resident who works with dialysis patients and sees the ravages alcoholism can wreak. “She was very gracious.”

Thousands of people have signed condolence books in Grand Rapids for Mrs. Ford since Saturday.

For former Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land and friends Joni Vander Till and Vicki Avink, the public viewing was a chance to talk about the days when the three young women greeted the Fords on the airport tarmac on their returns to Michigan with hand-lettered signs that read, “Welcome home, Jerry,” and “Welcome home, Betty.”

All three were “Scatterblitzers” during Mr. Ford‘s 1976 presidential campaign, young women who traveled around the Midwest and handed out Michigan apples for Mr. Ford. Ms. Land said Mrs.Ford gave them someone else to respect and admire besides the well-regarded president, as she played a large role in caring for her family and boosting her husband’s career — in her own outspoken way.

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Despite having a two-month head start, George Allen holds only a slight fundraising lead over likely opponent Tim Kaine in the race for U.S. Senate.

Mr. Allen raised about $1.1 million from April to June, after collecting $1.5 million during the first quarter. That brings his total fundraising to $2.6 million, compared with the $2.2 million pocketed by Mr. Kaine in the second quarter alone.

Mr. Allen has been gathering donations since late January, when the Republican announced his candidacy for the seat he lost five years ago. Mr. Kaine, a Democrat, didn’t jump into the race until early April. Both men are favored to win their respective primaries.

Mr. Kaine’s later start doesn’t seem to have hurt him in the fundraising realm. Fresh off a two-year stint as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, he brings fundraising prowess to a matchup that is expected to become the most expensive Virginia race yet.

“We expected Chairman Kaine to be a formidable fundraiser,” said Allen spokeswoman Katie Wright. “Over 25 percent of what he raised in his first quarter came from ActBlue. We had a strong quarter, and we’re excited about the momentum that’s building across the state.”

Mr. Allen has tried to turn ActBlue into a point of attack over the past two weeks. Created to raise money for Democrats, the political action committee has been the largest Democratic source of funding over the past decade and contributed more than half a million dollars to Mr. Kaine.

The Allen campaign pounced on the news, trying to paint Mr. Kaine as a puppet of the DNC and President Obama and connect him to labor unions. ActBlue also contributed money to Wisconsin Democrats who recently opposed a controversial law in that state to sharply curb union rights for public employees.

Mr. Kaine’s campaign shot back this week with a jab at Crossroads GPS — the “super PAC” created by Republican strategist Karl Rove that doesn’t have to disclose its donors. The group came under Democratic fire last year when it became one of the largest contributors to Republicans.

“This is absolutely absurd,” said senior adviser Mo Elleithee. “The real special interests in this race are the ones funding Karl Rove’s shadowy group that accepts anonymous, limitless contributions so they can run attack ads here in Virginia.”

More details on the second-quarter fundraising will not be available until Friday, when the final reports are due. Candidates often release totals before the deadline if they feel it will help their campaigns.

Mr. Allen said 82 percent of his funds came from donors in Virginia and that more than 5,000 individuals contributed to his campaign. Mr. Kaine reported donations from more than 4,600 individuals when he released his second-quarter totals last week.

Tea party favorite Jamie Radtke, who is battling Mr. Allen for the GOP nomination, also released her second-quarter totals on Wednesday. She reported raising $92,000, after bringing in $150,000 in the first quarter.

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Over fierce objections from Democrats, a key House panel Wednesday passed the third in a series of five reform bills aiming to lift restrictions on how school districts and states can use federal money.

But after the party-line vote, Rep. George Miller, California Democrat and his party’s ranking member on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, threatened “trench warfare” from this point forward.

“Allowing school districts to use federal dollars intended for poor students for something other than serving those students is morally reprehensible,” Mr. Miller said. “We won’t stand for a back-door dismantling of the federal role in education.”

Mr. Miller and fellow Democrats think the flexibility measure could widen the gap between the best- and worst-performing students. Rep. Ruben Hinojosa, Texas Democrat, called it “an attack on … civil rights” of disadvantaged students.

By giving superintendents and school boards greater authority, Republicans argue, the bill will help, rather than hurt, low-income and minority students.

Rep. Larry Bucshon, Indiana Republican, called it “insulting” for Democrats to accuse local and state education officials of wanting to use their new freedoms to chip away at programs geared toward minority students or low-income children.

