The financial firepower that fueled the rise of a network of conservative advocacy groups now pummeling Democrats with television ads can be traced, in part, to Box 72465 in the Boulder Hills post office, on a desert road on the northern outskirts of Phoenix.

That’s the address for the Center to Protect Patient Rights, an organization with ties to Charles and David H. Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankroll a number of conservative organizations.

During the 2010 midterm election, the center sent more than $55 million to 26 GOP-allied groups, tax filings show, funding opaque outfits such as American Future Fund, 60 Plus and Americans for Job Security that were behind a coordinated campaign against Democratic congressional candidates.

In short, an excess of 20 percent of the voters flagged as “non-citizens” in Miami-Dade are, in fact, citizens. And the actual number may be much higher.

An analysis of the state-wide list by the Miami Herald found that “Hispanic, Democratic and independent-minded voters are the most likely to be targeted” as ineligible by the list. Conversely, “whites and Republicans are disproportionately the least-likely to face the threat of removal.”

Late last year, Scott ordered his Secretary of State, Kurt Browning, to “to identify and remove non-U.S. citizens from the voter rolls.” Browning could not access to reliable citizenship data. So election officials attempted to identify non-U.S. citizens by comparing data from the state motor vehicle administration with the voting file. That process produced a massive list of 182,000 names, which Browning considered unreliable and refused to release. Browning resigned in February and Scott pressed forward with the purge.

The Fair Elections Legal Network, which is challenging the purge, noted that database matching is “notoriously unreliable” and “data entry errors, similar-sounding names, and changing information can all produce false matches.” Further, some voters may have naturalized since their license information was collected.

At the height of the Iraq war in 2004, veterans gave President George W. Bush a 16-percentage-point edge over his Democratic rival. Four years later, Barack Obama trailed among the former military members by 10 percentage points.

But Mr. Obama’s campaign said it thinks his three and a half years as commander in chief have turned the tables on the issue, giving him a good chance at winning the veteran vote this year.

One of Mr. Obama’s first campaign ads — released just this week — was aimed directly at war-weary service members and their families.

“It’s because of what they’ve done that we’ve been able to go after al-Qaeda and kill Bin Laden,” Mr. Obama says in the ad. “And when they come home we have a sacred trust to make sure that we are doing everything we can to heal all of their wounds, giving them the opportunities that they deserve to find a job and get the education that they need.”

The ad is part of Mr. Obama’s efforts to capitalize on a very different profile than is typical for a Democratic president.

Having come into the White House on an antiwar platform, Mr. Obama nonetheless increased American involvement in Afghanistan even as he began drawing down troops in Iraq. Now, both wars are winding down — a
relief to many military members and their families.

In addition, Mr. Obama has embraced the use of drones to assassinate terrorist leaders. And he authorized the raid that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden.

“President Obama is committed to ensuring that all of our men and women who’ve served in uniform can find work when they return home, receive the health care and benefits they’ve earned and have the chance to get a college education through the post-9/11 G.I. Bill,” said Clo Ewing, a campaign spokeswoman.

Working in Mr. Obama’s favor may be the changing face of the American military, which is becoming younger and more diverse. Advisers to the president note that he actually won in 2008 among veterans who were under 60 years old.

The military is also changing in its attitudes toward social issues, the Obama campaign believes. Mr. Obama’s decision to end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban on gays serving openly will be a benefit, they say.

There is little recent polling to suggest how the two candidates are faring among veterans. But advisers to Mr. Romney scoff at the idea that Mr. Obama will steal away a traditional Republican advantage come Election Day. They argue that the president’s economic policies have been especially detrimental to veterans and their families.

Actually, before I get to that, let me take a moment to debunk a fairy tale that we’ve been hearing a lot from Wall Street and its reliable defenders — a tale in which the incredible damage runaway finance inflicted on the U.S. economy gets flushed down the memory hole, and financiers instead become the heroes who saved America.

Once upon a time, this fairy tale tells us, America was a land of lazy managers and slacker workers. Productivity languished, and American industry was fading away in the face of foreign competition.

Then square-jawed, tough-minded buyout kings like Mitt Romney and the fictional Gordon Gekko came to the rescue, imposing financial and work discipline. Sure, some people didn’t like it, and, sure, they made a lot of money for themselves along the way. But the result was a great economic revival, whose benefits trickled down to everyone.

You can see why Wall Street likes this story. But none of it — except the bit about the Gekkos and the Romneys making lots of money — is true.

For the alleged productivity surge never actually happened. In fact, overall business productivity in America grew faster in the postwar generation, an era in which banks were tightly regulated and private equity barely existed, than it has since our political system decided that greed was good.

What about international competition? We now think of America as a nation doomed to perpetual trade deficits, but it was not always thus. From the 1950s through the 1970s, we generally had more or less balanced trade, exporting about as much as we imported. The big trade deficits only started in the Reagan years, that is, during the era of runaway finance.

And what about that trickle-down? It never took place. There have been significant productivity gains these past three decades, although not on the scale that Wall Street’s self-serving legend would have you believe. However, only a small part of those gains got passed on to American workers.

So, no, financial wheeling and dealing did not do wonders for the American economy, and there are real questions about why, exactly, the wheeler-dealers have made so much money while generating such dubious results.

But he doesn’t seem that enamored with Mitt Romney either.

In an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program Wednesday morning, Mr. Powell, a Republican who did endorse Mr. Obama in 2008, despite having worked under President George W. Bush, chided Mr. Romney for listening to conservative foreign policy advisers.

Mr. Powell noted that Mr. Romney recently said that Russia was the “No. 1 geopolitical foe” of the United States.

“Well, c’mon Mitt, think. It isn’t the case,” Mr. Powell said. “I don’t know whether Mitt really feels that.”

Asked whether he thought Mr. Romney’s advisers told him to say that, Mr. Powell said: “I don’t know. You ask him.”

Mr. Powell said Mr. Romney’s comment had been “catching a lot of heck from the regular G.O.P. foreign affairs community.”

“We’re kind of taken aback by it,” he said. “Look at the world. There is no pure competitor to the United States of America.”

Earlier in the interview, Mr. Powell described Mr. Romney’s foreign policy advisers as “quite far to the right.’

“Sometimes, they, I think, might be in a position to make judgments or recommendations to the candidate that should get a second thought,” Mr. Powell said.

House Minority Leader, responding to an expected acceleration of John Boehner’s timeline on the Bush tax cuts, fired off a letter to the Speaker asking for immediate consideration of an extension of just the “low end” tax cuts – which include the Bush-era marginal rates for households making up to $1 million. This represents a shift in the dividing line for the Bush tax cuts, which has traditionally been at $250,000.

The Bush tax cuts at every level up to $1 million in annual income, in other words, are now framed as “middle-income tax cuts.” She says it right here in the letter:

Without further delay, the Majority Leadership should schedule a vote on extension of the middle-income tax cuts, as early as next week, to increase certainty for millions of American taxpayers and for the economy. We should not delay passing this legislation that will help afford all Americans the opportunity to reach their goals and realize the promise of the American Dream.

We must ask the very wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share. Democrats believe that tax cuts for those earning over a million dollars a year should expire and that we should use the resulting revenues to pay down the deficit.

First of all, if you make the dividing line at $1 million a year in annual income, there simply won’t be all that many revenues generated to pay down that deficit. When the dividing line was $250,000 a year, the revenue was around $800 billion over a ten-year period. I don’t have a strong grasp of what the numbers would be at $1 million, but my guess would be half that, if not more. So from a deficit reduction standpoint, this makes pretty much no sense.

Second of all, because of our marginal tax rate system, high-income earners at the $1 million
level would still benefit from all the tax cuts on the first $1 million of their income, which are substantial. In fact, you’d be giving hundreds of billions of dollars – whatever the difference is between letting the tax cuts expire at the $250,000 level and the $1 million level – entirely to well-off people.

Mr. Powell, a retired four-star general and Republican former secretary of state, praises Mr. Obama for having “stabilized the financial system.”

And Mr. Powell is supportive of the president’s Afghanistan policy.

Nearly four years after lending his military stature and his political prowess to Mr. Obama with a critical endorsement, Mr. Powell sounds happy with the result. And yet, he is not quite ready to endorse the president again.

“I don’t want to throw my weight behind somebody,” Mr. Powell said on NBC‘s “Today Show” on Tuesday morning. “I feel as I private citizen I ought to listen to what the president says and what the president’s been doing. But I also have to listen to what the other fellow says. I’ve known Mitt Romney for many years, good man.”

The decision by Mr. Powell could just be a gracious delay from a man who served President George W. Bush during wartime. He said on NBC that he does “owe the Republican Party some consideration.”

And if Mr. Powell decides to endorse Mr. Obama again, he might want to time the announcement to have more impact that it might in late May.

May 22 (Reuters) - ATLANTA - When he entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination in May 2011, Newt Gingrich was the prosperous head of a small empire commonly known as Newt Inc, which included both for-profit consultancies and nonprofit foundations. Altogether, these entwined ventures pulled in more than $110 million over the past decade. Now the vestiges of this empire are mired in debt, as is Gingrich’s campaign fund. A bankruptcy proceeding under way in Atlanta will determine whether the one company still owned by Callista Gingrich, Gingrich Productions, will lose an expected payout that now constitutes the bulk of the Gingriches’ net worth.

Despite the persistent gender gap in opinion polls and mounting criticism of their hostility to women’s rights, Republicans are not backing off their assault on women’s equality and well-being. New laws in some states could mean a death sentence for a pregnant woman who suffers a life-threatening condition. But the attack goes well beyond abortion, into birth control, access to health care, equal pay and domestic violence.

Republicans seem immune to criticism. In an angry speech last month, John Boehner, the House speaker, said claims that his party was damaging the welfare of women were “entirely created” by Democrats. Earlier, the Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, sneered that any suggestion of a G.O.P. “war on women” was as big a fiction as a “war on caterpillars.”

But just last Wednesday, Mr. Boehner refuted his own argument by ramming through the House a bill that seriously weakens the Violence Against Women Act. That followed the Republican push in Virginia and elsewhere to require medically unnecessary and physically invasive sonograms before an abortion, and Senate Republicans’ persistent blocking of a measure to better address the entrenched problem of sex-based wage discrimination.

On Capitol Hill and in state legislatures, Republicans are attacking women’s rights in four broad areas.

The chart above is from the invaluable people at Voteview, who use data on Congressional voting to measure political positions and polarizations. What it shows is what should be obvious, but much of the Beltway chattering class still refuses to acknowledge: there has been a huge increase in polarization, and it’s because Republicans have moved right, not because Democrats have moved left. (You want to look at the Northern Democrat line; the southern Democrats disappeared or became Republicans).

As I said, this is obvious; yet people who try to say this get frozen out of the discourse, even when — like Mann and Ornstein — they have heretofore been pundits in good standing. Instead, you’re supposed to wring your hands over partisanship in the abstract.

And when the attempt to turn this hand-wringing into actual political effort flops, you blame it on the false equivalency police!

The facts have a well-known anti-centrist bias.

Newt Gingrich closed down his campaign early this month with at least $4.8 million in debt, according to campaign records filed with the Federal Election Commission on Saturday.

Among the biggest debts Mr. Gingrich accumulated were $181,977 for public relations consulting, $165,000 for Web advertising, $1 million to Moby Dick Airways, a charter company, and over $466,370 for security services. Mr. Gingrich also owes himself $580,134 in travel expenses.

