Fixing the GOP: Party Like It's 1949

Americans by a 15-point margin in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll say the Republican Party needs less conservative policies that are more focused on middle- and lower-income Americans, rather than better leaders to sell its existing positions.
And 63 years ago, Americans by an 11-point margin said precisely the same thing.
See PDF with full results, charts and tables here.
Mark it up to the swinging pendulum of American politics: Six decades after Republican presidential nominee Thomas Dewey's unexpected loss to incumbent Democrat Harry S. Truman, the GOP is back in the same doghouse.
The question last was asked in 1949, months after Truman's victory in what's widely considered to be the greatest upset in presidential election history. The GOP, at that point, had lost five presidential races in a row, leading Gallup to ask:
"One group holds that the Republican Party is too conservative - that it needs a program concerned more directly with the welfare of the people, particularly those in the lower- and middle-income levels. The other group says that the policies of the Republican party are good - but the party needs a better leader to explain and win support for these policies."
In 1949, respondents, asked which view best fit their own, took the first option by 41-30 percent, with an additional 12 percent volunteering that both applied equally.
Fast forward to 2012. Defeated last month by an incumbent Democrat, the Republican Party has lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. After hitting a 20-year high in 2003, allegiance to the GOP has dropped and shows no sign of recovery.
This poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates, repeated the 1949 Gallup question. The result: Fifty-three percent of Americans say the Republicans need to work on their policies. Thirty-eight percent see it, instead, as a leadership problem.
THEN/NOW - There are other parallels between 2012 and 1948. Mitt Romney came across as a stiff candidate, lacking the common touch - much the same commentary that described Dewey. Truman directed his fire at the "do-nothing" 80th Congress; Barack Obama, while stressing it less, benefitted from comparisons to the deeply unpopular 112th Congress.
And the 1948 economy was recovering after the recession of 1946-7; in the run-up to the 2012 vote the economy was recovering as well, with newly revised figures showing a 3.1 percent gain in GDP in the third quarter.
Finally, there was the sense in the 2012 election that Romney, one of the wealthiest men ever to seek the presidency, would, if elected, pursue policies that favored the well-off - a view expressed in the results of this survey, as it was about the Republican Party in 1949.
It should be noted that both parties have had their share of soul-searching: The Democrats also lost five of six presidential elections in recent times, from 1968 to 1988.
GROUPS - There are differences, of course, among groups. It's noteworthy that even among conservatives, 30 percent say the GOP is too conservative and insufficiently focused on lower- and middle-income Americans, as do 35 percent of evangelical white Protestants, a core Republican group, and nearly a quarter of Republicans themselves.
Those numbers rise sharply among other groups, for instance, to 53 percent of independents and 60 percent of moderates, peaking at 79 percent of Democrats and 77 percent of liberals. There was, notably, much less partisan polarization on this question in 1949.
Other differences largely follow partisan and ideological patterns. While 49 percent of whites say the Republican Party needs less conservative policies and a greater focus on middle- and lower-income Americans, that jumps to 66 percent among nonwhites, a growing share of the electorate. It's also much higher in the Northeast than in the South or Midwest, and higher among younger and the most highly educated Americans.
There's less of a difference, perhaps surprisingly, by income levels. Among people earning less than $50,000 a year, 55 percent say the GOP needs greater focus on lower- and middle-income Americans. But among $100,000-plus earners, essentially as many, 53 percent, say the same.
METHODOLOGY - This ABC News/Washington Post poll was conducted by telephone Dec. 13-16, 2012, among a random national sample of 1,002 adults, including landline and cell-phone-only respondents. Results have a margin of sampling error of 3.5 points, including design effect. Partisan divisions are 31-24-38 percent, Democrats-Republicans-independents.
The survey was produced for ABC News by Langer Research Associates of New York, N.Y., with sampling, data collection and tabulation by Abt-SRBI of New York, N.Y.