For example, the pool of federal money designated for English learning is of little use to districts with few students who don’t speak the language, Republicans say. Under current law, it can’t be spent on anything else and often goes unused. By giving schools freedom to use that money for other initiatives, Republicans argue that districts can implement their own innovative ideas and better cater to their unique student bodies.

“This does not mean states and school districts will be given carte blanche to spend taxpayer dollars without any accountability,” said committee Chairman John Kline, Minnesota Republican, adding that schools would still be required to submit annual reports to the Department of Education, detailing how every dollar was spent and justifying their reasons for moving money from one pot to another.

But Democrats still fear a lack of accountability.

“Where do you think that money will go?” said Rep. Rush Holt, New Jersey Democrat. “If you leave it to what you might call the market, the privileged will get more. We have serious divisions in our society. We have serious inequalities in our society. It is incumbent on us to do everything in our power to address those.”

Democrats tried to gut the bill with six amendments, each designed to maintain tight restrictions on specific pools of money. Each was shot down on party-line votes.

The tense, three-hour back-and-forth makes it all but certain that Republicans’ reform agenda will get little, if any, support from across the aisle. Mr. Miller said the “working relationship” between the two sides will greatly suffer as a result of Wednesday’s action.

Mr. Kline has said he expects similar resistance from Democrats when the final two reform bills are introduced later this year. While the details haven’t yet been made public, the fourth bill will aim to change the definition of “effective teachers,” and the fifth and final bill will reform the accountability process for schools across the country and replace the “adequate yearly progress” system put in place as part of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, according to Mr. Kline.

Meanwhile, Sen. Tom Harkin, Iowa Democrat and chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, is expected to introduce his own comprehensive education reform bill.

If the House and Senate can’t come together and pass legislation soon, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has threatened to bypass Congress and offer waivers from NCLB mandates to states that demonstrate progress and a workable reform model.

© Copyright 2011 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

HILLSBORO, N.H. — Rep. Michele Bachmann leads the House Tea Party Caucus, but for New Hampshire tea partyers, Rep. Ron Paul appears to be the GOP presidential candidate of choice.

The congressman from Texas torched his competition in a straw poll of taxpayer activists.

Mr. Paul’s strong showing in the straw poll at last weekend’s Coalition of New Hampshire Taxpayers (CNHT) gathering is another reminder of how Mrs. Bachmann’s path to victory here is murkier than in Iowa, where her reputation as a religious conservative and tea party leader is proving to be a natural fit.

“I think she does have a problem,” said former Sen. Judd Gregg, a Republican powerbroker in New Hampshire who said the winner of his state’s primary will need to break out of that mold. “In this race, you already have three or four people who’ve tried to gather a constituency that isn’t that large to begin with; it probably doesn’t break 20 to 25 percent of the electorate. So you have to get outside that constituency — especially in New Hampshire.”

Mrs. Bachmann, who formally announced her candidacy late last month, has ascended in national polls. A Quinnipiac Poll released Wednesday showed her support “zooming” from 6 percent to 14 percent, good enough for second place behind former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney with 25 percent in the same poll.

She is the front-runner in Iowa, where polls suggest she is on the same political wavelength as self-identified tea partyers and religious conservatives.

But to win the nomination, Republicans said, she will have to broaden her appeal beyond those voters or risk repeating the performance of 2008 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. The former Arkansas governor won the Iowa caucuses on the strength of his social conservative leanings, but he came in third in New Hampshire. His campaign petered out as the primary calendar continued.

Meanwhile, New Hampshire’s winner, Sen. John McCain, eventually won the GOP nomination by appealing to voters nationwide on a range of national security, pro-life, fiscal and electability issues.

The structure of the two contests matters, too. Iowa’s caucuses attract committed GOP activists willing to turn out for several hours on a usually frigid January night. In New Hampshire, voters go to the polls throughout the day just as with any other election. So while the state has less than half the population of Iowa, turnout can be double that of the caucuses.

“There is a night-and-day difference between Iowa and New Hampshire,” Manchester Mayor Ted Gatsas said, adding that New Hampshire voters like to meet candidates multiple times.

“In New Hampshire, it’s, ‘I want to talk to you, know what you say and make sure it’s the same thing you say the third time I meet you,’ ” he said.

Mr. Gatsas said that while most of the field has reached out to him, Mrs. Bachmann has not. He also said he didn’t get the sense she had laid much groundwork in the state’s largest city.

Mrs. Bachmann’s campaign didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.

