Summit Notebook

from Tales from the Trail:

This time, some Democrats are embracing “Obamacare”

Fierce opposition to President Barack Obama's healthcare bill helped propel Republicans to big victories in the 2010 mid-term elections, when they won a majority of seats in the House of Representatives and cut into the Democratic majority in the Senate.

But this year, at least some Democrats are embracing the healthcare plan - touting their support for its popular provisions and attacking Republicans for opposing measures that polls show big majorities of Americans supporting.

North Dakota's former Democratic attorney general, Heidi Heitkamp, who is running for the Senate, responded to a wave of attack advertisements against her over the healthcare law by creating an emotional advertisement of her own relating her own recovery from breast cancer to her support for the law.

"Twelve years ago I beat breast cancer. When you live through that, political attack ads seem silly," she said in the advertisement, in which she speaks directly to the camera, wearing a soft blue jacket over a simple white top.

"I would never vote to take away a senior's healthcare or limit anyone's care. There's good and bad in the healthcare law and it needs to be fixed," she continues in the short spot, in which she criticizes her Republican opponent for failing to support the law.

"Rick Berg voted to go back, to letting insurance companies deny coverage to kids or for pre-existing conditions. I approved this message because I don't ever want to go back to those days," Heitkamp said.

from Tales from the Trail:

Outside campaign groups can coordinate – with each other

Super PACs and other outside campaign organizations are barred from coordinating with the candidates they support or political parties, but there is nothing keeping a Super PAC from coordinating with another Super PAC, or several Super PACs. And indeed, some of them do.

Jonathan Collegio, director of public relations for American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, Karl Rove's conservative Super PAC and non-profit, said outside groups on the right work together all the time.

"There's a lot of coordination among outside groups on the right, all of which is allowed," he said at the Reuters Washington Summit on Monday. "Starting in 2010, Crossroads started bringing together a lot of the organizations that were going to be spending a lot of money in the issue and election debate. The goal there was to maximize the efficiency of what everyone was doing."

Although he would not list the groups, he said several have met to cooperate by sharing polling information and research, and also to minimize the risks that that the television advertisements they buy will compete with one another. "Crossroads encouraged a number of the groups to share polling information, research and also to share the scheduling of their media buy information," he said.

Media buying is an important aspect of an election season in which more than $1 billion is expected to be spent on television advertising. Collegio said he expected there might be so many ads in some areas that television stations will run out of airtime to sell.

"In some states they will," he said.

U.S. Treasury’s Wolin on tying debt limit to fiscal discipline debate: Don’t

Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin is urging lawmakers not to tie the U.S. debt limit to the debate on fiscal discipline.

Arguing about the future fiscal path of the United States is fine, but playing games with the debt limit can hurt U.S. creditworthiness, he warned.

The Treasury has said it will reach the statutory debt limit sometime between April 5 and May 31. Once that limit is reached, the Treasury would no longer borrow to meet day-to-day spending needs, including payment of interest on Treasury bills and bonds.

Many Republican lawmakers want to use the debt limit as leverage to push the Obama administration into deeper spending cuts.

Wolin had a message for Congress: keep the discussion over the future fiscal path of the United States separate from what to do about the debt limit.

“This is an issue on which Republicans and Democrats should come together and agree that the basic creditworthiness of the United States should not and cannot be put in question and jeopardy,” he said at the Reuters Future Face of Finance Summit.

“We should have our discussions, our debates and even our fights over what the fiscal future of the United States ought to be and those are happening,” Wolin said.

Gregg sees Republican victory in November as keeping Obama in check

If Republicans are able to capture either chamber of the U.S. Congress in the November election, they will use that power to try to block any further expansion of the federal government by the Obama administration, Republican Senator Judd Gregg said on Wednesday.

“I think clearly going into the next Congress, if you have one or the other houses controlled by the Republican party, you’re going to have much more financial discipline, there’s no question of that,” Gregg, who is from New Hampshire and is retiring after the election, told the Reuters Washington Summit.

Republicans lost control of both the House and Senate in the last two election cycles, in part because they strayed from their position of holding the line on federal spending during the Bush administration. As the economy slowly recovers from the worst recession in decades, the deficit and the mounting debt have become major themes in the 2010 congressional elections.