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Obama nominating Kerry for secretary of state

 President Barack Obama on Friday will nominate Sen. John Kerry as his next secretary of state, a senior administration official said, making the first move in an overhaul of his national security team heading into a second term.
If confirmed, Kerry would take the helm at the State Department from outgoing Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has long stated her intention to leave early next year. Kerry, a longtime Massachusetts senator, is expected to be easily approved for the Cabinet post by his Capitol Hill colleagues.
That would open up the Senate seat Kerry has held for nearly three decades. Recently defeated Republican Sen. Scott Brown might contest it.
Obama will announce Kerry's nomination from the White House Friday afternoon, said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss the president's decision before the announcement. Clinton was not expected to attend. The secretary fell and suffered a concussion last week, State Department officials said, and hasn't made public appearances since.
Word about Kerry's nomination — Washington's latest worst-kept secret — came at a somber and unusual time, with both the president and Kerry attending a memorial service for Democratic Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii. At the same time, leaders of the nation's divided government were in utter limbo about how to head off the "fiscal cliff" looming Jan. 1.
Kerry's nomination could bring to a close what has become for the White House a contentious and distracting effort to find a new secretary of state.
Kerry was the Democratic nominee for president in 2004, losing a close election to incumbent George W. Bush. He's a decorated Vietnam veteran who was critical of the war when he returned to the U.S., even testifying in front of the Senate committee he eventually chaired.
Kerry's only other rival for the job, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, faced harsh criticism from congressional Republicans for her initial accounting of the deadly September attack on Americans in Benghazi, Libya. Obama vigorously defended Rice, a close friend and longtime adviser, but GOP senators dug in, threatening to hold up her nomination if the president tapped her for the post.
Rice withdrew her name from consideration last week, making Kerry all but certain to become the nominee. People familiar with the White House's decision-making said support within the administration was moving toward Kerry even before Rice pulled out.
The Cabinet nomination of Kerry, 69, is the first Obama has made since winning a second term, and the first piece in an extensive shuffle of his national security team. The president is also expected to nominate a new defense secretary soon to take over for retiring Leon Panetta and a new director of the Central Intelligence Agency to replace former spy chief David Petreaus, who resigned last month after admitting to an affair with his biographer.
The White House had hoped to introduce Obama's national security team in a package announcement. But those plans were scrapped as the fiscal cliff negotiations consumed the administration and questions arose about the front-runner for the Pentagon post, former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. Hagel has been dogged by questions about his support for Israel and where he stands on gay rights, with critics calling on him to repudiate a comment in 1998 that a former ambassadorial nominee was "openly, aggressively gay."
As the nation's top diplomat, Kerry will be tasked with not only executing the president's foreign policy objectives, but also shaping Obama's approach. The senator offered some insight into his world view on Thursday during a Senate Foreign Relations committee hearing he chaired on the deadly September attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
Kerry called on Congress to put enough money into America's foreign policy objectives and said doing so is an investment "in our long-term security and more often than not it saves far more expensive expenditures in dollars and lives for the conflicts that we failed to see or avoid."
And he emphasized the importance of U.S. diplomats being able to work freely in places like Benghazi, despite its dangers.
"There will always be a tension between the diplomatic imperative to get 'outside the wire' and the security standards that require our diplomats to work behind high walls," he said. "Our challenge is to strike a balance between the necessity of the mission, available resources and tolerance for risk."
Kerry, the son of a diplomat, has long sought the nation's top diplomatic post. Obama considered him for the job after the 2008 election before picking Clinton, his defeated rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, in a surprise move.
Since then, Obama has dispatched Kerry around the world on his behalf numerous times, particularly to tamp down diplomatic disputes in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was also part of Obama's debate preparations team during the 2012 election, playing Republican challenger Mitt Romney in mock debates.
Kerry also won praise from Obama aides for his sharp national security-focused speech at the Democratic National Convention in August. He told delegates: "Ask Osama bin Laden if he's better off now than he was four years ago."
Before nominating Kerry, the White House consulted with congressional Democrats about the fate of the Senate seat he has held for five terms. Democrats have sought to assure the White House that the party has strong potential candidates in the state.
Kerry has pushed the White House's national security agenda in the Senate with mixed results. He ensured ratification of a nuclear arms reduction treaty in 2010 and most recently failed to persuade Republicans to back a U.N. pact on the rights of the disabled.
The senator was also outspoken in pushing for a 2011 no-fly zone over Libya as Moammar Gadhafi's forces attacked rebels and citizens.