His campaign reported $100,000 in debts to Crimson Hexagon, a Massachusetts firm, for software licenses, but a notation indicates that the campaign is disputing those bills.

During April, with his campaign effectively over, Mr. Gingrich raised just $786,782. He ended the month with $806,950 in cash on hand.

Mr. Gingrich’s debt is significant against the roughly $23 million he raised over the course of a tumultuous Republican primary.

Senator John McCain, who refused to make President Obama’s association with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright an issue during his 2008 presidential campaign, repudiated a proposal by Republican strategists to “do exactly what John McCain would not let us do” — open an incendiary, racially tinged attack on the president.

Mr. McCain also shrugged off the slights against him in a proposal for the political ad campaign, which was brought to light by The New York Times.

“I don’t know whether to be offended or not,” Mr. McCain said with a smile. “It is what it is. Look, my life has moved on.”

He added that such third-party attacks are “a way for political operatives to continue to make money.”

The authors of the ad campaign, timed to rock the Democratic National Convention in September, asserted that “if the nation had seen that ad, they’d never have elected Barack Obama.”

But I wanted to make another point. If you scan through all the media attention Romney’s speech received, you are hard-pressed to find any news accounts that tell readers the following rather relevant points:

1) Nonpartisan experts believe Romney’s plans would increase the deficit far more than Obama’s would.

2) George W. Bush’s policies arguably are more responsible for increasing the deficit than Obama’s are.

Oh, sure, many of the news accounts contain the Obama campaign’s response to Romney’s speech; the Obama campaign put out a widely-reprinted statement arguing that Romney’s plans would increase the deficit and that he’d return to policies that created it in the first place.

But this shouldn’t be a matter of partisan opinion. On the first point, independent experts think an actual set of facts exists that can be used to determine what the impact of Romney’s policies on the deficit would be. And according to those experts, based on what we know now, Romney’s policies would explode the deficit far more than Obama’s would.

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has taken a close look at this question. It has determined that relative to current policy — that is, if you keep the Bush tax cuts in place, as Romney wants to do — Romney’s tax cutting plans would increase the deficit by nearly $5 trillion over 10 years. That’s on top of keeping the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Romney has promised to close various loopholes to pay for his tax cuts, but he hasn’t specified which ones. Until he does, the Tax Policy Center concludes, his plan would cost $5 trillion — which would be added, yes, to the deficit.

By contrast, Obama’s plans would not increase the deficit by anything close to that amount. Relative to current policy, the Tax Policy Center has found, Obama’s plan would reduce the deficit by approximately $2 trillion over the next decade. Now, under Obama, the deficit would still increase. That’s because current policy means we’re forgoing the $4.5 trillion in revenues we’d gain if we let all the Bush tax cuts expire. But neither candidate is going to do that. Obama, however, would end the Bush tax cuts for the rich and bring in revenues through a variety of other tax increases. Bottom line: relative to current policy, Obama’s plan would reduce the deficit by bringing in $180 billion or more in revenues a year, or approximately $2 trillion over 10 years; Romeny’s plan would increase the deficit by nearly $500 billion a year — $5 trillion over ten years.

Then they asked each member of the group how they would handle the defence budget if they were a member of Congress. They found

Presented the base national defense budget for 2012 and given the opportunity to set a level for 2013, three quarters reduced it, including two thirds of Republicans and 9 in 10 Democrats. On average defense spending was lowered 23%. A majority lowered it at least 11%.

When participants were asked to get more specific and propose changes to the levels of spending in nine areas, a majority cut all nine. “All areas combined were cut 18% on average, with Republicans cutting 12% and Democrats 22%,” the study notes. Most participants were surprised by the level of America’s defence spending when it was held up against the rest of the discretionary budget, historical levels of spending, and the defence spending of other nations. A previous poll showed similar results—support for defence cuts—when participants were informed about the comparable size of the 31 largest categories in the federal discretionary budget.

The potential cuts to the Pentagon contained in last year’s budget deal are actually less than those proposed by the PPC study group on average. So it may seem odd that America’s politicians are now scrambling to avoid those reductions. Instead, Republicans have proposed cuts to food stamps, Medicaid, social services and other programmes for poor Americans, while Democrats have proposed raising taxes on the rich. Few have pushed back against the military spendthrifts, who argue that America would swiftly decline were it to return to the level of funding George Bush laboured under at the end of his peaceable presidency.

The OpenSecrets blog of the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington says the Supreme Court ruling “allowed non-profit corporations under the Tax Code 501c to spend unlimited amounts of money running … political advertisements while not revealing their donors.” The blog said “conservative non-profit groups [have] spent $121 million without disclosing where the money came from.”

The blog ticks off other results of Citizens United.

“The percentage of spending coming from groups that do not disclose their donors has risen from 1 percent to 47 percent since the 2006 midterm elections.”

Spending by those secretive 501c non-profits “increased from zero percent of total spending by outside groups in 2006 to 42 percent in 2010.”

OpenSecrets said the “amount of independent expenditure and electioneering communication spending by outside groups has quadrupled since 2006.”

Meanwhile, 72 percent of “political advertising spending by outside groups in 2010 came from sources that were prohibited from spending money in 2006.”

The Center for Public Integrity, which is devoted to investigative journalism, reports 62 percent of the money raised by the two conservative groups “associated with former Bush adviser Karl Rove have come from mystery donors, a statistic that shows the increasingly important role being played by non-profits in a post-Citizens United political world.”

US Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul is to end active campaigning, a statement says, and will not campaign in states yet to hold primaries.

Battling on would require millions of dollars that the Ron Paul operation does not have, his campaign said.

But the Texas congressman will continue to try to win delegates awarded at forthcoming state conventions.

Mr Paul has 104 delegates, behind Mitt Romney’s 966, with 1,144 delegates needed to secure the nomination.

“We will no longer spend resources campaigning in primaries in states that have not yet voted. Doing so with any hope of success would take many tens of millions of dollars we simply do not have,” he said in a statement.

“In the coming days, my campaign leadership will lay out to you our delegate strategy and what you can do to help.”

Mr Paul is a libertarian-leaning Republican who has opposed the US Federal Reserve monetary system and US military engagement abroad.

The 76-year-old, a former obstetrician-gynaecologist, has a small base of staunch supporters and enjoys popularity among many younger voters.

In the 2012 election campaign, Mr Paul was consistently ranked in the middle of the pack, neither rising to challenge Mr Romney’s front-runner status nor trailing at the bottom of opinion polls.

I wrote earlier about the electoral implications of the defeat of longtime Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana in the Republican primary on Tuesday. It should make the seat much more competitive and will increase Democrats’ odds of retaining the Senate, although the nominee that Republicans chose instead, Richard E. Mourdock, the state treasurer, is perhaps a very slight favorite over the Democratic nominee Joe Donnelly.

The bigger story here, however, is that Mr. Lugar is the latest in a long line of relatively moderate Republican senators to meet an electoral demise. In fact, most moderate Republicans who served in the Senate just a few years ago will no longer be in the Congress when it meets again 2013. This is quite simple to illustrate.

I took the 55 Republican senators that served in the 109th Congress from 2005 through 2007 and divided them into two groups, moderates and conservatives, according to their voting records as analyzed by the statistical system DW-Nominate. Because there were an odd number of Republican senators in that year, I could not divide them exactly evenly, but I put 27 in the moderate group and 28 in the conservative group, with the dividing line falling between Senator John McCain of Arizona and Senator John Thune of South Dakota.

Of the 27 moderates, at most six will return to the Congress in 2013: Mr. McCain, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Thad Cochran of Mississippi, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Charles E. Grassley of Iowa.

Richard G. Lugar , a six-term Republican senator from Indiana, lost his bid to stay in office after his Tea Party -backed rival questioned his conservative credentials and accused Mr. Lugar of losing touch with Indiana and its voters.

Richard E. Mourdock, the state’s treasurer, defeated Mr. Lugar in the Republican primary on Tuesday, according to networks and The Associated Press. Mr. Mourdock will face Joe Donnelly, a Democratic member of the House, in November.

The results of the primary end the career of one of the longest-serving members of the Senate and provide a new trophy for the Tea Party movement. Mr. Lugar, 80, leaves after three decades as one of the chamber’s leading foreign policy experts and with a reputation as a voice of moderation in his party.

That reputation — and a sense among his constituents that he had long ago become a creature of Washington — doomed Mr. Lugar, who had not faced a primary challenger in more than a quarter-century.

Mr. Mourdock repeatedly accused Mr. Lugar of not being conservative enough for Indiana. He pointed to Mr. Lugar’s votes to confirm President Obama ’s Supreme Court nominees, support for immigration legislation known as the Dream Act and his backing of bank bailouts during the economic crisis.

Conservative organizations with connections to the Tea Party movement flocked to Mr. Mourdock, hoping to add to the list of moderate senators they had helped to oust over the past several years. (Bob Bennett, Republican of Utah, and Lisa Murkowski , Republican of Alaska, both lost primary battles to Tea Party candidates, though Ms. Murkowski ran as an independent and kept her seat.)

But Mr. Mourdock also benefited from the perception that Mr. Lugar had long ago abandoned Indiana for a life in Washington. The senator and his wife live in suburban Washington, having sold their house in Indiana years ago.

Mitt Romney often finds himself on the defensive in Rust Belt states for having been against the auto industry bailout, which many credit with saving the industry. Now, he is taking a new tack on the sensitive issue: he’s taking credit for the industry’s rebound.

Though Mr. Romney’s closest aides acknowledge that he is politically vulnerable over his opposition to the government bailout — immortalized in a New York Times op-ed in 2008 titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” — Mr. Romney on Monday told WEWS-TV in Cleveland that he deserved some praise for the auto industry’s recovery. (In fact, that headline was written by the paper, not Mr. Romney, who originally submitted the piece as, “The Way Forward for the Auto Industry.”)

“I’ll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry’s come back,” Mr. Romney told the local news station after a campaign event in Euclid, Ohio.

In opposing the bailout, Mr. Romney instead lobbied for a process of “managed bankruptcy,” which he said would have allowed the car companies to restructure and emerge stronger than before.

“My own view is that the auto companies needed to go through bankruptcy before government help,” Mr. Romney said. “And frankly, that’s finally what the president did. He finally took them through bankruptcy.”

The federal government eventually did help the companies restructure through bankruptcy, but only after providing billions of dollars in loans.

Mr. Romney’s opposition to the auto industry bailout presents a challenge to his hopes of winning Michigan, his native state, in November. While campaigning in Lansing on Tuesday, he did not mention the bailout at all, though he made sure to talk about his plans to “help usher in a revival in American manufacturing.”

Rick Santorum told his supporters in an e-mail Monday night that he was endorsing Mitt Romney as the Republican presidential candidate and that “all hands on deck” would be needed to defeat President Obama in the fall.

Mr. Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania who dropped his bid for the Republican presidential nomination last month after making a strong showing in multiple states, said he met privately with Mr. Romney in Pittsburgh last Friday.

During that hour-long meeting, Mr. Santorum said that he felt a responsibility to assess Mr. Romney’s commitment to issues that are important to social conservatives and tea party supporters, among others. He said he also wanted a commitment from Mr. Romney, assuring him that there would be “appropriate representation” of conservatives in a Romney administration.

