Romney Faces Unexpected Challenge From Santorum in Michigan

Mitt Romney and an aide, Garrett Jackson, in Michigan on a bus, where a banner from a previous Romney campaign hangs.

NOVI, Mich. — This was supposed to be a state, at last, where Mitt Romney could coast. After all, he grew up here. His father, an automobile executive, had been the governor. And the last time there was a Republican presidential primary in Michigan, Mr. Romney won handily.

A one-stop destination for the latest political news — from The Times and other top sources. Plus opinion, polls, campaign data and video.

Yet, with less than a week until Michigan Republicans vote and with polling suggesting that Rick Santorum is mounting a serious challenge, Mr. Romney finds himself urgently pouring resources into his home state — unveiling gauzy television ads aimed at reminding residents of his family roots and rolling out endorsements from a virtual who’s who in Lansing: the governor, a former Senate majority leader, the attorney general, a former attorney general, and on and on.

While Mr. Romney’s comments against the federal bailout of the auto industry have drawn particular attention in Michigan, his troubles among Republican voters here appear to have less to do with his views on the bailout — which plenty of them say they were not keen on either — than with a shifting political landscape in a changing state and a fading, and in some cases tattered, emotional bond to the Romney name.

“Sure, I’d love to be able to say that our president is from Michigan, but that’s not all that matters to me,” said Cindy Minier, a Republican Party chairwoman from Presque Isle County, who said she was leaning toward Newt Gingrich or, given a second choice, Mr. Santorum. “When it comes right down to it, I just don’t feel that Romney is a real conservative — not a real, true one.”

It is hard to remember that in 2008, Michigan voters perceived Mr. Romney as the more conservative Republican beside Senator John McCain of Arizona, who ultimately won the nomination. This time, of course, others are claiming that mantle. Meanwhile, Michigan is changing too, with its long-struggling economy in the uncertain midst of transition, the emergence of Tea Party groups and conservatives who helped Republicans win a wave of elections in 2010, and an ever-growing generational split between those for whom 1950s- and 1960s-era images of Mitt Romney with his father still stir nostalgia and younger people with blurry memories of Gov. George W. Romney, or none at all.

“It’s a joke,” Randy Bishop, 54 and a Tea Party organizer, said of Mr. Romney’s emphasis on his connections to Michigan. “He left after high school, became the governor of Massachusetts and never looked back.”

Mr. Bishop criticized Mr. Romney for the health care insurance law he supported in Massachusetts, portrayed him as a “moderate in lockstep with the establishment folks” and described Michigan’s economy as a far cry from the manufacturing capital over which Mr. Romney’s father presided. Mr. Bishop said he would vote for Mr. Santorum.

In a way, much of Michigan is only beginning to meet Mr. Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania. Even some supporters here acknowledged that they had not given particular attention to him until this month, when he won a series of races elsewhere. Michigan’s influential Right to Life political action committee said it would not endorse any one Republican over the others; all oppose abortion, it says. But Mr. Santorum drew praise from voters who said their evangelical Christian or Roman Catholic faith drove their political outlook, particularly from voters in the state’s western section and rural northern stretches.

Plenty of Republicans — even some of Mr. Santorum’s supporters — said they believed that Mr. Romney would ultimately win here, given a flood of advertisements and support from influential Republican leaders. Mr. Romney certainly has a base of loyal supporters, some of whom seemed to view the outcome of Michigan’s primary as carrying a special, personal weight, and the notion that Mr. Romney might actually be in trouble here as reason to redouble their efforts now.

“His family made a substantial effect on our state, and you just can’t take that away from him,” said Al Heilman, 76, who said he still had a photograph socked away somewhere of himself meeting Mr. Romney’s father decades ago.

Mr. Heilman, a Republican chairman from Kalamazoo County in the southwestern part of the state, said some people seem to want to penalize Mr. Romney for his business experience. “I don’t understand people who kick people in the shins because they’ve been successful — profits make the world go around,” Mr. Heilman, who retired after running a confections and nuts business, said. “Look, we’re on a dive, and this is the time for a true businessman like Mitt Romney who can turn around the country.”