Some New Hampshire voters got their first look at her in March when she confused the state’s role in the Revolutionary War with that of neighboring Massachusetts, saying the Granite State was “where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord.”

But the mother of five rebounded from the gaffe with a strong showing at the presidential debate at St. Anslem College last month, winning praise from many state Republicans, who said she likely helped erase some lingering doubts about whether she was ready for prime time.

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Capitol Hill lawmakers scrambled Wednesday to come up with backup plans to decide who would still get paid if the government bumps up against its debt limit next month, as the outlook for a deal grew gloomier and following President Obama’s warning that Social Security benefit checks could be halted.

Moody’s bond rating service admonished that a default on government debt payments will cost the country its prized AAA rating, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said it would send “shock waves through the entire financial system.”

Another high-stakes meeting Wednesday between Mr. Obama and congressional leaders failed to produce an accord, and pessimism grew on Capitol Hill that a deal would be made by Aug. 2, which is when the Treasury Department says the $13.29 trillion debt limit would be reached.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Virginia Republican and one of the negotiators, said nobody has produced a plan that can win enough votes to pass the House, and he urged both sides to focus on areas of agreement such as spending cuts and entitlement program changes.

“The path forward is to focus on what we can agree upon, and though it doesn’t go as far as our budget, House Republicans can likely agree with the general spending cuts and entitlement changes in the ‘big deal’ proposed by the president,” he said.

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama said he couldn’t guarantee Social Security benefit checks would be paid if the debt limit is hit, and the White House said it’s unclear what payments would be suspended.

A day later, lawmakers responded with several proposals to try to prioritize payments should the debt negotiations fail.

Sen. Bill Nelson, Florida Democrat, on Wednesday offered legislation that would allow the Treasury Department to temporarily stop counting Social Security obligations against the debt limit, thus ensuring that benefits checks would continue to be mailed in the event of a government default.

Mr. Nelson said he based his bill on a measure passed by Congress in 1996 during a budget conflict between Democrat President Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress.

“I want to urge our colleagues to try to come together and give the assurances to millions of retirees that they are not going to be whacked, and especially so they are not going to be whacked out of political gridlock,” Mr. Nelson said.

On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, proposed a complex backup plan that would adjust congressional rules to allow the debt to be increased but would also shift the political peril for doing so onto the White House.

Mr. McConnell told radio show host Laura Ingraham that Mr. Obama would use a default against Republicans in next year’s elections, leaving the GOP in “a horrible position politically that would allow the president to probably get re-elected.”

In the House, meanwhile, Rep. Steve King, Iowa Republican, introduced a bill Wednesday that calls for setting the pay of military personnel, as well as the payment of the principal and interest on public debt, as “top priorities” in the event that the debt limit is reached.

“There’s still a lot of money left over for the president’s discretion to play political games,” he said. “But let us not do so with our military and let us not let … the full faith and credit of the United States go to pot at the expense of political leveraging.”

A threat that military pay could be halted also was an issue this year when Congress faced a possible government shutdown during a budget dispute. Such a scenario was averted when lawmakers agreed to a stopgap spending measure to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year.

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President Obama’s campaign team announced Wednesday that he had raised $86 million for his re-election campaign and the Democratic National Committee in the second quarter, blowing past the stated goal of $60 million Democrats had set.

And a new poll showed that Mr. Obama is holding together his winning grassroots coalition from 2008, with firm support from women, blacks and voters under age 35. Mr. Obama beat every potential Republican candidate in the survey by double digits except for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, whom he edged by 47 percent to 41 percent.

“Mr. Obama will have overwhelming support from the Democratic base, despite some unhappiness with some perhaps on the left wing,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
Obama campaign manager Jim Messina announced the fundraising results early Wednesday in a video release to supporters.

The total of $86 million is a record for the second quarter in an off year, eclipsing the $60 million raised by President George W. Bush and the Republican National Committee in 2003. It left no doubt about the sustained ability of Mr. Obama, who once pledged to abide by public financing limits for presidential elections, to rake in ever-higher amounts of cash.

Mr. Messina highlighted the campaign’s 552,462 donors, saying the campaign had “more grassroots support at this point in the process than any campaign in political history.”

He said the average donation was $69, and 98 percent of the contributions were less than $250. Among the pitches the campaign used was a raffle in which people gave $5 or more for a chance to have dinner with Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden.

Itemized reports detailing the number of big-money donors won’t be filed with the government until Friday. The campaign also held several high-priced events, such as one in Philadelphia late last month at which couples paid up to $71,600.