He said they also discussed the role of the family in the country’s economic success. “I was impressed with the Governor’s deep understanding of this connection and his commitment to economic policies that preserve and strengthen families,” Mr. Santorum said.

Mr. Santorum noted that he had repeatedly raised concerns during the Republican primary fight over whether Mr. Romney would take on Mr. Obama’s health care policy. However, in the e-mail, he told his supporters that he had no doubt that Mr. Romney would work with a Republican Congress to repeal it and replace it.

“Above all else, we both agree that President Obama must be defeated,” Mr. Santorum said. “The task will not be easy. It will require all hands on deck if our nominee is to be victorious. Governor Romney will be that nominee and he has my endorsement and support to win this the most critical election of our lifetime.”

He closed by saying that while his conversation with Mr. Romney was productive, he intended to keep the lines of “communication open with him and his campaign.”

Despite Mr. Santorum’s praise for Mr. Romney in his endorsement, the Democratic National Committee was trying to make sure that people did not forget all the unkind things he said about his fellow Republican during the campaign that were captured on video.

EUCLID, Ohio — At a town hall Monday afternoon, Mitt Romney at first did not offer a public rebuke to a female supporter who stood and said that President Obama “should be tried for treason,” but he later clarified to reporters on the rope line that he did not agree with the woman’s remarks.

“We have a president right now who is operating outside the construction of our Constitution,” Mr. Romney’s supporter said aloud at the campaign event at Stamco Industries, an engineering and metal-stamping plant in Euclid, a suburb of Cleveland. “And I do agree he should be tried for treason. But I want to know what you are going to be able to do to help restore balance between the three branches of government and what you’re going to be able to do to restore our Constitution in this country?”

“As I’m sure you do, I happen to believe that the Constitution was not just brilliant, but probably inspired,” Mr. Romney said, sidestepping the woman’s comments about treason, a crime still punishable by death in the United States. Mr. Romney also allowed the woman a follow-up question.

Later, when specifically asked by reporters if he agreed with the woman’s assertion, Mr. Romney clarified that he did not believe Mr. Obama should be charged with treason.

“No, no, no, of course not,” Mr. Romney told reporters, vigorously shaking his head, when asked on the rope line after the event if he agreed with his supporter’s assertion that the president should be tried for treason.

Explaining his reluctance to correct the woman publicly, Mr. Romney told CNN: “I don’t correct all of the questions that get asked of me. Obviously I don’t agree that he should be tried.”

In 2008, Senator John McCain of Arizona famously corrected a voter at one of his town halls who stood up and declared that she could not trust Mr. Obama, who she called “an Arab.”

“No, ma’am,” Mr. McCain said at the time, taking the microphone away from the questioner. “He’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about.”

Mr. McCain’s comments, which occurred during a period of increasing heated oratory during the 2008 campaign, were largely heralded as an example of courage on his part, and were even reprised in the HBO movie “Game Change.”

A Romney spokesman at the event had no immediate comment as to why Mr. Romney did not choose to correct the inflammatory statement during the town hall, and the presumptive Republican nominee’s campaign did not offer a comment beyond what was said on the rope line. The Obama campaign, however, criticized Mr. Romney’s in-the-moment silence.

Saying pleasant things about one's political adversary who just a few short weeks earlier was ripping you apart as you returned the favor might be the accepted thing for the ultimate victor in a contest to do in politics. But Smith was clearly in no mood for it.

According to sources familiar with the situation, Grenell decided to resign after being kept under wraps during a time when national security issues, including the president’s ad concerning Osama bin Laden, had emerged front and center in the campaign.

Pieces in two conservative publications, the National Review and Daily Caller , reflected the uproar by some social conservatives over the appointment.

In the National Review, Matthew J. Franck wrote late last week: “Suppose Barack Obama comes out — as Grenell wishes he would — in favor of same-sex marriage in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. How fast and how publicly will Richard Grenell decamp from Romney to Obama?”

The argument that Grenell could essentially not be openly gay and serve on a GOP presidential campaign was belied by the fact that Grenell has been a loyal Republican for many years, working for esteemed foreign policy figures including former Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton.

The ongoing pressure from social conservatives over his appointment and the reluctance of the Romney campaign to send Grenell out as a spokesman while controversy swirled left Grenell essentially with no job. The Romney camp has not responded to my request for comment.

Mitt Romney hasn’t appreciated the fact that President Obama’s campaign released a new video pointing out that Romney said in 2007 that he would not order military action similar to the one Obama ordered that ended up killing Osama bin Laden.

Romney now says that “of course ” he would have done what Obama did. “Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order,” he said yesterday. And this morning during an interview with Charlie Rose on CBS, Romney reiterated that sentiment. “Of course I would have,” he said, “any thinking American would have ordered exactly the same thing.”

Apparently some of Obama’s top advisers don’t fit into the “thinking American” category. Vice President Joe Biden said in January that he advised the president against the raid. “Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go. We have to do two more things to see if he’s there,’” Biden recalled. Biden added that “every single person in the room” expressed reservations about going forward with the raid, “except Leon Panetta.”

Obama’s top counterterror adviser John Brennen, in an interview to be aired this Sunday, confirmed Biden’s account . “It was a divided room as far as, you know, some of the principal sentiments on this issue were concerned,” he said.

The New Yorker reported last August that Obama’s “military advisers were divided” and “Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense, was one of the most outspoken opponents of a helicopter assault,” recalling President Carter’s failed attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980.

When Charlie Rose pointed this out to Romney this morning, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee stuck to his talking points:

ROMNEY: Well you can look at the different military options but clearly if you’ve identified where Osama bin Laden is , the United States of America is going to take action, capture him or kill him. And that was the right action to be taken, that was the right course to be taken. We haven’t heard all the different military options there were .

Watch the clip:

It seems that Romney hasn’t been paying much attention to reports on the bin Laden raid. In fact, U.S. intelligence had not “identified” bin Laden, as Romney claimed. “My worry was the level of uncertainty about whether bin Laden was even in the compound,” Gates said in an interview with 60 Minutes. “There wasn`t any direct evidence that he was there. It was all circumstantial.”

Moreover, while it’s possible that “we haven’t heard all the different military options there were” for the bin Laden raid, as Romney also said, various reports have outlined a number of courses of action Obama could have taken. “Most were variations of either a JSOC raid or an airstrike. Some versions included cooperating with the Pakistani military; some did not,” the New Yorker reported .

“We are disappointed that Ric decided to resign from the campaign for his own personal reasons,” Matt Rhoades, the Romney campaign manager, said in a statement. “We wanted him to stay because he had superior qualifications for the position he was hired to fill.”

Mr. Grenell served four American ambassadors to the United Nations during the presidency of George W. Bush. But his selection had been sharply criticized by some social conservatives soon after he was named less than two weeks ago as Mr. Romney’s campaign spokesman for national security issues. In addition to concerns from some in the party about his sexual orientation, Mr. Grenell had been criticized for sometimes caustic Twitter posts about women including Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC host, and Callista Gingrich, the wife of Newt Gingrich.

In a statement to Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post columnist who first reported the resignation, Mr. Grenell said: “While I welcomed the challenge to confront President Obama’s foreign policy failures and weak leadership on the world stage, my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyperpartisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign. I want to thank Governor Romney for his belief in me and my abilities and his clear message to me that being openly gay was a non-issue for him and his team.”

A openly gay spokesman for presidential candidate Mitt Romney has resigned on his first official day of work, amid criticism by anti-gay conservatives.

Richard Grenell, recently hired to speak on foreign affairs for the presumptive Republican nominee, announced his departure on Tuesday.

In a statement, Mr Grenell thanked Mr Romney for “his belief in me”.

The spokesman had previously deleted about 800 tweets and took down his personal website.

According to the Washington Post Mr Grenell had come under fire for statements about Callista Gingrich and Michelle Obama.

The Romney campaign said it was “disappointed” that Mr Grenell had resigned.

“We wanted him to stay because he had superior qualifications for the position he was hired to fill,” Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades said in a statement.

For the Romney campaign, however, a paucity of small-dollar donations is inauspicious not because it means that it will have trouble raising enough money (it probably won’t, and if it does, Mr. Romney has considerable personal wealth at his disposal). Rather, a lack of small-dollar donors could indicate tepid support for Mr. Romney among the Republican base.

Research by Adam Bonica of the political science department at Stanford University suggests that small donations tend to come from the wings of the ideological spectrum. For Mr. Romney, donations of less than $200 would most likely come from the most conservative camp in the Republican Party, a group that resisted his candidacy throughout the nominating process.

“In the primaries, there were a lot of small donors, but they weren’t giving to Romney,” Professor Bonica said. “I think it does have something to do with Romney being perceived to be more moderate.”

The Romney campaign’s continuing dearth of small-dollar contributions suggests that very conservative voters, like those who supported Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, have yet to warm completely to Mr. Romney, which could potentially mean not only less money but also fewer lawn signs and bumper stickers, fewer volunteers and, ultimately, fewer votes.

It is too early to call the problem chronic. The Republican primary was only recently resolved. Mr. Gingrich is expected to drop out of the race officially on Wednesday. Mr. Gingrich, as well as Mr. Santorum and Michele Bachmann, who appealed to more conservative voters, will presumably endorse Mr. Romney eventually. And at that point, conservative Republicans may begin coalescing around Mr. Romney in earnest, enabling his campaign to construct a robust small-donor network.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science ; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization . Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.

It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct.

The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency, it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.

What happened? Of course, there were larger forces at work beyond the realignment of the South. They included the mobilization of social conservatives after the 1973Roe v. Wade decision, the anti-tax movement launched in 1978 by California’s Proposition 13, the rise of conservative talk radio after a congressional pay raise in 1989, and the emergence of Fox News and right-wing blogs. But the real move to the bedrock right starts with two names: Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist .

The Republican National Committee officially embraced Mitt Romney as the party’s presumptive nominee on Wednesday morning after Mr. Romney claimed his new title in an energetic speech Tuesday night.

Reince R. Priebus, the chairman of the committee, said in a statement sent out early Wednesday morning that the party organization and its resources were now at the disposal of Mr. Romney’s campaign.

“Governor Romney’s strong performance and delegate count at this stage of the primary process has made him our party’s presumptive nominee,” Mr. Priebus said. “In order to maximize our efforts I have directed my staff at the R.N.C. to open lines of communication with the Romney campaign.”

The statement ends the committee’s neutral role in the Republican primaries despite the fact that Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and Representative Ron Paul of Texas, are still, technically, in the race to be the nominee.

But officials at the committee said that it became clear — if not technically official — that Mr. Romney would be the nominee after he swept five large primaries Tuesday night.

Officials said the shift, which was planned with top aides in Mr. Romney’s Boston headquarters, will lead to what they called a “full synchronization of both operations,” with the goal of making the most of the resources in both places.

Brian Jones, a veteran Republican strategist who has worked on several presidential campaigns, will be the chief liaison between the campaign and the committee and will split his time between Washington and Boston, said Sean Spicer, a spokesman for the committee. Mr. Jones, a former committee staff member, is very close to Matt Rhoades, Mr. Romney’s campaign manager, and has been advising the campaign for several months.

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is expected to suspend his campaign next week, US media report.

The former House Speaker said on Wednesday that he expected Mitt Romney, who won five primaries on Tuesday, to be the Republican nominee.