View the original article here

Maryland Gay Marriage Faces Black Skepticism

It is the most serious attempt by advocates for same-sex marriage to win over blacks, who have traditionally been skeptical, and whose support is critical for the bill’s passage in this state, where nearly a third of the population is African-American, a far higher share than in the broader population.

The campaign includes videos of well-known African-American Marylanders, including Michael Kenneth Williams, an actor from the television series “The Wire,” and Mo’nique, a Baltimore-born actress; an editorial in The Afro; and conversations in churches and union halls, where most members are black.

The Human Rights Campaign and the Service Employees International Union have sent dozens of workers and volunteers, many of them African-American, across the state to talk about the issue. Particular attention is being paid to Baltimore and Prince George’s County, organizers said, two majority-black areas where skepticism has been strong.

It is uncertain whether the effort will lead to the bill’s passage; a similar bill failed in the House last year without coming to a vote. But it has had one clear effect, that of opening a difficult conversation about homosexuality among one group that has traditionally shied away from talking about it.

“It’s a very sensitive subject in the black community,” said Ezekiel Jackson, a political organizer for the 1199 Service Employees International Union in Maryland, who has been meeting with members, mostly health care workers, to persuade them to support the bill. “The culture is different. Gay people got pushed off into their own circle. Instead of dealing with it, they just lived their lives among like minds, apart.”

Much of the hesitation, black advocates of the bill say, has its roots in the churches, whose influence is strong among many African-Americans. And while the overwhelming majority of black clergy in the state still strongly oppose same-sex marriage — they held a rally here in the state capital last month to make that point — a few young pastors have come out in support.

“This was an issue I knew I could not avoid,” said the Rev. Delman Coates, 39, one of two Baptist preachers who testified in support of the bill in a hearing last week. “Clergy leaders have been organizing against this, and I didn’t want my silence to sound like consent.”

The soul-searching in Maryland on same-sex marriage shows just how delicate the issue can be for Democrats around the country who count on strong African-American support at the polls.

It presents a tricky equation for President Obama, who cannot risk depressing turnout among blacks, as their votes will be critical in what is shaping up to be a closely fought campaign. Mr. Obama, who has in the past opposed same-sex marriage, has said his views are “evolving.” In July, he endorsed a bill to repeal the law that limits the legal definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman.

Among those opposing the bill in Maryland is Pastor Joel Peebles of Jericho City of Praise, a megachurch in Prince George’s County. “The black community is watching with a great deal of concern regarding how our legislators vote on this bill,” he said. “Their decision will be strongly in the mind of the voters when they go to the polls.”

Maryland’s Democrats are sharply divided by race on the issue. A Washington Post poll published on Jan. 30 found that 71 percent of white respondents supported it, while 24 percent did not. Among blacks, 41 percent were supportive, while 53 percent were opposed. African-Americans are an important constituency here: their share of the population — 29 percent — is greater than in many Southern states, including Alabama and South Carolina, according to the Brookings Institution.

View the original article here

Gingrich Money Hunt Faces Obstacles

Mr. Perry asked his top financial rainmakers to raise money for Mr. Gingrich, telling the group, according to one participant, that he fully supported the former House speaker.

But it seems unlikely that Mr. Gingrich will reap a financial windfall from wealthy donors for his cash-starved campaign, Perry supporters and Republican leaders said, even as Mr. Gingrich begins three days of fund-raising in California on Monday.

The detour to a state that is rich in Republican donors but does not hold its primary until June comes during a third week in which Mr. Gingrich will make limited public appearances, and it comes ahead of the 10 contests on “Super Tuesday,” March 6, which looks increasingly like a make-or-break date for Mr. Gingrich’s struggling campaign.

He will be largely out of sight for part of this week, just as he was in the days before last week’s contests in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri, which Rick Santorum won, and before the Feb. 4 caucuses in Nevada, which Mitt Romney won. Even as he sacrifices time in front of voters, his prospects of raising the cash he needs are uncertain.

“Unless your name is Mitt Romney, raising money in this political environment is like trying to hit a bullet with another bullet while riding a horse,” said Ron Nehring, a former chairman of the California Republican Party.