Of the total, Mr. Messina said more than $47 million went to Obama for America and more than $38 million went to the DNC. Republican presidential candidates have raised about $35 million combined to date, with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney leading the pack with $18.25 million. Tim Pawlenty, former governor of Minnesota, raised $4.2 million.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said Mr. Obama excels at raising money from large donors, but his fundraising prowess can’t mask the president’s failure to create jobs.

“I don’t think any amount of money is going to save” the president, Mr. Priebus said on “Fox Friends.”

Pointing to third-party fundraising by Republicans, Mr. Messina told supporters “we have reason to be proud of what we’ve built so far, but it’s going to get tougher from here. This is a whole new ballgame like we’ve never faced before.”

Independent groups not coordinating with the candidates are expected to raise hundreds of millions of dollars this cycle for election advocacy.

Mr. Obama raised about $750 million for his campaign in 2008, and some Democrats have suggested he could top $1 billion in his re-election bid. Mr. Messina said the money haul will allow Chicago-based Obama for America to expand its reach beyond the more than 60 field offices it already is operating around the country.

The Quinnipiac poll showed the return of the “gender gap.” Female voters in 2010 had given Republican candidates a slight advantage for the first time in decades, but the poll shows Mr. Obama personally still enjoys huge margins among women voters over GOP contenders.

Against Mr. Romney, the president carries female voters 50 to 39, and loses men 45 to 44. Against Rep. Michele Bachmann, Minnesota Republican, Mr. Obama leads among women 52 to 35 while also winning among men, 48 to 40.

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© Copyright 2011 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

HILLSBORO, N.H. — Rep. Michele Bachmann leads the House Tea Party Caucus, but for New Hampshire tea partyers, Rep. Ron Paul appears to be the GOP presidential candidate of choice.

The congressman from Texas torched his competition in a straw poll of taxpayer activists.

Mr. Paul’s strong showing in the straw poll at last weekend’s Coalition of New Hampshire Taxpayers (CNHT) gathering is another reminder of how Mrs. Bachmann’s path to victory here is murkier than in Iowa, where her reputation as a religious conservative and tea party leader is proving to be a natural fit.

“I think she does have a problem,” said former Sen. Judd Gregg, a Republican powerbroker in New Hampshire who said the winner of his state’s primary will need to break out of that mold. “In this race, you already have three or four people who’ve tried to gather a constituency that isn’t that large to begin with; it probably doesn’t break 20 to 25 percent of the electorate. So you have to get outside that constituency — especially in New Hampshire.”

Mrs. Bachmann, who formally announced her candidacy late last month, has ascended in national polls. A Quinnipiac Poll released Wednesday showed her support “zooming” from 6 percent to 14 percent, good enough for second place behind former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney with 25 percent in the same poll.

She is the front-runner in Iowa, where polls suggest she is on the same political wavelength as self-identified tea partyers and religious conservatives.

But to win the nomination, Republicans said, she will have to broaden her appeal beyond those voters or risk repeating the performance of 2008 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. The former Arkansas governor won the Iowa caucuses on the strength of his social conservative leanings, but he came in third in New Hampshire. His campaign petered out as the primary calendar continued.

Meanwhile, New Hampshire’s winner, Sen. John McCain, eventually won the GOP nomination by appealing to voters nationwide on a range of national security, pro-life, fiscal and electability issues.

The structure of the two contests matters, too. Iowa’s caucuses attract committed GOP activists willing to turn out for several hours on a usually frigid January night. In New Hampshire, voters go to the polls throughout the day just as with any other election. So while the state has less than half the population of Iowa, turnout can be double that of the caucuses.

“There is a night-and-day difference between Iowa and New Hampshire,” Manchester Mayor Ted Gatsas said, adding that New Hampshire voters like to meet candidates multiple times.

“In New Hampshire, it’s, ‘I want to talk to you, know what you say and make sure it’s the same thing you say the third time I meet you,’ ” he said.

Mr. Gatsas said that while most of the field has reached out to him, Mrs. Bachmann has not. He also said he didn’t get the sense she had laid much groundwork in the state’s largest city.

Mrs. Bachmann’s campaign didn’t respond to messages seeking comment.

Some New Hampshire voters got their first look at her in March when she confused the state’s role in the Revolutionary War with that of neighboring Massachusetts, saying the Granite State was “where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord.”