The Gingrich campaign had said it would reassess its future if he did not win the contest in Delaware.

He has won only two primaries - South Carolina and Georgia - since the election season began in January.

Mr Gingrich will reportedly hold his last campaign event on 1 May in Washington DC.

Odds are, in other words, that if Obama wins, he will still be negotiating with Republican leaders in Congress. But the same can’t be said for Mitt Romney.

If Romney wins the election, it’s almost a sure bet that Republicans win control of both the House and the Senate. And that matters. Right now, the GOP’s agenda is the Ryan budget, and that’s entirely fiscal: It’s a premium support plan for Medicare, and tax cuts, and deep cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and other domestic programs. All that can be passed through budget reconciliation — which is to say, all that can be made immune to the filibuster.

So if Romney wins and the Republicans take control, they could accomplish quite a lot on party-line votes, even if their majorities are slim, and Democrats are opposed. Indeed, Romney could end up being a fairly transformational president for conservatives so long as he’s paired with a Republican Congress.

Mitt Romney vowed to oust Barack Obama and build “a better America”

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has vowed to take the White House from President Barack Obama and end four years of “disappointments”.

Speaking while racking up a series of primary night victories, he said a “new campaign” was beginning.

“Hold on a little longer. A better America begins tonight,” he said.

The presumptive Republican nominee easily won primaries in Connecticut, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

As the results began to come in on a night with the most electoral delegates at stake since Super Tuesday, Mr Romney took the stage in New Hampshire, the site of his first primary win of the year.

He focused on the forthcoming general election campaign, saying America needed a new direction and a renewal of its greatness.

“Tonight is the start of a new campaign to unite every American who knows in their heart that we can do better,” he said.

Five-term Representative Tim Holden of Pennsylvania was defeated in a Democratic primary on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, losing to Matt Cartwright, a lawyer, who made Mr. Holden’s vote against President Obama’s health care law a major issue in the newly redrawn 17th District.

Mr. Holden, who is part of the Blue Dog Coalition of conservative Democrats, would become the second incumbent to lose to a newcomer in a House primary this season. This year, Representative Jean Schmidt, Republican of Ohio, was also defeated by a member of her own party . In both cases, the anti-incumbent “super PAC” Campaign for Primary Accountability has worked against the defeated House member.

In Mr. Holden’s case, the liberal League of Conservation Voters and MoveOn.org also piled on, taking advantage of a new district drawn by Republican legislators that is considerably more Democratic than Mr. Holden’s old seat. Center Forward, a group that is pro-Blue Dog Democrat, tried to bail out Mr. Holden with an advertisement last week attacking Mr. Cartwright. Mr. Holden himself had tried to portray his opponent as a corrupt lawyer wrapped up in a pay-to-play judicial scandal.

But ultimately, Mr. Cartwright’s own money may have made the biggest difference in a district where most Democratic voters had never been represented by Mr. Holden. Mr. Cartwright also hit Mr. Holden for voting with Republicans on some energy policies.

The incumbent was one of only 25 remaining Blue Dogs, whose ranks were decimated in the Republican surge of 2010 that wiped out most Democrats in Republican-leaning districts.

In the chart below, I’ve run these comparisons for all major-party vice presidential nominees since 1920. We compare the ticket’s R.V.I. in the year the vice presidential candidate was on the ticket to the next and previous election cycles in which he was not on the ticket and when there was also no one else from his state running for president or vice president.

For instance, in looking at the R.V.I. for the Democratic nominee for vice president in 1992, Al Gore, the comparison years are 1988 (when Mr. Gore was not on the ticket, and nobody else from Tennessee was) and 2004 (since Mr. Gore was again the vice presidential nominee in 1996 and was the presidential nominee in 2000, disqualifying those years). There are also a few cases in which there were multiple candidates on the ticket in the same state in the same year. Richard Nixon’s vice presidential nominee in 1960, for instance, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., was from Massachusetts, the same state as the Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kennedy. We simply throw out these years, since Mr. Lodge’s performance might have been more a reflection of Kennedy’s strength in Massachusetts than his own strengths and weaknesses.

Over all, the benefit provided by a vice presidential nominee has been quite paltry under this method. On average since 1920, he has produced a net gain of only about two percentage points for the top of the ticket in his home state.

Mitt Romney circled back at the end of a brief news conference Monday afternoon to clarify an issue he had failed to mention before: his support of a temporary extension of a low interest rate on federal student loans, which President Obama also favors .

“There’s one thing I want to mention that I forgot to mention at the very beginning, and that was that particularly with the mention of the number of college graduates that can’t find work or that can only find work well beneath their skill level, I fully support the effort to extend the low interest rate on student loans,” Mr. Romney said. “There was some concern that that would expire halfway through the year, and I support extending the temporary relief on interest rates for students as a result of – as a result of student loans, obviously – in part because of the extraordinarily poor conditions in the job market.”

Though House Republicans oppose such an extension, Mr. Obama has been urging Congress to extend the existing interest rate on federal student loans. If Congress fails to act, the interest rate on the loans, which are taken out by nearly eight million students each year, will double on July 1, to 6.8 percent.

The Egyptian government has refused to license eight US civil society groups, including the election-monitoring Carter Centre, MENA the state news media reported.

The crackdown on foreign non-governmental organizations working in Egypt comes a month before presidential polls.

MENA said the Insurance and Social Affairs Ministry rejected the applications because their activities violated “the state’s sovereignty on its lands”.

The eight NGOs include the Carter Center, Seeds of Peace, Coptic Orphans, the Latter-day Saints Association and others.

Former Republican candidate Jon Huntsman took a battle axe to his own party, comparing it to China's Communist Party and criticizing it's standard bearer in a wide-ranging interview at the 92nd Street Y Sunday night.
Recounting his first experience on the presidential debate stage in Iowa last August, Huntsman says he was struck by the question "Is this the best we could do?"
Huntsman, the former Utah governor and once President Barack Obama's Ambassador to China, expressed disappointment that the Republican Party disinvited him from a Florida fundraiser in March after he publicly called for a third party.
"This is what they do in China on party matters if you talk off script," he said.
Huntsman said he regrets his decision to oppose a 10-to-1 spending cuts to tax increase deal to cut the deficit at the Iowa debate lamenting: “if you can only do certain things over again in life.”
"What went through my head was if I veer at all from my pledge not to raise any taxes…then I’m going to have to do a lot of explaining," he explained. "What was going through my mind was 'don't I just want to get through this?'"
That decision, Huntsman said, "has caused me a lot of heartburn.”
Huntsman jokingly blamed his failed candidacy in part on his wife, Mary Kaye, who told him she'd leave him if he abandoned his principles.
“She said if you pandered, if you sign any of those damn pledges, I’ll leave you,” Huntsman recounted.
"So I had to say I believe in science — and people on stage look at you quizzically as though you're was an oddball," Huntsman said, explaining why he was "toast" in Iowa.
Asked by journalist Jeff Greenfield if he could win the nomination of the Republican Party in Utah today, Huntsman said he could not, saying later that Ronald Reagan would "likely not" be able to win the GOP nomination nationally in this political climate.
On foreign policy, Huntsman questioned his former Republican opponents' hard-line positions on China. "I don’t know what world these people are living in," he said, not naming Mitt Romney by name.
Though he categorically ruled out being Romney's running mate, Huntsman stood by his tepid endorsement of Romney, saying he would manage legislation through Congress more effectively.
But Huntsman said Romney has to campaign on more than fear, and provide a positive alternative to Obama.
“He’ll have to work hard on making sure that happens,” he said.

Mitt Romney is facing a severe crisis of popularity.

He has the weakest favorability ratings on record for a presumptive presidential nominee at this stage of the campaign, according to new polling by ABC News and The Washington Post . The organizations have been measuring such popularity since 1984.

Mr. Romney is in a situation that pollsters call “underwater”: more people view him negatively than view him positively. His favorable rating is 35 percent, and his unfavorable rating stands at 47 percent.

He was the first nominee to be underwater in the Washington Post/ABC News poll in the eight presidential primary seasons it has been surveying the subject, the poll said. The pollsters attributed the results in part on the Republican primary process, which Americans viewed negatively overall, and on Mr. Romney’s unpopularity among women.

President Obama, by contrast, is more popular than he is unpopular: 56 percent viewed him positively, while 40 percent of those polled viewed him negatively.

Mr. Obama is more popular than he has been for two years, which the pollsters ascribed to the improving economy.

So long, flip-flopper. Hello, right-wing extremist.

Mitt Romney may be inclined to start moving to the political center now that he’s practically got the Republican nomination won and done, but the Obama campaign would much rather keep him right where he’s been for the past few months: in the conservative territory he staked out while battling for Republican primary voters.

After months of depicting Mr. Romney as the ultimate squishy, double-talking, no-core soul, Team Obama is shifting gears. Senior administration officials, along with Democratic and campaign officials, all say their strategy now will be to tell the world that Mr. Romney has a core after all — and it’s deep red.

Mr. Romney’s overheard remarks at a fund-raiser in Florida on Sunday night that, if elected, he planned to slash government programs (though he has not spelled that out for the voters) gave Obama backers the perfect opening, and they jumped on it. “Mitt Romney Tells Rich Voters His Secret Plan to Cut Housing Assistance,” said a headline from ThinkProgress , a blog put out by the left-leaning Center for American Progress. Democratic officials followed that up with a call to reporters on Thursday charging that Mr. Romney’s proposal would “cut critical funds for homeless veterans.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama’s advisers saw another chance, and they were all over that, too. Hours after Mr. Romney accepted the endorsement of Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, the Democratic National Committee was out with an ad “Mitt Romney and Tom Corbett: Too Extreme for Women.” The traditional spooky music accompanies video of Mr. Corbett defending his advocacy of a proposal that could make women undergo ultrasounds before receiving abortions, and saying women could “close their eyes” if they didn’t want to see what was on the screen.

“Did Mitt Romney close his eyes to accept this endorsement?” the D.N.C. said in an e-mail it helpfully sent to reporters trumpeting the advertisement. “Probably not, since Mitt Romney’s positions mirror those of the extreme elements of his party,” the e-mail continued, going on to list a host of conservative Romney positions that Democrats hope will alienate women.

For Mr. Obama, the decision to start going after Mr. Romney from the left is as much a logical evolution as is any attempt by Mr. Romney to move to the center, in particular Mr. Romney’s effort now to try to woo Hispanic and female voters who may have been alienated by some of the talk coming out of the Republican primary.

As the general election heats up, a central battlefield promises to be the fights for suburban women in crucial swing states like Florida, Ohio and Colorado, and both camps are now trying to prove their bona fides with that population. When added to recent data that shows an increase in Hispanic voters in key states, the Obama campaign sees an opening to paint Mr. Romney as out of touch among both women and Hispanics.

John Edwards , whose personal life and political career have publicly fallen apart over the last five years, will face a federal jury on Monday in the state that sent him to the Senate and twice rallied around his quest for the presidency.

Mr. Edwards stands accused of misusing campaign money to hide both an affair with a former campaign videographer and the child they conceived as he made his run for the 2008 Democratic nomination for president.

The trial in nearby Greensboro, which Judge Catherine C. Eagles of Federal District Court expects to take six weeks, promises to continue the long story of Mr. Edwards’s derailed career and scarred personal life.