Roy Bailey, who was a national finance co-chairman for Mr. Perry, said most of the Texas governor’s wealthy supporters would hesitate to back Mr. Gingrich. “The problem is you want to feel the person you’re supporting has a really good chance of succeeding,” Mr. Bailey said. “I think bundlers are waiting to see who emerges to be the conservative choice. Is it going to be Gingrich or is it going to be Santorum? Santorum clearly has a lot of momentum right now.”

In California, Mr. Gingrich will attend small-scale events in homes, restaurants and country clubs, where he will seek checks of $500 to $2,500.

For $500, supporters can attend breakfast with Mr. Gingrich on Tuesday morning at a country club outside San Diego. (For $1,000, they can have their photograph taken with him.) That evening, Valentine’s Day, he will attend a cocktail reception at a private home in Fresno, Calif., where a $2,500 donation includes “a little Champagne, a photo op,” said Wendy Turner, the host.

Fund-raising experts say such supporters are midtier donors who seek to rub elbows and pose for a picture in exchange for checks. They have Mr. Gingrich’s attention just now because he has had little success with the top-tier bundlers who gather the maximum legal donations of $2,500 from networks of friends and business associates.

These are the “access” fund-raisers who want a connection to the candidate once he is in the White House, and they commit only to someone whose odds of becoming the nominee are good, Mr. Nehring said. “Everybody wants to be an ambassador,” he said. “You only get to be an ambassador if your guy wins.”

Mr. Gingrich has put little effort into building a network of fund-raisers, focusing instead on the debates. After his one primary victory to date, in South Carolina, the campaign announced that it had quickly raised $2 million with an Internet appeal. But that small-donor momentum has now shifted to Mr. Santorum, whose campaign said it raised $3 million in as many days after his trifecta of victories last week.

In a memorandum on Jan. 30, Martin Baker, Mr. Gingrich’s national political director, wrote that because of “overwhelming support” after South Carolina, “the Gingrich campaign is now in a position where we will be able to respond to Romney’s ads in every state moving forward.”

But that promise appears to have quickly faded. The campaign did not run any advertisements after the Florida primary — in Nevada or elsewhere — according to Kantar Media.

Much of Mr. Gingrich’s four days in Nevada ahead of the caucuses there were spent seeking donors. About 30 top fund-raisers from around the country gathered in Las Vegas and pledged to raise $2 million, said Eric Beach, a national finance chairman for Mr. Gingrich’s campaign.

“It’s always hard to raise money, but at the same time I think there’s a lot of support out there for Newt’s ideas, and that’s why we got those commitments,” said Mr. Beach, who initiated the get-together and also oversees Mr. Gingrich’s fund-raising in California.

The group met in a conference room at the Venetian hotel, which is owned by Sheldon Adelson, a casino mogul who with his wife and other family members has contributed a reported $11 million to a “super PAC” supporting Mr. Gingrich. It has largely financed Mr. Gingrich’s anti-Romney advertisements.

Mr. Adelson addressed the fund-raisers from around the country, said people who were there, but his remarks were confined to his life story and he did not commit more money to the Gingrich campaign. Mr. Adelson has signaled to Mr. Romney’s supporters that he will back him if he becomes the nominee.

Until and if that happens, Mr. Adelson’s willingness to further help Mr. Gingrich is unclear. “It is best described as ‘remains to be seen,’ ” an associate of Mr. Adelson’s said on Friday.

At the Venetian meeting, the fund-raisers heard Mr. Gingrich’s political aides lay out their strategy to capture as many delegates as Mr. Romney in the next months: winning in the Southern states that vote on Super Tuesday — Georgia, Tennessee and Oklahoma — while remaining competitive in Ohio and then winning Texas in April with Mr. Perry’s support.

But all that was before Mr. Santorum’s victories last week, which won him few delegates but something more valuable: the aura of a victor.

View the original article here

Santorum Faces Questions on Women in Work Force

WASHINGTON — Only days after having to explain a comment about women in the military and emotions in combat, Rick Santorum seemed to struggle a bit on Sunday to explain a remark in his book “It Takes a Family” that accuses “radical feminists” of undermining families and trying to convince women that they could find fulfillment only in the workplace.