But the mother of five rebounded from the gaffe with a strong showing at the presidential debate at St. Anslem College last month, winning praise from many state Republicans, who said she likely helped erase some lingering doubts about whether she was ready for prime time.

Story Continues →

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© Copyright 2011 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

Capitol Hill lawmakers scrambled Wednesday to come up with backup plans to decide who would still get paid if the government bumps up against its debt limit next month, as the outlook for a deal grew gloomier and following President Obama’s warning that Social Security benefit checks could be halted.

Moody’s bond rating service admonished that a default on government debt payments will cost the country its prized AAA rating, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said it would send “shock waves through the entire financial system.”

Another high-stakes meeting Wednesday between Mr. Obama and congressional leaders failed to produce an accord, and pessimism grew on Capitol Hill that a deal would be made by Aug. 2, which is when the Treasury Department says the $13.29 trillion debt limit would be reached.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Virginia Republican and one of the negotiators, said nobody has produced a plan that can win enough votes to pass the House, and he urged both sides to focus on areas of agreement such as spending cuts and entitlement program changes.

“The path forward is to focus on what we can agree upon, and though it doesn’t go as far as our budget, House Republicans can likely agree with the general spending cuts and entitlement changes in the ‘big deal’ proposed by the president,” he said.

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama said he couldn’t guarantee Social Security benefit checks would be paid if the debt limit is hit, and the White House said it’s unclear what payments would be suspended.

A day later, lawmakers responded with several proposals to try to prioritize payments should the debt negotiations fail.

Sen. Bill Nelson, Florida Democrat, on Wednesday offered legislation that would allow the Treasury Department to temporarily stop counting Social Security obligations against the debt limit, thus ensuring that benefits checks would continue to be mailed in the event of a government default.

Mr. Nelson said he based his bill on a measure passed by Congress in 1996 during a budget conflict between Democrat President Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress.

“I want to urge our colleagues to try to come together and give the assurances to millions of retirees that they are not going to be whacked, and especially so they are not going to be whacked out of political gridlock,” Mr. Nelson said.

On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, proposed a complex backup plan that would adjust congressional rules to allow the debt to be increased but would also shift the political peril for doing so onto the White House.

Mr. McConnell told radio show host Laura Ingraham that Mr. Obama would use a default against Republicans in next year’s elections, leaving the GOP in “a horrible position politically that would allow the president to probably get re-elected.”

In the House, meanwhile, Rep. Steve King, Iowa Republican, introduced a bill Wednesday that calls for setting the pay of military personnel, as well as the payment of the principal and interest on public debt, as “top priorities” in the event that the debt limit is reached.

“There’s still a lot of money left over for the president’s discretion to play political games,” he said. “But let us not do so with our military and let us not let … the full faith and credit of the United States go to pot at the expense of political leveraging.”

A threat that military pay could be halted also was an issue this year when Congress faced a possible government shutdown during a budget dispute. Such a scenario was averted when lawmakers agreed to a stopgap spending measure to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year.

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© Copyright 2011 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

The score after two 2011 special congressional elections: Democrats 2, Republicans 0.

California Democrat Janice Hahn won Tuesday’s election to replace retiring Rep. Jane Harman in a coastal Los Angeles County district, defeating Republican businessman Craig Huey by a margin of 54 percent to 45 percent.

Any other outcome would have been considered an upset in a district in which Democrats enjoy an 18 percentage point voter-registration advantage and that President Obama won by 30 percentage points in 2008. Mrs. Harman, a Democrat, held the seat since 2001 before she stepped down to head the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Still, Mr. Huey, 61, a political newcomer backed by the tea party, ran a closer-than-expected race against the well-connected Mrs. Hahn, who has served for a decade on the Los Angeles City Council. Her father, Kenneth Hahn, was a longtime Los Angeles County supervisor, and her brother, James, served as Los Angeles mayor.

The race might be best remembered for an independently produced “rap” video that accused Mrs. Hahn of being soft on gangs, portraying her as a pole dancer giving dollar bills to gang members. The video was widely denounced as racist, including by Mr. Huey.

However, Republicans have a chance to even the score with two more special elections, both scheduled for Sept. 13.

In Nevada, voters will choose a successor to Republican Rep. Dean Heller, who was appointed by the governor to replace Sen. John Ensign. Mr. Ensign, a Republican, resigned in May amid an investigation of his efforts to cover up an affair the wife of a top aide.