But for the government, the case goes beyond the messiness of an affair that Mr. Edwards repeatedly denied, even as his wife, Elizabeth, was suffering from the cancer that eventually took her life in 2010.

Prosecutors have been unyielding in their pursuit of a case that they say represents a clear and flagrant misuse of $925,000 that they argue was used to try to influence the outcome of the election. If he is convicted on all six counts, Mr. Edwards, 58, faces up to 30 years in prison and $1.5 million in fines.

The government’s case is simple: Mr. Edwards knowingly accepted the money from two wealthy donors and used it to keep information from the public that would have surely torpedoed his presidential campaign. Thus, the money was a campaign contribution and its use a conspiracy.

Mr. Edwards’s legal team rejects that argument entirely: the money was a gift from two friends and was intended to help a candidate they believed in deal with a personal problem. Mr. Edwards, his lawyers say, was not aware of the donations.

They will try to characterize the case as being politically motivated. It began under the tenure of George Holding, a Republican appointee of President George W. Bush who stayed on as a United States attorney under the Obama administration to bring the case to trial.

Mr. Holding had long been politically hostile to Mr. Edwards, the defense lawyers say, and hoped the case would help his political ambitions. Mr. Holding retired last year, a month after securing Mr. Edward’s indictments, and then announced he was running for Congress in 2012.

But some political strategists dismiss the defense’s theory as mere posturing. The case has little political relevance, they say, especially so long after the alleged crimes were committed.

As long as Newt Gingrich stays in the presidential race, he is still receiving Secret Service protection — at a cost of more than $40,000 a day.

Mr. Gingrich has no intention of dropping out of the race or of asking the Secret Service to drop its detail, his campaign spokesman said on Friday, despite calls from a taxpayer group that the protection is a waste of money.

The issue bubbled up this week after The Daily Caller , an online news site, dug up Congressional testimony from 2008 in which Mark Sullivan, director of the Secret Service, estimated the cost of daily protection for a presidential candidate at $38,000. He said then that he expected the cost to rise to $44,000 a day.

The Utah Republican convention is going to a second ballot, to determine whether six-term Sen. Orrin Hatch will be renominated outright today, or if he will face a primary in June against former state Sen. Liljenquist.

Out of over 3,900 delegates in attendance on Saturday, Hatch received 57.2 percent of the vote on the first ballot, the state GOP announced, to Liljenquist’s 28.8 percent. All eight other candidates have been eliminated — even if their supporters combined together, they would not be able to overtake Liljenquist.

Hatch and Liljenquist will now compete again on a second ballot, in a one-on-one match. The level of support needed to win outright is 60 percent of the vote, at which point there would not be a primary.

At the state GOP convention two years ago, incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett came in third place, and was eliminated without the chance to compete in a primary.

Members of the Republican National Committee considered — and rejected — changes to their presidential nominating process for 2016 after a contest this year that some members say was too long and drawn out.

At a meeting here of the R.N.C.’s rules committee, members debated whether to abandon the proportional voting that gave Mitt Romney’s rivals the ability to try and accumulate delegates even as they failed to win the nominating contests.

Sue Everhart, a committee member from Georgia, proposed the change, citing concerns about the length of the competition. She suggested changes that would have allowed states to hold winner-take-all contests in 2016, potentially bringing the contest to a close more quickly.

But several members spoke in opposition to her proposal, saying the current process gives more voters an opportunity to participate in the nomination by creating a lengthier process.

“The thought has been for 20 years to try to create a process which keeps us from having a one-day primary in which you have the man on the white horse winning and then you wake up with buyer’s remorse,” said John Ryder, a committee member from Tennessee.

Morton Blackwell, a member from Virginia, also opposed the change. He said that the longer process, made possible by proportional voting, made it possible for more states to consider the candidates.

“We have had a full vetting as a result of the rules,” Mr. Blackwell said.

A change in the rules at Thursday’s meeting would have been a recommendation only; the power to change the presidential selection process for 2016 rests with the Republican National Convention in Tampa later this year.

But the quick rejection of the proposed change suggests that many in the party are happy with a process that offered many Republican candidates a shot at being the front-runner during a months-long competition.

Mitt Romney will deliver the commencement address at Liberty University, the evangelical institution founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg, Va.

Mr. Romney’s campaign said the university invited him to speak to the approximately 48,000 people expected to attend the graduation ceremony on May 12.

Virginia is a swing state, but for Mr. Romney, this invitation offers a chance to shore up one of his weaknesses within his base, as many evangelicals remain wary of his Mormon faith.

Jerry Falwell Jr., the university’s chancellor, said in a statement that “we are delighted” that Mr. Romney would be speaking, and he compared the visit to those of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the elder George Bush in 1990. However, the decision has already sparked controversy among students and alumni of Liberty University, with nearly 300 people commenting on the institution’s Facebook announcement within two hours of its posting.

“I am so disappointed in my university for their choice in commencement speaker Romney. You have lost a potential grad student,” wrote Paige Farmer. “It is shameful that you would allow him a stage for political gain. What could a Mormon possibly have to share with Christians?”

Others, like Josh Phares, who is graduating this year, took a different view: “All of us can learn something from this man, regardless of his faith. In life you are going to be surrounded by different people from different backgrounds and religions. Learn to embrace it!”

Students at Regent University, founded by the Rev. Pat Robertson, reacted similarly to news that Mr. Romney would deliver the commencement address in 2007. He spoke about conservative ideas, but not his faith.

Mitt Romney has made Afghanistan a showcase for his attacks on President Obama’s foreign policy. He says Mr. Obama has undercut American interests by setting timetables for withdrawing troops, providing the Taliban — who displayed their resilience with attacks over the weekend — further reason to wait things out. He called Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta “misguided and so naïve” for announcing plans to hand over primary combat responsibilities to Afghan forces next year and leave American troops mainly in training and other roles.

But despite the tough critique, Mr. Romney has loosely embraced the main thrust of White House policy for troop levels after the election: a timetable for pulling out nearly all troops by the end of 2014.

Now that Mr. Romney has emerged as the likely Republican nominee and Afghanistan is again being tested by a Taliban offensive, his position on the war is likely to come under more scrutiny after a primary fight that gave him few opportunities to offer nuanced national security positions. Even so, analysts say he has reasons to be less than precise on Afghanistan: The war’s declining support among voters means there is little space for him to stake out a policy that provides both a sharp political contrast with Mr. Obama and keeps the war’s unpopularity at a distance.

“He doesn’t want to own this war in the event he gets elected, but by the same token he can’t look like he’s advocating a precipitous withdrawal for all sorts of reasons, including alienating the Republican base, and yet he cannot take the same position as the president,” said Stephen Biddle, a military expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s difficult to square the circle and meet all those constraints at the same time.”

And domestic politics are only one tricky element. There are serious doubts that the broadly hoped-for exit strategy of both parties — that Afghan forces can progress to where they can keep the Taliban at bay with limited assistance by 2014 — will materialize that quickly, if at all.

The most sensible takeaways, I think, are as follows:

1) Mr. Romney’s mediocre favorability ratings at this early stage of the race are no death sentence. There have been clear reversals in favorability ratings in the recent past once the general election campaign got under way, such as in 1988 and 1992. At least one recent candidate (Mr. Clinton in 1992) won his election with similarly mediocre early favorability ratings. With that said, it would be foolish to suggest that this makes no difference at all. Mr. Romney would prefer to have a positive rating than a negative one. For that matter, Mr. Obama would prefer to have a clearly positive favorability rating than break-even numbers.

2) The favorability deficit between Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama is more likely to be meaningful the longer it persists. If, for instance, we still see this favorability deficit in July — and certainly if we see it in September or October — the odds are fairly good that Mr. Obama will perform more strongly than the economic fundamentals alone would dictate and could win an election that he is otherwise “supposed” to lose. Of course, this will probably be reflected in head-to-head polls between Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney, which also become stronger predictors of the election outcome as November draws nearer.

My guess, for what it’s worth, is that we will see some improvement in Mr. Romney’s favorability numbers over the next month or two. It has not been uncommon in the past for a candidate’s numbers to decline while he is actively engaged in a primary, but for him to go through a honeymoon period once he begins to wrap up the nomination.

We’ll have a better sense for where Mr. Romney’s numbers are likely to settle in, and whether they represent a real concern for him or just a transient annoyance, once the general election campaign has become more substantive a couple of months from now. For the time being, I’d consider them a negative but fairly minor factor when we evaluate his chances at victory.

House Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio formally endorsed Mitt Romney as the Republican presidential nominee on Tuesday, throwing the weight of his office behind Mr. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, roughly a month before the candidate can amass the delegates necessary to make it official.

“It is clear now that Mitt Romney is going to be our nominee,” Mr. Boehner said at a news conference that followed his weekly meeting with the House Republican Conference. “I think Mitt Romney has a set of economic policies that can put Americans back to work and, frankly, contrast sharply with the failed economic policies of President Obama.”

Mr. Boehner promised to do “everything I can to help him win.”

What does Rick Santorum want?

On Monday night he held a conference call that was billed as a chance for him to discuss the presidential campaign and his future. But during the half-hour discussion, with more than 4,000 supporters listening in, he raised more questions than he answered about his intentions between now and November. And the uncertainty about his intentions highlights the challenges that Mitt Romney faces in revving up Mr. Santorum and his conservative followers for the fall campaign.

Mr. Santorum refrained from endorsing Mr. Romney during the conference call, but John Brabender, his top strategist, said Tuesday that he expected such an endorsement to take place in the next two or three weeks. Mr. Brabender said that he and his counterparts in the Romney campaign had simply not had a chance to coordinate their schedules.

Still, this period before an endorsement is a delicate time in which Mr. Santorum is likely to try to leverage what he can out of Mr. Romney while also presenting a constant political threat to him.

Mr. Santorum did make clear that he was eager to pay off his campaign debt. He asked for donations during the conference call and on Tuesday followed up with yet another e-mail solicitation to supporters, telling them that he must retire his debt before he gets involved in anything else.

He was less clear about his long-range goals, but friends and aides said that he wanted to establish himself as the leader of the conservative base of the Republican Party . Any such plans would be seen as laying the groundwork for another presidential run, in either 2016 or 2020, depending on whether Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, is elected this fall.

During the call, Mr. Santorum suggested he would be putting a structure and organization in place in the next few weeks to promote the conservative values he advocated during his campaign, which he suspended last week. He could form a political action committee or some type of foundation through which he could continue to raise money and prepare for a later presidential run.

On Thursday, President Obama’s allies in organized labor are to announce an Internet-based effort to rally workers to the president’s corner using what they say will be the latest social media tools.

In an event at the Washington headquarters of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., organizers are scheduled to unveil a new Web site, workersvoice.org, along with ambitious plans to energize union and nonunion workers to participate in the presidential and Congressional elections.

“The labor movement is the original social network,” said Eddie Vale, the communications director for the new group. “Workers’ Voice will be revolutionizing it for today’s world by taking our traditional field and organizing knowledge and applying it to the digital era and making it available to all workers.”

In the last six months, Mr. Obama has increasingly focused his campaign for re-election on a populist argument that the policies of the Republicans would benefit the wealthiest in the country, leaving most workers behind.

This week, Mr. Obama is pushing Congress to pass what Democrats call the “Buffett Rule,” which would require anyone making over $1 million a year to pay at least 30 percent in taxes.

