Obama reaps victory as judges uphold health law (AP)

CINCINNATI – In the first ruling by a federal appeals court on President Barack Obama's health care overhaul, a panel in Cincinnati handed the administration a victory Wednesday by agreeing that the government can require a minimum amount of insurance for Americans.

A Republican-appointed judge joined with a Democratic appointee for the 2-1 majority in another milestone for Obama's hotly debated signature domestic initiative — the first time a Republican federal court appointee has affirmed the merits of the law.

The White House and Justice Department hailed the panel's affirmation of an earlier ruling by a federal court in Michigan; opponents of the law said challenges will continue to the U.S. Supreme Court.

At issue is a conservative law center's lawsuit arguing on behalf of plaintiffs that potentially requiring them to buy insurance or face penalties could subject them to financial hardship. The suit warns that the law is too broad and could lead to more federal mandates.

The Thomas More Law Center, based in Ann Arbor, Mich., argued before the panel that the law was unconstitutional and that Congress overstepped its powers.

The government countered that the measure was needed for the overall goal of reducing health care costs and reforms such as protecting people with pre-existing conditions. It said the coverage mandate will help keep the costs of changes from being shifted to households and providers.

White House adviser Stephanie Cutter called the ruling "another victory" for millions of Americans and small businesses benefiting from the overhaul.

"At the end of the day, we are confident the constitutionality of these landmark reforms will be upheld," she said in a statement.

The law center predicted its case would have a good shot on appeal.

"Clearly our case won't resolve all the issues, because we don't raise the state rights issue, but we are the only one that is currently ripe for Supreme Court review that raises the challenge on behalf of an individual," said David Yerushalmi, an attorney for the law center.

The three-judge 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel delivered a lengthy opinion with disagreement on some issues, moving unusually quickly in delivering its decision less than a month after hearing oral arguments.

"Congress had a rational basis for concluding that the minimum coverage provision is essential to the Affordable Care Act's larger reforms to the national markets in health care delivery and health insurance," Judge Boyce F. Martin, appointed by former President Jimmy Carter, wrote for the majority.

A George W. Bush appointee concurred; a Ronald Reagan appointee who is a U.S. district judge in Columbus sitting on the panel disagreed. Judges are selected for panels through random draw.

"If the exercise of power is allowed and the mandate upheld, it is difficult to see what the limits on Congress' Commerce Clause authority would be," warned dissenting Judge James Graham of Columbus. "What aspect of human activity would escape federal power?"

Judge Jeffrey Sutton, the Bush appointee, delivered the decisive vote, although his opinion raised questions and noted the unusual nature of a law directed at someone who chooses inaction, referring to those "who prize that most American of freedoms: to be left alone."

But the government argued that telling someone to buy health insurance, something that virtually everyone needs and is part of a sweeping effort, isn't the same as ordering them to buy a car or a vegetable.

"The novelty of the individual mandate may indeed suggest it is a bridge too far, but it also may offer one more example of a policy necessity giving birth to an inventive (and constitutional) congressional solution," Sutton wrote.

The opinion by Sutton, a well-respected conservative jurist, will be studied closely by other courts, said a law professor at Virginia's University of Richmond.

"His opinion is comprehensive and cautious and careful, but I think it comes out to pretty much the same conclusion as Judge Martin's," Carl Tobias said in a telephone interview.

An attorney for Thomas More said the center expects to appeal. It could ask for the full circuit court to review the case or go on to the U.S. Supreme Court. The 16-seat 6th Circuit has one vacancy.

Among those supporting the center in court documents in the case — titled Thomas More Law Center, et al, vs. Barack Hussein Obama, et al — were Republican presidential candidates Michelle Bachmann and Ron Paul and several other members of Congress including Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio.

More than 30 legal challenges have been filed over the health care overhaul, some focusing on different issues such as states' rights. Earlier decisions at the U.S. district court level have found Republican-appointed judges opposing and Democrat-appointed judges affirming.

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Associated Press writers Lisa Cornwell in Cincinnati and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Mark Sherman in Washington contributed to this report.

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Dan Sewell can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/dansewell.

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Can President Obama win Georgia?