Republican Mark Amodei, a former state senator, will face state Treasurer Kate Marshall. Mr. Amodei is running on a limited-government, Nevada-first platform, while Ms. Marshall is running an anti-Washington video that doesn’t mention her party affiliation.

There’s a reason for that: No Democrat has been elected in the 30-year history of Nevada’s 2nd Congressional District, which encompasses the whole state minus the Las Vegas area.

A win by Ms. Marshall would constitute the most stunning Democratic special-election upset since, March, when Democrat Kathy Hochul won a New York seat that Republicans had held since 1970. Las Vegas political analyst Jon Ralston called Ms. Marshall’s chances of success “not likely,” adding that her best shot would be to emulate the Ms. Hochul’s Medicare strategy.

“This is a very tough race for the Democrats, who have never won in this district,” said Mr. Ralston in his July 11 Las Vegas Sun column. “Marshall will need to run a Mediscare campaign and hope any base dissatisfaction with Amodei because of his intermittently controversial legislative record minimizes GOP turnout.”

The second Sept. 13 special election will be back in New York, where two candidates will vie to replace Rep. Anthony D. Weiner, the Democrat who stepped down in June amid a scandal about his explicit texts and photos to young women.

Republican Bob Turner, a retired movie executive who ran against Mr. Weiner in 2010, will square off against Democratic Assemblyman David Weprin in a race viewed as the Democrat’s to lose. Still, there are signs of hope for Republicans: Mr. Turner took 40 percent of the vote in his 2010 bid, a surprisingly strong showing in the safe Democratic district.

The special election may hinge on Jewish voters, a reliable Democratic voting bloc that has been increasingly uneasy with President Obama’s policies toward Israel. A Gallup poll released July 5 showed that only 51 percent of religious Jews support Mr. Obama, as opposed to 71 percent of nonreligious Jews.

Former New York Mayor Ed Koch recently urged Jewish voters to send “a shot across Obama’s bow” by supporting Mr. Turner, according to the Jewish Week newspaper.

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WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Wednesday that the central bank is prepared to provide additional stimulus if the economic lull persists.

Delivering his twice-a-year economic report to Congress, Bernanke laid out three options the central bank would consider. One possibility, he said, was another round of Treasury bond buying. That would make the third such effort since 2009.

The Fed chief’s reassurances helped drive stock prices higher, but it also underscored the fragile state of the economy more than two years after economists said the recession had ended. Unemployment has risen for three straight months and a debt crisis in Greece and other European countries threatens to weaken the global economy.

Bernanke warned U.S. lawmakers that their failure to raise the nation’s borrowing limit by Aug. 2 could trigger a major financial crisis. He said that if government defaults on its debt, it would throw “shock waves through the entire financial system.”

Bernanke said more stimulus would only be necessary if economic conditions worsened and deflation re-emerged as a threat. Deflation is a destabilizing period of falling prices.

He also said the Fed was nimble enough to respond if the opposite happened. He said the Fed was ready to raise interest rates that have been held at record lows for nearly three years, should the central bank fear a greater risk of inflation.

“We have to keep all options on the table,” Bernanke told the House Financial Services Committee on the first of two days of Capitol Hill testimony. “If we get to the point where the recovery is faltering” and inflation is dropping toward zero, then the central bank would consider the additional stimulus options, he said.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose more than 93 points in afternoon trading. Broader indexes also increased.

In addition to purchasing Treasury bonds, Bernanke said the Fed could help the economy by:

— Cutting the interest paid to banks on the reserves they hold as a way to encourage them to lend more.

— Communicating in more explicit terms how long it planned to keep rates at record-low levels. That would give investors confidence about the Fed’s efforts to continue supporting the economy.

The Fed last month agreed to end on schedule its program to boost the economy through the purchase of $600 billion in Treasury bonds. But the central bank also acknowledged that the economy had slowed in the first half of the year. As a result, it lowered its economic growth forecast for 2011 and said unemployment wouldn’t fall below 8.6 percent this year.

Since then, the government reported a second straight month of dismal hiring in June. The economy added just 18,000 jobs last month, the fewest in nine months. The unemployment rate rose to 9.2 percent — the highest rate this year.

Companies pulled back sharply on hiring after adding an average of 215,000 jobs per month from February through April. The economy typically needs to add 125,000 jobs per month just to keep up with population growth. And at least twice that many jobs are needed to bring down the unemployment rate.

The Fed has said that temporary factors, such as high gas prices and supply chain disruptions caused by the Japan crisis, are partly to blame for the sluggish period.

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