“Tell them to stop giving tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans who don’t need them and aren’t asking for them,” Mr. Obama said during an event on Wednesday. “Tell them to start asking everybody to do their fair share and play by the same rules.”

The new labor group describes itself as a counter to those allied behind Mitt Romney, Mr. Obama’s likely opponent in the fall. They include American Crossroads and other “super PACs” that have pledged to support Mr. Romney with advertising and voter mobilization efforts.

In fact, Mr. Romney has made clear in recent weeks that he intends to prosecute the same populist case against Mr. Obama, describing the sitting president as out of touch with the plight of everyday Americans and unable to develop solutions that will help them weather the economic turmoil.

Newt Gingrich became the latest Republican candidate to lash out at the cable news network, accusing it on Wednesday of dooming his flagging campaign by slanting its political coverage to Mitt Romney‘s benefit.

Mr. Gingrich quickly found that Fox News’s tenacity is a match for his own. The network shot back on Thursday, calling the former House speaker bitter.

The sniping started when Mr. Gingrich, a former Fox News commentator, told a gathering of Tea Party supporters in Delaware that Fox News had distorted its coverage of him. And he accused Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the network’s parent company, News Corporation, of pulling the strings behind the scenes. His comments were reported on Thursday morning by Real Clear Politics, which gained access to the Delaware event.

“I assume it’s because Murdoch at some point said, ‘I want Romney,’ and so ‘fair and balanced’ became ‘Romney,’ ” Gingrich was quoted as saying. “And there’s no question that Fox had a lot to do with stopping my campaign because such a high percentage of our base watches Fox.”

He went on to add: “In our experience, Callista and I both believe CNN is less biased than Fox this year. We are more likely to get neutral coverage out of CNN than we are of Fox, and we’re more likely to get distortion out of Fox. That’s just a fact.”

In a prepared statement, Fox News said Thursday that Mr. Gingrich appeared to have other motives: “This is nothing more than Newt auditioning for a windfall of a gig at CNN. That’s the kind of man he is. Not to mention, he’s still bitter over the termination of his contributor contract.”

Mr. Gingrich, like Rick Santorum, found his Fox News contract terminated last year after the network suspended the two men while they pursued a run for the presidency. Mr. Santorum, who ended his campaign on Tuesday, had also accused Fox News of favoring other candidates in its coverage.

But if Fox News covered other candidates — namely Mr. Romney — more often, they weren’t the only ones. The Pew Research Center, which conducts regular studies on the amount of media coverage the candidates receive, has found repeatedly that Mr. Romney is covered the most.

Aides and leading donors to Mitt Romney are preparing a major expansion of the campaign’s fund-raising efforts to prepare for a general election contest against President Obama , with the goal of raising up to $600 million, according to several people involved in the discussions.

Republican-leaning outside groups and Democratic-leaning unions are planning to spend hundreds of millions more.

And Mr. Obama, who raised $750 million in 2008, is likely to meet or exceed that this year, according to people involved in his fund-raising operation.

Those goals make it virtually certain that neither party’s nominee will accept public funds for the general election or the spending limits that come with them — the likely death knell for a cornerstone of the post-Watergate campaign finance reforms intended to limit the influence of money in federal elections.

Mr. Obama opted out of the public financing program in 2008, breaking a campaign pledge, and went on to outspend the Republican nominee, John McCain, by four to one.

“This is going to be the most moneyed election in the history of the United States,” said Bob Edgar, the president of Common Cause, a group that favors greater restrictions on campaign spending. Mr. Edgar, a former congressman who was among the Democratic “Watergate babies” elected in the wake of the scandal, added, “There is a sense of coming full circle, of forgetting our history — the reason we installed a system for financing campaigns that didn’t rely on corporate or wealthy money.”

Mr. Obama has already held over a hundred major fund-raisers for his campaign, jointly raising large amounts with the Democratic National Committee , and Mr. Romney is moving quickly to catch up. His campaign is planning dozens of fund-raisers through the end of June, high-dollar events that will feature Mr. Romney as well as the campaign’s top allies and other elected officials.

The campaign is setting a goal of raising at least $1 million for most events featuring Mr. Romney personally.

Rep. Dan Benishek’s (R-MI) embrace of the Republican Party’s platform ran into stiff opposition at a town hall meeting in Saulte Sainte Marie, Michigan when at least a dozen constituents, many of them senior citizens, pushed back against Benishek’s claims on Medicare, Social Security, oil subsides and health care reform.
Benishek couldn’t even get through his opening remarks before attendees began criticizing his support for Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) proposed budget that would increase the cost of health care for seniors by providing “premium support” vouchers to eligible senior citizens.

“If you have a better idea as how to keep Medicare sustainable over the long term, I’d be happy to hear it,” offered Benishek.

He may have regretted those words after the event, because for half an hour, Benishek fielded several suggestions on how to increase funding for Medicare, ranging from ending oil subsidies to increasing taxes on the wealthiest two percent, suggestions that Benishek summarily dismissed.

Benishek also displayed a shocking lack of self-awareness about his level of knowledge of some key facts. “There are no government subsidies for oil,” he told one woman who suggested ending the very real subsidies given to oil corporations to help defray the cost of Medicare.

Rick Santorum says that when push came to shove, what shoved him out of the race was his dwindling bank account.

In an interview with Tony Perkins, the Family Research Council Action president, Mr. Santorum said: “Someone – one of the old politicos when I got involved in this race said the same thing, which is: ‘Every presidential campaign ends for the same reason: You run out of money.’ And we didn’t have a lot of money to begin with, but we were at a point where we simply had in the last couple of races — really worked hard and spent money and particularly in Wisconsin — we felt we had to win Wisconsin in order to do well in Pennsylvania, and it was a situation where we simply didn’t have the resources to compete going forward.”

Most important, he said:

“We had for the first time in the campaign had a debt. The debt was — from my perspective — a little more substantial than I was comfortable with. And I’ll be honest with you, Tony. In the last week after Wisconsin, we basically raised almost no money. We had solicitations going out, and people were just e-mailing back, saying the race was over, and you’ve got to join the crew. And there were others saying not, but it was a very, very small trickle of funds that were coming in. And we just realized, you know, it’s one thing to go out and compete in Pennsylvania, Romney had already laid down $4 million of advertising, and we were looking at probably not being able to spend a penny on advertising.”

He added, “You reach a point where you want to compete, but you have to be able to compete, and we felt we couldn’t.”

Mitt Romney’s campaign scrambled Wednesday afternoon to clarify his support for the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act after top aides were caught flat-footed by the question.

In a statement, Amanda Hennenberg, a campaign spokeswoman, said Mr. Romney “supports pay equity and is not looking to change current law.”

That came after top policy aides to the former Massachusetts governor seemed uncertain how to respond when a reporter asked about Mr. Romney’s position on it during a campaign conference call.

“We’ll get back to you on that,” the adviser told reporters.

The stumble comes as Mr. Romney’s campaign is searching for ways to address the large lead that President Obama holds among female voters. That lead developed during the last several months, as Mr. Romney expressed positions that have angered many women.

The fumble on the Lilly Ledbetter law is not likely to help his case.

The law, which makes it easier for women to sue in equal pay cases, was the first bill that Mr. Obama signed into law, just nine days after taking office. It is despised by conservatives who claim it is leading to a flurry of unnecessary and frivolous lawsuits.

But the law is hailed by many women’s organizations as a step forward toward rectifying discriminatory salary situations. Democrats immediately jumped on the campaign’s hesitance to support the law, quickly distributing audio of the conference call.

“If he is truly concerned about women in this economy, he wouldn’t have to take time to ‘think’ about whether he supports the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act,” Ms. Ledbetter said in a statement distributed by Mr. Obama’s campaign. “This act not only ensures women have the tools to get equal pay for equal work, but it means their families will be better served also.”

Mr. Romney’s campaign reacted quickly, putting out statements from women attacking the impact of Mr. Obama’s policies on women.

“Barack Obama talks a good game on women in the economy, but the facts don’t back him up,” Representative Mary Bono Mack, Republican of California, said in a statement. “Women in the Obama economy are facing hardships of historical proportions.”

The Democratic National Convention quickly noted that Ms. Bono Mack voted against the Ledbetter Act when it passed in Congress in 2009.

As Mitt Romney begins to pivot to the general election, President Obama’s campaign is working to remind voters of the things Mr. Romney said during the primary.

In a new “greatest hits” video, the Obama campaign highlights what it calls “memories to last a lifetime” from the campaign trail. They include some of Mr. Romney’s most oft-cited comments on issues that may come back to haunt him as he tries to attract swing voters, including:

“Corporations are people, my friend.”

“I like being able to fire people that provide services to me.”

“I was a severely conservative Republican governor.”

The video by Mr. Obama’s “Truth Team” makes no effort to put any of Mr. Romney’s statements into context. For example, the comment about liking to fire people was really said about being able to change health insurance providers.

But as the campaigns begin to engage each other more directly, it is clear that the competing narratives are set.

Mr. Obama and his advisers are hoping to portray Mr. Romney as an out-of-touch, wealthy conservative whose statements about a number of issues — immigration, women’s health, the budget — appear too extreme to moderate and independent voters.

As part of its bizarre strategy of blaming President Obama for the GOP’s “war on women,” the Romney campaign released statements today from two Republican Congresswomen, Reps. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA) and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA). The statements correctly note that women have been hit particularly hard by job losses in recent years, but misleadingly lay the blame for those losses on Obama, just as Romney himself has been doing recently .

“Mitt Romney supports pay equity for women and, as president, will do what President Obama has not — implement pro-growth economic policies that will allow women and all Americans to finally get back to work,” wrote McMorris Rodgers. “Women in the Obama economy are facing hardships of historical proportions,” added Bono Mack. “Simply put, women cannot afford four more years of Barack Obama.”

But their concern for pay equity and women in the workplace must be a recent development. Both congresswomen voted against the landmark Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 — which empowers women to seek restitution for pay discrimination — and both voted against the proposed Paycheck Fairness Act , which would have made it easier for women to fight pay inequality.

This morning, the Romney campaign refused to say during a conference call whether Romney supports the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the first law that President Obama signed. The campaign later scrambled to assert that Romney “supports pay equity ” and “is not looking to change current law.”

A $500 (£314) cheque issued by the cash-strapped campaign of Republican candidate Newt Gingrich bounced, it has emerged.

Election officials in Utah told US media they contacted the Gingrich campaign over the unpaid filing fee for the state’s primary in June.

Mr Gingrich has vowed to stay in the contest following Tuesday’s exit of Republican rival Rick Santorum.

But front-runner Mitt Romney is expected to wrap up the race by June.

Utah election officials say the cheque bounced on 27 March. The fee must be paid by 20 April if Mr Gingrich is to qualify for the ballot.

BOSTON — Senator Scott P. Brown posed for pictures with President Obama two days in a row last week, smiling as Mr. Obama signed two bills that Mr. Brown co-sponsored. Never mind that he is a Republican seeking re-election in a season of strident partisanship. Mr. Brown is on a mission to persuade the voters of Massachusetts that he is as independent as politicians come.

His carefully cultivated image — of a genial Everyman beholden to no one, flashing a moderate streak even as his friend and erstwhile mentor Mitt Romney hews to conservative ideas in the Republican presidential primary contest — is at the core of Mr. Brown’s strategy in what has become a tight race against Elizabeth Warren, his presumed Democratic opponent.