When President Obama was elected in 2008, some of the biggest surprises on election night came in the South, where Obama won longtime Republican redoubts like North Carolina and Virginia.

Now, as the president launches his reelection campaign, his advisers are already talking about victory in another southern state: Georgia.

In an interview this weekend with the New York Times’s Jeff Zeleny, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina broached the idea that the president could win in the Peach State.

“If you look at the new Census numbers, you would think that Georgia would be in play. You would definitely think that Arizona would be in play — as I think it is,” Messina said. “Those are states where we didn’t play in last time.”

Messina, of course, isn’t promising victory; he’s simply making the case that the there are new targets out there for Obama.

But the mention of Georgia is very interesting given that the Republican presidential nominee has carried the state in six out of the last seven elections. (Bill Clinton won it in 1992.) Could Obama break that trend?

Messina rightly notes that Georgia turned in some of the most surprising Census numbers in the country this year.

Its black population increased more than almost any other state, rising from 25.6 percent in 2000 to 30.5 percent last year. Meanwhile, the burgeoning metropolitan Atlanta area continues make the state more urban and more educated – and, in the process, more Democratic.

We’ve seen this movie before. Obama’s strength among black voters, young voters and highly educated voters spurred his wins in North Carolina and Virginia in 2008. Georgia was initially one of the Southern states that Obama aides talked about targeting, but they wound up canceling ad buys and pulling much of their staff out in early September.

“It’s easy to look at numbers and see what Jim Messina sees, but the fact of the matter is, when you’re on the ground in Georgia, it’s apparent who’s going to win here in 2012,” said Brian Robinson, deputy chief of staff to Republican Gov. Nathan Deal, who was elected in November.

Georgia is certainly moving in the right direction for the president. Obama took 47 percent there in 2008, which was the highest percentage for a Democrat in the Peach State since former President (and Georgia governor) Jimmy Carter ran for reelection in 1980. (Clinton carried the state with 43.5 percent in a very competitive three-way race with George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot.)

The rise in the black population means Georgia has considerably more black voters than either North Carolina or Virginia. And given how close Obama came to winning the state in 2008, it’s a logical target for 2012.

But there are several things working against him too. While there are some similarities between Georgia and the so-called “new South” states that Obama won in 2008, there are differences too.

Georgia is more deep South than new South, and you see that when you analyze the white vote. While 35 percent of white voters in North Carolina voted for Obama, just 23 percent of white voters in Georgia did, according to exit polls. That number is more on-par with a state like South Carolina (26 percent of white vote) and closer to Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi — where Obama took high teens of the white vote — than North Carolina and Virginia.

While white voters in Georgia supported Obama more than in some other Deep South states, it’s hard to win a state when the state’s largest demographic group votes against you three-to-one. Georgia remains a majority-white state, and Obama would need more white votes, in addition to the growing black vote.

Second, replicating the turnout model from 2008 will be tough. Obama successfully turned out black voters and young voters in an unprecedented way. Those groups — particularly young voters — stayed home in droves in 2010 and there remain big questions about how energized they will be for the Obama re-election race.

There’s also the matter of the mobilized opposition. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) didn’t quite inspire Southern Republican voters in 2008, but Obama’s presidency certainly got them voting in 2010.

Democrats got a strong rebuke in the South in 2010, including Republicans taking big majorities in the Georgia legislature and winning every statewide office. Since then, more than two dozen Southern state legislators — nine Georgians among them — have switched from Democrat to Republican.

Lastly, the Obama infrastructure isn’t the same in Georgia as it is in places like North Carolina. While Obama spent lots of resources building up his campaign for North Carolina’s May 2008 primary, Georgia’s primary got lost in the shuffle by being held on Super Tuesday on Feb. 5, 2008. (North Carolina is getting even more attention this time, with Democrats holding their national convention in Charlotte.)

Like North Carolina, Georgia also saw significant increases in voter registration in 2008, but it’s not clear how much of that was to Obama’s benefit since the state doesn’t register by party.

All signs are pointing in the right direction for Obama to have a chance to win in Georgia, but sometimes getting from 47 to 50 percent of the vote is a lot harder than it may seem.