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Obama nominates Kerry for secretary of state

 President Barack Obama on Friday nominated Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, one of Washington's most respected voices on foreign policy, as his next secretary of state.
The move is the first in an expected overhaul of Obama's national security team heading into his second term.
As the nation's top diplomat, Kerry will not only be tasked with executing the president's foreign policy objectives, but will also have a hand in shaping them. The longtime lawmaker has been in lockstep with Obama on issues like nuclear non-proliferation, but ahead of the White House in advocating aggressive policies in Libya, Egypt and elsewhere that the president later embraced.
"He is not going to need a lot of on-the-job training," Obama said, standing alongside Kerry in a Roosevelt Room ceremony. "Few individuals know as many presidents and prime ministers or grasp our foreign policies as firmly as John Kerry."
He is expected to win confirmation easily in the Senate, where he has served since 1985, the last six years as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.
Kerry would take the helm at the State Department from Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has long planned to leave the administration early next year. Clinton is recovering from a concussion sustained in a fall and did not attend the White House event.
In a statement, Clinton said, "John Kerry has been tested — in war, in government, and in diplomacy. Time and again, he has proven his mettle."
Obama settled on Kerry for the job even though it could cause a political problem for Democrats in Massachusetts. Kerry's move to State would open the Senate seat he has held for five terms, giving Republicans an opportunity to take advantage. Recently defeated GOP Sen. Scott Brown would be his party's clear favorite in a special election.
Kerry would join a national security team in flux, with Obama expected to choose a new defense secretary and director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the coming weeks.
The 69-year-old Kerry already has deep relationships with many world leaders, formed both during his Senate travels and as an unofficial envoy for Obama. The president has called upon Kerry in particular to diffuse diplomatic disputes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, two countries that will be at the forefront of Obama's foreign policy agenda early in his second term.
At times, Kerry has been more forward-leaning than Obama on foreign policy issues. He was an early advocate of an international "no-fly zone" over Libya in 2011 and among the first U.S. lawmakers to call for Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak to leave power as pro-democracy protests grew. Obama later backed both positions.
Kerry would take over at a State Department grappling with the deaths of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans during a September attack on the consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Kerry, during a hearing on the attacks Thursday, hinted at how he would manage U.S. diplomatic personnel working in unstable regions.
"There will always be a tension between the diplomatic imperative to get 'outside the wire' and the security standards that require our diplomats to work behind high walls," he said. "Our challenge is to strike a balance between the necessity of the mission, available resources and tolerance for risk."
His only other rival for the job, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, faced harsh criticism from congressional Republicans for her initial accounting of the consulate attack. Obama vigorously defended Rice, a close friend and longtime adviser, but GOP senators dug in, threatening to hold up her nomination if the president tapped her for the post.
Rice withdrew her name from consideration last week, making Kerry all but certain to become the nominee. People familiar with the White House's decision-making said support within the administration was moving toward Kerry even before Rice pulled out.
The son of a diplomat, Kerry was first elected to the Senate in 1984. He is also a decorated Vietnam veteran who was critical of the war effort when he returned to the U.S. He ran for president in 2004, losing a close race to incumbent Republican President George W. Bush.
Obama and Kerry have developed close ties in recent years. It was Kerry, during his 2004 presidential run, who tapped Obama as the party's convention keynote speaker, a role that thrust the little-known Illinois politician into national prominence.
Kerry served on Obama's debate preparation team during the 2012 election, playing Republican challenger Mitt Romney in mock debates.
"Nothing brings two people closer together than two weeks of debate prep," Obama joked on Friday. "John, I'm looking forward to working with you rather than debating you."
Kerry is Obama's first Cabinet appointee following the November election. The president is also mulling replacements for retiring Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and former CIA director David Petraeus, who resigned last month after admitting to an affair with his biographer.
Former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska is a front-runner for the Pentagon post, but has been dogged by questions about his support for Israel and where he stands on gay rights, with critics calling on him to repudiate a comment in 1998 that a former ambassadorial nominee was "openly, aggressively gay."
Hagel apologized for that comment Friday.
Former Pentagon official Michele Flournoy and current Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter are also under consideration to replace Panetta. Obama is also considering promoting acting CIA Director Michael Morell or naming White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan as the nation's spy chief.

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Son says Romney was reluctant to run for president again: report

 Republican Mitt Romney's family had to convince him to make a second bid for the presidency because he was reluctant to run again after failing to secure his party's nomination in 2008, Romney's son told the Boston Globe on Sunday.
In an article that examined what went wrong with Romney's losing 2012 presidential campaign, Tagg Romney said his father Mitt said he had no intention of running again after he did not become the Republican presidential nominee in 2008.
Arizona Senator John McCain secured the Republican nomination that year and lost to Democrat Barack Obama in the presidential election.
In order to overcome his father's reluctance, Tagg Romney told the Globe he and his mother Ann worked to change his mind.
"He wanted to be president less than anyone I've met in my life," Tagg Romney told the paper. "If he could have found someone else to take his place ... he would have been ecstatic to step aside."
Despite predictions that the 2012 election would be close, Romney, a former Massachusetts governor and businessman, fell well short of the 270 electoral votes needed to defeat President Obama.
In November, Obama won re-election with 332 electoral votes and won most of the battleground states, including Ohio and Florida.