Ms. Warren, the Harvard professor and nationally known consumer advocate, entered the race beloved by the national Democratic base and has enchanted party loyalists here. She is also raising far more money than Mr. Brown, including an extraordinary $6.9 million in the first quarter of this year, compared with $3.4 million for him.

But for all her fans and campaign riches, Ms. Warren, has a lot of work ahead to persuade voters to oust Mr. Brown. In a Boston Globe poll released last week, 57 percent of respondents said Mr. Brown was the most likable candidate, compared with 23 percent for Ms. Warren. Asked which candidate was best able to work with the opposite party, 49 percent chose Mr. Brown and 27 percent Ms. Warren.

Over all, the poll found a dead heat, with 37 percent supporting Mr. Brown, 35 percent behind Ms. Warren and 26 percent undecided. But Mr. Brown had a 3-to-1 advantage with independent voters, who make up more than half the Massachusetts electorate. He even won praise from Democrats, 40 percent of whom said he was the most likable candidate.

Such numbers suggest that Mr. Brown may be having some success in his effort to define Ms. Warren as a Harvard elitist and a partisan “rock-thrower.” Meanwhile, he is playing up his Average Joe qualities on the campaign trail, using not only his famous pickup truck but also the same barn jacket that helped him beat a much better-known Democrat in the 2010 special election for what he called “the people’s seat.”

The Republican primary has reached an endgame. Mitt Romney has turned his attention to President Obama and the general election. Rick Santorum is trying to remain relevant. And Newt Gingrich has downsized his campaign.

Ron Paul remains mostly an afterthought, electorally – a candidate pushing a message more than a candidacy. By at least one metric – his chance of occupying the Oval Office – Mr. Paul is doing no better than he did in 2008. But by most other yardsticks, Mr. Paul this year has far exceeded the accomplishments of his 2008 campaign, reflecting, perhaps, how much the mood of the country has shifted.

A year ago, when word emerged that Republicans in Wisconsin were encouraging less-than-genuine candidates to run in Democratic primary elections as a strategy, some Wisconsin residents voiced shock. This was not the way politics traditionally had been done around here, they said.

But as candidates in recall elections for Wisconsin governor, lieutenant governor, and four Republican-held State Senate seats filed petitions by a state deadline on Tuesday, no one seemed particularly surprised to see more of the same — what Democrats were calling “fake Democrats” and Republicans were openly describing as “protest candidates.” After more than a year of division and tumult in the state’s political doings, little seems left to surprise anyone.

State Republican Party leaders acknowledge that they helped guide and collect signatures for at least six Republican-leaning Wisconsin residents to run as Democratic candidates in recall elections this spring.

The point, according to the Republicans: To ensure that all of these efforts to recall Republicans require primary elections (on May 8), then go on to general elections (on June 5). If no primary was needed, the thinking went, some recalled Republicans would be forced into general elections on May 8, when more Democratic-leaning voters would presumably be out casting votes in the (very real) statewide Democratic primary for a nominee to run against Gov. Scott Walker, the Republican who is the chief target of the recall push in the first place.

“We’re running placeholder candidates to ensure that there is one primary date and one general election date,” said Ben Sparks, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Republican Party. “This is about election fairness. Obviously it’s a new thing, but look, this is something that’s absolutely necessary. This entire recall effort is a political game in and of itself.”

Democrats, who have yet to settle on a candidate (a real one) to take on Mr. Walker, saw it differently.

Rick Santorum’s days as a paid Fox News commentator are long gone.

But that doesn’t have anything to do with the disparaging remarks he made about the network over the course of his now defunct presidential campaign — comments that angered Fox News executives and will make it difficult for him to return even if he wants to.

Mr. Santorum, in fact, was terminated about a year ago, a person with knowledge of the parameters of his contract said Tuesday. Under the terms of his three-year deal with Fox — which the person said was actually in the range of five-figures per year and not the higher six-figure amounts that had been widely reported — Mr. Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, had 60 days after the network suspended him in March 2011 to confirm that he was not running for president. He never confirmed, so his contract was canceled.

Fox placed both Mr. Santorum and Mr. Gingrich, who were paid contributors at the time, on suspension because their continued employment would have presented a conflict of interest for the network.

Mr. Santorum complicated matters for himself further by attacking Fox News for what he deemed their biased and imbalanced coverage of him. In September, when he barely registered in most polls, he blasted the network’s coverage of Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, then a top contender. “Fox News is a dog following the squirrel,” he told Politico at the time.

Then just last month he complained of Mitt Romney ‘s advantages in the race for the Republican nomination, saying, “He has Fox News shilling for him every day.” (The Romney campaign has never had the warmest of relationships with Fox News either. They most notably soured after Mr. Romney objected on camera to a line of questioning from Bret Baier.)

Now if Mr. Santorum wants to return to Fox News as a commentator, he would have to negotiate a new contract. The likelihood of that happening seems slim now, given his public hostility toward the network and sentiments running high among executives there that he has burned that bridge.

Still, there have certainly been stranger television pairings lately. Katie Couric and Good Morning America, anyone?

Nein, nein, nein, Herman Cain.
Erstwhile Newt Gingrich–backer Herman Cain announced this morning that he is now “ready to get behind the nominee ,” Mitt Romney. And in one of his first acts as an official Romney supporter, Cain, in an interview with Fox News , offered his take on the trouble Romney is having with women (President Obama leads by 19 percent among female voters , according to a new Washington Post poll):

“Yes, President Obama is very likable to most people, if you just look at him and his family. But if you look at his policies, which is what most people disagree with, it’s a different story. And I think many men are much more familiar with the failed policies than a lot of other people, as well as the general public.”

Ha. Other people . Cain realized halfway through that last sentence that he was about to say something really sexist, so at the last second, he tried to subtly replace “women” with “other people,” hoping nobody would notice. Other options considered by Cain in that moment included “non-men” and “phallus-challenged.”

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has bowed out of the race, leaving former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney as the presumptive nominee.

The former Pennsylvania senator made the announcement at a news conference in Gettysburg in his home state.

“While this presidential race is over for me, we are not done fighting,” said Mr Santorum.

The social conservative had been campaigning ahead of Pennsylvania’s primary on 24 April.

But he was far behind Mr Romney in terms of funding and the number of delegates needed to seal the nomination at the Republican convention in Tampa, Florida, in late August.

It was a powerful concept, but Santorum could not manage to execute it. He fused one gimmick (a concessionary tax rate for manufacturing industry) to the generic Republican platform that favors the old and the wealthy over the young and the striving.

To some degree, Santorum was constrained by inner factors: his own strong ideological commitments.

But even more, he was constrained by the Republican campaign map. The activist economic program needed to accomplish what Santorum declared he wished to accomplish—stabilize working-class employment and thus working-class families—is simply anathema to the donors, media institutions, and activists who sway Republican primaries.

Santorum dwindled into the candidate of ideological purity. It’s a strange kind of working-class champion who also sees eye-to-eye with the Club for Growth and the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Yet the need Santorum identified remains a genuine need indeed. Is there some way for the party of markets and enterprise to speak for the economic aspirations of a larger segment of the population than Santorum’s party speaks for today? For that matter, than Santorum himself was ever able to speak to?

The person who finds that way will be the next Republican president. And I greatly fear that we won’t see another Republican president until that way is found.

Now that Rick Santorum has suspended his campaign, and Newt Gingrich is focusing his efforts on the convention , Mitt Romney still faces one opponent with money: Representative Ron Paul . And on Tuesday, Mr. Paul was campaigning in Texas, his home state, which votes on May 29, to show that the Republican contest was still registering a slight pulse.

Mr. Paul was visiting Texas A & M University as part of a three-day swing through the state, which also included stops in Fort Worth and San Antonio. And showing how much the campaign is focused on collecting delegates in Texas, it produced a video before Mr. Santorum’s suspension that employs a Texas twang to take swipes at Mr. Santorum (labeling him a “big spending, debt-ceiling raising fiscal liberal”), Newt Gingrich (“the moon colony guy”) and Mitt Romney (“the moderate from Massachusetts”).

Of course, at this stage Mr. Paul is little more than a distraction to Mr. Romney, and the two candidates are said to be quite fond of each other. Until now, Mr. Santorum had also been pinning some of his hopes on Texas, which, with its 155 delegates, has the most delegates of any contest to date.

After Rick Santorum suspended his presidential campaign, speculation turned to Newt Gingrich, whose candidacy continued despite long odds.

But Mr. Gingrich was quick to squelch any notions that he, too, would exit the Republican race.

“I am committed to staying in this race all the way to Tampa so that the conservative movement has a real choice,” Mr. Gingrich said in a statement shortly after Mr. Santorum stepped down. “I humbly ask Senator Santorum’s supporters to visit Newt.org to review my conservative record and join us as we bring these values to Tampa.”

Mr. Gingrich said Sunday on Fox News that Mr. Romney was “far and away” the likely nominee. But he also said he would remain in the race to influence the party’s platform, citing his positions on oil drilling and personal retirement accounts as an alternative to Social Security.

For more than a month, the Gingrich and Santorum campaigns traded calls for the other to withdraw so conservatives could unite behind a single alternative to Mr. Romney.

That essentially is the situation for Rick Santorum. He is all suited up and ready to go. “The clock starts tonight,” he told supporters here Tuesday night, hoping to start fresh after losses in Wisconsin, Maryland and the District of Columbia.

But as far as supporters of Mitt Romney are concerned that clock has run out.

“Whether Rick Santorum stays in or not, it’s now basically irrelevant,” Senator John McCain said Wednesday morning on CNN. Mr. Romney has already moved to a different track and is running a different race against a different opponent — President Obama.

“Mitt has a lot of ground to make up,” Mr. McCain said. “It’s been a very nasty primary. His unfavorables are high. I’m confident that he will do very well. But the fact is that every day that goes by without being in the general election campaign mode is a day lost. He realizes that and I think you’re going to see — already you’re seeing the opening shots in a very spirited campaign.”

The question now is the degree to which Mr. Romney bothers to compete with Mr. Santorum here in Pennsylvania, Mr. Santorum’s former home state, which votes on April 24. A few other states, including New York, vote on that date too, and are expected to back Mr. Romney. But Pennsylvania will be the focal point over the next three weeks, in part because Mr. Santorum, who represented the state for 16 years in Washington, has declared it to be his firewall.

At this point, both sides are trying to manage expectations.

The latest fad seems to be articles claiming that if the Supreme Court declares President Obama’s health care bill to be unconstitutional, it would be good news for him politically. This position has been argued by the Democratic pollster Mark Penn , the Democratic strategist Bob Shrum and CNN’s James Carville, among others.

The theory seems to rest on the notion that Mr. Obama could use the health care bill to rally his base, either by railing against the Supreme Court or by trying to advance a new plan.

There are a few basic problems with it:

1. Mr. Obama does not face a major problem with his base, but his standing is tenuous with swing voters.

2. Among swing voters, the health care bill is not very popular.

3. The Supreme Court declaring the health care bill unconstitutional will not make it more popular among swing voters.

In an online town-hall-style meeting last week, Mr. Romney accused Mr. Obama of having a presidential policy intended to “see energy prices rise,” and he mocked the president for once saying that he would like gasoline prices to “change gradually.”