“We won’t be able to set the agenda in the sense that the president sets the agenda, but we will at least be able to control the expansiveness of the government and slow the rate of growth and start to raise the issues that are important for being fiscally disciplined,” Gregg said, noting that “we can’t overpromise because we don’t control the presidency.”

He said that New Hampshire voters chose Democrats in the last two elections because they thought Republicans had walked away from their traditional principle of fiscal discipline and supported the Iraq war. Candidates running in the state this time are dedicated to returning to fiscal conservativism, he said.

However, he offered some caution that Republicans can only do so much without controlling the White House.

“The presidency is still extremely strong, and I don’t think anybody is overpromising what can occur,” he said.

If Democrats hold US House, Pelosi seen concentrating power-lobbyist

If Democrats are able to hang on to the U.S. House of Representatives in the November 2 elections, Speaker Nancy Pelosi will likely be able to concentrate her power because there will be fewer conservative Democrats giving her a hard time on critical votes, according to top senior lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Political prognosticators have said that Republicans are within striking distance of taking control of the House in November, with Republicans needing a net gain of 40 seats and polls showing them closing in on that target.

“She’ll have a much more cohesive conference than she has now because it’s the middle that’s anticipated to get cratered in this election,” Bruce Josten told the Reuters Washington Summit.  “Most of the seat losses anticipated come from the people that are the hardest votes to get on party-line unity votes.”

Pelosi has had a tough time over the last few years holding onto votes from conservative Democrats, like the Blue Dog Democrats who have lobbied hard to ensure most legislation does not add to the bloated federal deficit.

“She’ll have a lot less negotiating to have to do, she’ll have a stronger more cohesive conference, oddly enough, than what she has had,” Josten said, adding a cautionary note that “she’ll have less margin … but literally most of the members of the Progressive Caucus are in safe districts.”

Many of the Blue Dog Democrats have decided against running for re-election or are facing tough bids to return to Washington.

Josten also said that if Republicans are able to win control of the House, predictions that they will be able to significantly alter the health care law that was passed earlier this year are probably overblown.

Shift in power on the horizon in Washington?

Republicans stand poised to gain substantial influence in Congress, putting at stake billions of dollars in investment as a shift among power brokers throws legislative initiatives old and new into doubt. Reuters Washington Summit will bring together an influential line-up of insiders just weeks before Americans cast their votes, promising a must-read stream of exclusive news on the outlook for Congress and President Barack Obama’s agenda. Editors and correspondents from the Reuters Washington bureau are sitting down with senior lawmakers, including GOP heavyweights in line for leadership, and regulators whose implementation of Wall Street and healthcare reform could be complicated by a change in control on Capitol Hill.

The Summit will generate exclusive stories, investable insights, online videos and blog postings, which will be immediately available only to Thomson Reuters clients during the Summit. Key interviews will air live exclusively on Reuters Insider – a new multimedia platform delivering relevant news, analysis and trade ideas presented through a personalized video experience. Visit http://etv.thomsonreuters.com/

Demoplicans or Repocrats? A look at stock market performance and politics

Compiled by Thomson Reuters Proprietary Research Group

• There have been five terms out of the last 16 where the last year of the term has a negative return on the DOW, and four of those terms have been during a Republican president’s term.
• When we look at the previous 90 day returns before the new term, we see that the markets are generally positive (only four negative in the last 16 terms).
• Elections are generally held in the first week of November. When we take the previous 60 day returns before the new term (from Nov. 20 – Jan. 20), we see that the DOW returns are even more positive, with only two terms out of 16 preceded by negative returns in the previous 60 days. This says that the lack of uncertainty after the elections usually give a boost to the market.
• Only three four year terms have had negative returns. 1973-1981 (Oil crisis) and 2001-2005 (Dubya’s first term).
• On average, the 90 days before the new term performs much better (3%) than the 90 days after the new term starts (1.1%).
• The last three terms have started with negative returns in the first 90 days.
• Since WW2, the Dems have had 7 terms and the Republicans have 8 (excluding the 2005-2009 Dubya term). The Dems have done slightly better (8.3% vs. 6.7%) in terms of average annualized returns over this period. However, these numbers are skewed in their favor because of the Clinton-Bubble era.