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Deportations of illegal immigrants in 2012 reach new US record

The Obama administration deported at least 400,000 illegal immigrants in fiscal year 2012, a new record. It emphasizes deporting 'criminal aliens' to protect public safety, but the high figure serves to remind Latinos of the president's unfilled pledge to reform immigration policy.

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The rapid die-off of the world's oldest trees

Trees across the globe are disappearing at 10 times the normal rate, and their demise could spell ecological disaster

If you've never been to California to see its giant redwoods, you should probably go soon. It might be only a matter of time before they're all gone. Research released Friday indicates that the world's oldest trees are dying at an alarming rate. "It is a very, very disturbing trend," says lead researcher William Laurance of James Cook University. "We are talking about the loss of the biggest living organisms on the planet, of the largest flowering plants on the planet, of organisms that play a key role in regulating and enriching our world."

For the study, researchers examined Swedish forestry records starting in 1860s and found that big trees ranging in age from 100 to 300 years old — including American pines and California's magnificent redwoods — are dying at 10 times the normal rate. And it's not just happening in the states. Major losses have been observed at all latitudes, all over the world, a symptom of the earth's rapidly changing climate combined with aggressive logging and land development.

Scientists find this trend so disturbing because big, old trees play an important — critical, in fact — ecological role by providing homes for forest creatures. In some ecosystems, the trees shelter up to 30 percent of all birds and animals, and without them, these creatures could face extinction. The trees also influence local rainfall and retain massive amounts of carbon. Their absence would hasten the already rampant effects of climate change and "have substantial impacts on bio-diversity and forest ecology," Laurance says.

So what's to be done? Scientists insist policies need to be put in place to protect existing trees and encourage the growth of new ones. "Targeted research is urgently needed to better understand the key threats to their existence and to devise strategies to counter them," the study says. "Without such initiatives, these iconic organisms and the many species dependent on them could be greatly diminished or lost altogether."

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Making money: Snagging year-end dividends, and more

Gift cards to avoid
If you give gift cards this holiday season, make sure they're not ones "loaded with sneaky fees," said Martha C. White at TIME. The Federal Reserve cracked down on retailer gift cards in 2010, ruling that they can't expire in less than five years and that issuers can't charge any fees until the card has been inactive for a year. But those rules don't apply to promotional gift cards, which retailers often offer as a reward to customers who spend a set amount. Those cards can bear fees and often expire not long after Christmas. Cards offered by banks or credit card companies are also not ideal. They may seem convenient since they can be spent anywhere, but they sometimes charge "the recipient a monthly maintenance fee, a fee to check their balance, or even a fee to use the card." If you want to give a gift with no strings attached, "retailer-specific cards are the way to go."

Snagging year-end dividends
Some companies are issuing special year-end dividends so investors can avoid possible higher tax rates in 2013, said David Randall and Linda Stern at Reuters. Costco, Oracle, and Ethan Allen Interiors have all made extra dividend payments or accelerated payouts originally scheduled for next year. Investors hoping to get in on the action should note that spotting companies likely to issue such special dividends "is easier said than done." Those with businesses focused on the U.S. are good candidates, as are those with "a lot of cash on hand, a payout ratio of less than 40 percent, and board members who themselves hold a lot of shares." But investors need to act fast. "Time is not on your side," said Paul Rubillo, founder of Dividend.com.

Trouble for defense firms
Investors in defense stocks are being "too complacent" about the risks of deep cuts to the defense budget, said Brett Arends in The Wall Street Journal. The S&P 500 Aerospace & Defense Index of leading defense companies is trading within 10 percent of its 2007 high. But even if lawmakers avoid big defense cuts next year, "budget pressures and the end of two wars" will push down military spending, and the profits at companies heavily reliant on government contracts will likely take a hit. "Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics could be among those more at risk," because their big-ticket projects could come under budget pressure, while Raytheon appears "best positioned to weather the storm."

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