“They have put in place policies that are designed to reduce our production of fossil-based fuels and drive up the cost of energy and therefore encourage people to move towards wind and solar which are of course much higher cost,” Mr. Romney said in the Google hangout .

But Mr. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, has in the past appeared much more open to the notion that rising energy costs could be good for the American economy. In his 2010 book, “No Apology,” Mr. Romney described a gradual increase in the cost of energy as the kind of market-based incentive that conservatives could embrace.

While not suggesting particular policies that might lead to higher prices — like an increase in the gas tax , a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade plan — Mr. Romney praised the benefits that would flow from a slowly increasing cost of energy.

“Higher energy prices would encourage energy efficiency across the full array of American businesses and citizens,” Mr. Romney wrote. “It would provide industries of all kinds with a predictable outlook for energy costs, allowing them to confidently invest in growth.”

In the book, Mr. Romney called for greater domestic exploration and drilling. And he expressed concern about the collateral damage from higher energy prices on people who drive great distances, businesses that consume a lot of energy and people on fixed incomes.

But he acknowledged that allowing the price for gas and oil to rise could be the centerpiece of “game-changing incentives” that would alter consumer behavior when it came to buying cars and using electricity. That, he wrote, could help the country wean itself off an overreliance on foreign oil.

By the end of April we may have a Republican nominee for president. Republicans are coalescing around Romney, as he has picked up recent endorsements from party leaders past (George H.W. Bush), present (Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan) and future (Marco Rubio). Meanwhile the primary calendar is set to give the frontrunner a boost this week.

The widespread perception is that Romney has had the steady backing of the GOP establishment. In fact, it appeared that way only because his opponents were so unappealing, or even unserious, in the eyes of most influential Republicans, that they received even fewer endorsements. By historical standards Romney has actually lagged behind past favorites. As BuzzFeed’s Zeke Miller notes, “George W. Bush locked up 44 Senate endorsements before the South Carolina primary, and had more than half of the House’s 222 Republicans backing him by May of 1999—well over a year before the election. But to date, Mitt Romney has only gathered the endorsements of 91 Republican members of Congress—including just 17 senators.”

On Tuesday Maryland, Wisconsin and Washington, D.C., will hold their primaries. Washington is considered such friendly territory for Romney that Santorum’s campaign claims he will be no worse off for not having even gotten onto the ballot. Maryland, being a liberal Northern state, is also Romney country. The Washington Post reports, “the often overlooked and bulging moderate middle of the Maryland GOP will be relevant—at least for a day. In the state’s first competitive presidential primary in a generation, polls and interviews suggest an overwhelming number of Republicans will vote for Mitt Romney.”

Santorum’s only chance at slowing Romney’s momentum will be in Wisconsin. Santorum has been competitive in industrial MidWest, but he has yet to score a decisive win there. MidWestern states have competing characteristics, some of which favor Romney and some Santorum. They tend to have lower education and income levels than the Northeast. That helps Santorum, who does better with less wealthy and educated voters. But they have fewer evangelicals than the South, Great Plains and Rocky Mountain West. Generally, Santorum only wins in states where evangelical or born again Christians are a majority of Republican primary voters.

Romney is following his standard playbook in Wisconsin and massively outspending his opponents. His Super PAC, Restore Our Future, has spent $2,687,938, compared to $735,093 from Santorum’s Red White and Blue Fund.

Polls show Romney leading Santorum by an average of seven or eight points in Wisconsin. The New York Times’ statistical guru Nate Silver gives Romney a 91 percent chance of victory.

After Tuesday Santorum’s last stand will be the April 24 Pennsylvania primary. The other states to vote on April 23—Delaware, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut—are likely to favor Romney. Santorum has conceded that he must win his home state to stay viable. If Romney is able to win Pennsylvania and sweep the April primaries, the nomination could be settled and pundit fantasies of a brokered convention in Tampa would be an ancient memory by August.

APPLETON, Wis. — Refusing to concede the inevitability of Mitt Romney‘s candidacy, Rick Santorum said a contested Republican convention in August would be “energizing” for the party.

“People say going to the convention would be dangerous – no,” he told reporters on Monday, the day before Wisconsin, Maryland and Washington, D.C., go to the polls. Behind in voter surveys in all three contests, Mr. Santorum offered a view very different than that of a rising number of Republican leaders who have called for the party to unify behind Mr. Romney and pivot to take on President Obama.

And Mr. Santorum maintained that a contested convention would fire up voters and, moreover, the shortest possible head-to-head matchup with Mr. Obama before the November vote would favor Republicans.

“I would argue even if it ends up in a convention, that’s a positive thing for the Republican Party,” he said. “That’s a positive thing for activating and energizing our folks heading into this fall election.”

Rather than sundering the party, a contested convention in Tampa “would be a fascinating display of open democracy,” Mr. Santorum said, adding, “I think it would be an energizing thing for our party to have a candidate emerge who isn’t the blessed candidate of the Republican establishment. It makes this election a short election, the shorter this election in the fall, the better off we are, not the worse.”

US President Barack Obama is hosting three-way talks at the White House with the leaders of Canada and Mexico.

Talks usually centre on border issues and the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).

This year the summit could also touch on a disputed US-Canada oil pipeline.

President Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon are meeting weeks before a broader regional summit to be held in Colombia.

The Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, is to be held in two weeks’ time.

No major agreements are expected to be signed at Monday’s summit, which will see the three leaders hold a joint news conference.

The meeting was originally planned to take place in Hawaii in November, but had to be rescheduled after a top Mexican official was killed in a helicopter crash.

A US Republican at the forefront of efforts to cut government spending has become the latest big endorsement for presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

The congressional budget committee chairman has been floated as a possible vice-presidential pick for Mr Romney.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio and former President George H W Bush also backed the former Massachusetts governor week.

Mr Ryan’s endorsement comes four days ahead of a Republican presidential primary in his home state of Wisconsin.

“I think he deserves to be the nominee. I think he earned it,” Representative Ryan told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “He has emerged as the best candidate.”

Mr Ryan echoed other Republican calls to support Mr Romney and avoid a drawn-out fight for the nomination. The winner will challenge Democratic President Barack Obama in November’s election.

“I believe it’s getting to the point where it’s going to become counter-productive if the primary drags on,” Mr Ryan said. “It’s going to get much tougher to defeat Barack Obama in the fall.”

But Mr Romney’s closest rival, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, has vowed to continue fighting for the nomination until the party convention in August. Nor has Newt Gingrich, who is trailing in the race, shown any willingness to step aside.

Mr Ryan is expected to campaign in Wisconsin with Mr Romney. Polls suggest the former Massachusetts governor is leading by several points in the state.

It’s likely that some taxpayers won’t be satisfied with that answer, because Bush’s campaign cost the state on average half of what Perry’s cost, even when the figures are adjusted for inflation.

Perry’s bill works out to an average of $22,500 a day for his out-of-state political activities during the 160 days he was in the presidential race.

Before the Secret Service took over Bush’s security at the end of March 2000, the Texas Department of Public Safety spent $3.9 on Bush’s out-of-state security, state records show.

When you run that through the Commerce Department’s cost of living inflation adjustment formula, Bush’s bill was about $5.25 million in today’s money. But that was spread over 455 days from Jan. 1, 1999, to March 31, 2000 — an average of only $11,428 a day.

The Houston Chronicle reported that while Perry’s campaign generally paid for his personal travel expenses, his security detail is paid through the state gasoline tax and vehicle registration fees.

“One way to protect taxpayers’ money is by not spending it unnecessarily,” Texas House Democratic leader Jessica Farrar said in a letter to Perry in January, when the bill was still only $2.6 million, NBC station KXAN of Austin reported at the time. “If someone discovers tax dollars have been spent unnecessarily, it should be reimbursed either to general revenue or directly to taxpayers.”

Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas billionaire who along with his wife has used a superPAC to pour about $15 million worth of support behind Newt Gingrich’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination, told reporters earlier this week that the former House speaker’s campaign appears to be “at the end of his line.”

If you’re Rick Santorum , making a crack about a pink bowling ball is sure to draw some unwanted attention.

Sure enough, after making such a comment to a young man at a bowling alley here on Wednesday, that is exactly what happened.

During a campaign stop with a group of young Republicans, Mr. Santorum took about 20 minutes for a round of bowling. As one of the young men reached for a pink ball — one that some of the women used — Mr. Santorum ribbed him.

“You’re not gonna use the pink ball,” Mr. Santorum said. “We’re not gonna let you do that. Not on camera.” The remark was posted to Twitter by a Reuters reporter and soon ricocheted around the Web.

It didn’t take long for the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group, to pounce. It issued a statement on Wednesday calling Mr. Santorum’s remark “ignorant.”

Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas billionaire who has been the biggest backer to a group supporting Newt Gingrich, said this week that Mr. Gingrich had reached “the end of his line” in his bid for the presidency.

Mr. Adelson, whose family has contributed more than $15 million to a “super PAC” supporting Mr. Gingrich, made the comments in a brief interview with The Jewish Journal at the Venetian resort in Las Vegas.

After singing Mr. Gingrich’s praises, Mr. Adelson responded to a reporter’s comment that the candidate was not likely to be the Republican presidential nominee.

“No, no. I know. I know. It appears as though he’s at the end of his line,” Mr. Adelson said. “Because mathematically, he can’t get anywhere near the numbers, and there’s unlikely to be a brokered convention.”

The acknowledgement came even as The Washington Times reported on Thursday that Mr. Gingrich had secretly met with Mitt Romney in Louisiana over the weekend.

Business groups that worked hard to install a Republican majority in the House equated Republican control with a business-friendly environment. But the majority is first and foremost a conservative political force, and on key issues, its ideology is not always aligned with commercial interests that helped finance election victories.

“Free market is not always the same as pro-business,” said Barney Keller, spokesman for the conservative political action committee Club for Growth.

There could be real-world consequences to the conservative rebellion. The 90-day extension of the highway trust fund that House Republican leaders say they will pass this week in lieu of a broad highway bill would keep existing projects moving for now. But business groups say few new government-funded infrastructure projects can get under way without longer-range certainty about federal backing.

Florida senator and conservative favourite Marco Rubio has endorsed Mitt Romney in the race for the US Republican presidential nomination.

Mr Rubio, speaking on Fox News, said Mr Romney would be an impressive president and an improvement over the “disastrous” Barack Obama.

He would not be drawn on frequent speculation that he could be named as Mr Romney’s vice-presidential pick.

On Thursday former President George H W Bush will also endorse Mr Romney.

Rick Santorum, who once held a wide lead in the polls in his home state of Pennsylvania, has lost substantial ground to Mitt Romney among Republican voters over the last month, according to a new poll.

He leads now by just 2 percentage points, creating an opening for the Romney team to move in with overwhelming force and try to shut down Mr. Santorum’s quest for the presidential nomination in the state’s primary on April 24.

Mr. Santorum’s support has shrunk to 30 percentage points while Mr. Romney’s has grown to 28 percentage points, putting him within the poll’s margin of sampling error of 4 percentage points. The poll was conducted March 20-25 by Franklin & Marshall College for several news organizations in the state.

In February, Mr. Santorum led Mr. Romney in the same poll 45 percent to 26 percent, a difference of 19 percentage points.

The Romney camp has expected Mr. Santorum to win Pennsylvania’s popular vote, or the “beauty contest,” while believing Mr. Romney could at least break even in the unrelated and more important race for delegates.