“I don’t know that Georgia is there yet, in terms of the changes,” said David Bositis, an expert on African-American voters at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. “That doesn’t mean it’s not close to being there.”

More than likely, a win in Georgia would highlight another huge wave in Obama’s favor. Put simply: If he wins Georgia, he wins, period. And probably by even more than he did in 2008.

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Examining the Obama 2012 electoral landscape

President Obama announced his plan to run for a second term on Monday. Can he recreate his 2008 success? (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green) President Obama’s reelection announcement this morning amounts to the formal kickoff — finally — of the 2012 campaign.

With the starter’s pistol fired, it’s worth doing a deep dive into the map that elected President Obama with 365 electoral votes in 2008 — and analyzing whether he can do it again in 2012.

Let’s start as broadly as possible.

In 2008, Obama won 28 states and the District of Columbia. That’s nine more states than Sen. John Kerry (Mass.), um, carried in 2004 and eight more than then Vice President Al Gore won in 2000.

Obama’s 365 electoral votes were the most for a Democratic nominee since Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection race and the fourth most for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson’s massive 486 electoral vote sweep in 1964.

Those numbers explain the scope of Obama’s 2008 victory. But what do they tell us about where the map is headed in 2012?

To figure that out, we took Obama’s performance in the 28 states he won in 2008 and overlaid it with historical voting patterns at the presidential level for each of those states — in hopes of using the past and the present to help us predict the future. (Nerd alert!)

Of the 28 states Obama won in 2008, he carried 19 of them with 55 percent or more. (He won 10 of the 19 with more than 60 percent). Of those 19 states, 17 also went for Kerry in 2004, suggesting that they are somewhere close to reliably Democratic heading into 2012. (The two outliers were Nevada and New Mexico where the Democratic presidential nominee last won in 1996 and 2000, respectively.)

So, let’s grant Obama those 17 states (although to do so gives him victories in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan that Republicans are likely to dispute.) Those 17 states account for 229 electoral votes — 41 short of the 270 Obama needs to be re-elected. (If you take Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan out of that reliably Democratic category, Obama would stand at 183 electoral votes and would need 87 more to win a second term.)

That leaves us with 11other Obama states — New Mexico and Nevada as well as nine where he won with 54 percent or less — that seem likely to be the swing states of 2012.

They are: Colorado (54 percent), Florida (51), Iowa (54), Indiana (50), Minnesota (54), New Hampshire (54), New Mexico (57), Nevada (55), North Carolina (50), Ohio (52) and Virginia (53).

In nine of those 11 states, Obama was the first Democrat to carry them in at least two — and often more — national elections. (The exceptions were Minnesota and New Hampshire, both of which Kerry won in 2004.)

A Democrat last won New Mexico and Iowa in 2000 and last carried Florida, Nevada and Ohio in 1996. Colorado hadn’t been won by a Democrat since 1992 and the last Democrat to win in North Carolina had been Jimmy Carter in 1976. In Virginia and Indiana, Lyndon Johnson — way back in 1964 — was the last Democrat before Obama to win.

By those numbers alone, Iowa, Minnesota, New Mexico and New Hampshire are the most likely to stay in Obama’s camp in 2012 while Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia will be the heaviest lifts.

But, of course, numbers can only tell us so much.

To wit:

* Obama’s strength in the African American community coupled with changing growth patterns — and partisan identity — make Virginia a genuine swing state and give Democrats some reason for hope in North Carolina.

* Kerry’s geographic proximity to New Hampshire may have skewed the state’s competitiveness somewhat in 2004 and both parties will almost certainly spend heavily to win the Granite State in 2012.

* Sen. John McCain’s home-state appeal in Arizona played a major role in Obama’s loss there in 2008 but the President contest it in 2012. Clinton carried Arizona in his 1996 reelection race.

Still, viewed broadly, the numbers suggest a playing field remarkably similar to those that have dominated American electoral politics for the better part of the last decade. Florida and Ohio are the most competitive of the competitive — complemented by a handful of southwestern/western states (Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and Arizona).

Watch those states. The presidency will almost certainly be decided in them.

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President Obama, the compassion candidate

President Obama is pushing a message of compassion in the early stages of the 2012 campaign. Mark Wilson/Pool via Bloomberg President Obama has begun road-testing his 2012 campaign message this week in a series of speeches that can be boiled down to a single word: compassion.

“The America I know is generous and compassionate,” Obama said in his speech on the debt Wednesday .

At a Democratic National Committee fundraiser Thursday night in Chicago, Obama reiterated his “belief in an America that is competitive and compassionate,” contrasting that with a Republican Party that “is entirely sincere that says we no longer can afford to do big things in this country ... (that) we can’t afford to be compassionate.”

The electoral frame Obama is seeking to set up is simple: the 2012 election is not about an issue or even a set of issues but rather a broader moral choice about what kind of country we want America to be.

In many ways, that strategy is a return to the central tenet of the successful campaign of 2008: that voting for Obama was fundamentally aspirational, that it said something larger about who we are and, more importantly, who we can be.

Need proof? The two most memorable words/phrases of the 2008 race — “hope” and “yes we can” — both sought to invoke that somewhat amorphous idea that voting for Obama said something basic (and good) about the country.

Early indications are that Obama and his political team want to return to that aspirational, we-are-all-in-this-together messaging that delivered him victory with 365 electoral votes in 2008.

Of course, the three years that have passed since Obama won have been filled with economic turmoil and legislative battles — most notably health care — that have made him look more like an average politician than the transformational leader that Democrats, independents and even some Republicans voted for back in 2008.

Republicans will do everything they can to keep the election at a ground level debate of Obama’s policies, rather than a 10,000-foot discussion of what it means to be an American.

But Obama’s rhetorical skill — coupled with the fact that the GOP will be embroiled in a serious primary fight for much of the next year — suggest that the incumbent will get a chance to frame the race as he sees fit for the foreseeable future.

The big budget vote: The number of Republican defections on the budget compromise was hardly overwhelming Thursday, as the bill passed with 260 votes. But the tea party sent a message.

Fifty-nine Republicans — a handful more than rejected a short-term continuing resolution a few weeks ago — rejected the bill, while another 179 voted in favor. That three in four Republicans voted for the bill demonstrates a fair amount of party unity, even though some on the right were clearly looking for much bigger cuts.

On the Democratic side, 81 voted yes and 108 voted no, in what amounts to a more divided reaction to the compromise Obama and Democratic leaders helped orchestrate.

On the Senate side, the bill passed even more easily, 81 to 19.

Notable ‘no’ voters included most of the House’s and Senate’s tea party-affiliated members, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), Dean Heller (R-Nev.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Mike Pence (R-Ind.), Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.), all of whom are eyeing or running for higher office.

Redistricting update: Arkansas and Oklahoma are both moving forward with redistricting maps that are unlikely to change much in their current delegations.

Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe (D) on Thursday signed into law a congressional redistricting plan that should have little impact on the current map. Meanwhile, Oklahoma’s congressional delegation has agreed on its own status quo plan, which sailed through a state House committee vote.

Though Democrats controlled the process in Arkansas, they chose not to overhaul the map, which could have given them a better chance at winning seats. Instead, a map that flipped from three Democrats and one Republican to one Democrat and three Republicans in November will remain largely the same.

That the Democrats chose not to be too ambitious with the map means they miss one of relatively few opportunities to add winnable districts. Arkansas is one of just three states where Republicans hold a majority of congressional seats but Democrats get to draw the lines. (At the same time, outside of Little Rock, it’s hard to find territory that isn’t conservative, so it’s not clear how Democrats could have done much better.)

In Oklahoma, Republicans control the process and could try to make things tough for Democratic Rep. Dan Boren, but Boren has held down a very conservative district for a while now, and Republicans in the delegation seemed happy to keep their four-to-one majority.

Fixbits:

Mitt Romney accuses Obama of demagoguery.

Obama thinks birtherism works in his favor.

Ohio state Treasurer Josh Mandel (R) is staffing up for a potential challenge to Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio).

Nebraska Attorney General Jon Brun ing (R) stands by his embattled fundraiser, onetime Warren Buffett heir apparent David Sokol. The Securities and Exchange Commission is reportedly looking into an insider trading probe of Sokol, but Bruning insists there is nothing criminal involved.

Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.) is set to endorse Romney for president.

Former Rep. Carol Shea-Porter (D-N.H.) is running for her old seat, which she lost to Rep. Frank Guinta (R) last year — setting up a second potential rematch in the Granite State. But she may face primary opposition from former state Senate president Maggie Hassan or DNC member Joanne Dowdell.

Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) raised $1.1 million in the first quarter and has $2.1 million in the bank.

Meanwhile, Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) raised $1.1 million and has $1.5 million on hand, significantly outraising his likely GOP opponent, Rehberg, who raised $580,000 million and had $933,000 on hand.

Bob Vander Plaats’s Iowa conservative group will decide this fall whether to endorse in the GOP presidential primary.

Must-reads:

“Independent groups expected to raise hundreds of millions” — Jessica Yellin and Kevin Bohn, CNN

“Trump’s a joke” — Charlie Cook, National Journal

“Census shows declining black population shares in U.S. metro areas, stirring redistricting fights” — AP

“Rumors of Democrats’ demise in the Senate are slightly exaggerated” — Nate Silver, New York Times

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The Obama 2012 message: No one’s perfect

President Barack Obama is running for re-election in 2012. Bradley C. Bower/Bloomberg President Obama may have launched his reelection campaign earlier this week but he and his aides have given little indication about the message on which that campaign will be based.

Read between the lines, however, the first faint traces of the message have begun to emerge.

The first clue came in the two-minute web video released by the campaign to coincide with Obama filing papers with the Federal Election Commission to allow him to raise money for a 2012 bid

“I don’t agree with Obama on everything,” says a man from North Carolina identified as “Ed”. “But I respect him and trust him.”

Then, in an energy-themed event in Philadelphia on Wednesday, Obama reiterated that sentiment — hearkening back to a line he used during the 2008 campaign.

“I said, ‘I am not a perfect man and I will not be a perfect president,’” Obama reminded the audience. “But I can promise you this: I will always tell you where I stand. I will be honest with you about the challenges we face and how we can solve these problems.”

The emergence — or re-emergence — of the “no one’s perfect” message suggests that the Obama campaign wants to do two things simultaneously heading into 2012: acknowledge that his first term had its fair share of bumps and play into the fact that, through it all, the American public still likes him.

Let’s take the second point first.

In a March Pew poll, 58 percent of people had a favorable impression of the President on a personal level while 39 percent had an unfavorable view of him. In that same survey his job approval rating was 51 percent while disapproval stood at 39 percent.

Those numbers are in keeping with a long-term trend for President Obama; his policies are often less popular than he is.

That reality gets us back to the first part of the Obama messaging strategy.

Knowing that he retains a considerable amount of personal goodwill among independents, the Obama campaign will try to leverage those positive feelings into a reelection argument that focuses more on the personal than the policy.

In many ways, that’s a return to the Obama messaging of 2008. Because he had a very limited record on which to run, Obama focused the campaign on the idea that he — and not any specific policy for which he advocated — was the key to transforming the wy Washington worked.

Of course, Obama now has a record he will need to run on and the 2010 election proved that some of his policies — the health care bill most especially — were not particularly popular with electorally critical independent voters. (Democrats lost independents by 19 points in 2010 after winning them by 18 points in the 2006 midterms.)

While the White House has continued to insist that the health care bill can be turned into a political positive by the time 2012 rolls around, the focus on Obama the person (and, left unsaid but not unimportant in this conversation, the historical figure) is an insurance policy of sorts for this White House.

Political independents, much less so than partisans, tend to not be all that motivated by a candidate’s specific positions on issues. What typically motivates them more are personal traits — does the candidate understand the problems of people like you, does he seem to have the country’s best interests at heart etc. And that sentiment is where Obama hopes to make political hay with the “not perfect but worth trusting” idea.

With 2012 almost certain to pull out both parties’ bases in equal fervor, independents will likely be the deciding factor in deciding whether Obama returns to the White House for a second term. It’s no surprise then that the early messaging of his re-election bid is focused squarely on that group.

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