Rick Santorum also faced criticism over his book’s “radical feminists” remark in 2005 when it was published.

A one-stop destination for the latest political news — from The Times and other top sources. Plus opinion, polls, campaign data and video.

Asked by George Stephanopoulos about that remark on ABC’s “This Week,” Mr. Santorum said that his wife, Karen, had written that section of the 2005 book — though only his name is on the cover and he does not list her, in his acknowledgements, among those “who assisted me in the writing of this book.” He said that when Ms. Santorum, a nurse and a lawyer, had quit her job to raise the couple’s children, she felt that many people “looked down their nose at that decision.”

“Sadly the propaganda campaign launched in the 1960s has taken root,” Mr. Santorum, or his wife, wrote in the book. “The radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness.”

In the interview Sunday with Mr. Stephanopoulos, Mr. Santorum pleaded unfamiliarity with the citation, saying, “I don’t know — that’s a new quote for me,” before adding that “the bottom line is that people should have equal opportunity to rise in the work force.”

But criticism of his argument that more women should perhaps stay home should not have come as news to Mr. Santorum as he seeks the Republican presidential nomination. The book was sharply debated during his unsuccessful 2006 bid for re-election as a senator from Pennsylvania, drawing pointed criticism from women’s groups and Democratic officials at the time.

Mr. Santorum argues in the book that many of the problems facing the poor could be solved by building stronger families and communities, including by making divorce more difficult and providing fatherhood training programs.

His fundamental point, he said on Sunday, was that there should be a strong “affirmation of whatever decision women decide to make.”

Last week, Mr. Santorum faced a brief storm of criticism after saying in a CNN interview that to put more women in combat roles “could be a very compromising situation, where people naturally may do things that may not be in the interest of the mission because of other types of emotions that are involved.”

He managed to quell some of the criticism — if not all — by saying later that he was referring to the emotional reactions of male soldiers. “Men have emotions when you see a woman in harm’s way,” he said Friday on NBC, adding that it was a “natural inclination to not focus on the mission but to try to be in a position where you might want to protect someone.”

There is another reason Mr. Santorum, in his interview Sunday, should not have been surprised by the line of questioning he got Sunday. Mr. Stephanopoulos had asked him about the same quote in 2005, pressing him to identify those he said were creating pressure for women to work:

Asked by Mr. Stephanopoulos, “Where are these radical feminists?” Mr. Santorum had replied, “It comes from an elite culture, dictated, again, from academia, dictated, again, from the Hollywood culture and the news media, that says, ‘The only thing that’s affirming, the only thing that really counts is what you do at work.’ ”

He then added: “And that goes for men and women. And it’s wrong. It’s wrong to tell that to fathers. It’s wrong to tell that to mothers. And we need to value mothers and fathers spending time with their children much more than we do in America.”

Katharine Q. Seelye contributed reporting from New York.

View the original article here

Analysis: Canada plan to sell oil to China faces big hurdles

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Prime Minister Stephen Harper may still be smarting from Canada's failed bid to ramp up oil exports to the United States, but his plan B could prove to be even tougher.

Harper heads across the Pacific next week in a bid to convince China to satisfy its growing energy appetite with Canada's vast oil reserves.

Though it appears a classic supply-demand match on the surface, the plan faces hurdles that range from how long it will take to build the pipeline to environmental dangers and questions about China's human rights record.

China imports no oil from Canada at present, and the infrastructure is not in place in Canada to get the crude from the massive tar sands of Alberta to the Pacific coast, forcing a long-term view of a partnership.

"China as an energy market directly for the delivery of (Canadian) oil is medium to long term. Five years is too short, 10 years is perhaps doable," said Gordon Houlden, a former Canadian diplomat with extensive Chinese experience who heads the University of Alberta's China Institute.

A myriad of legal and regulatory issues play a big role in the delay.

The most obvious supply route for crude headed to China is pipeline operator Enbridge Inc's proposed 1,177-km (731-mile) Northern Gateway pipeline from the northern Alberta oil sands to Kitimat on the British Columbia coast, which is strongly opposed by greens and some aboriginal bands.

Regulatory hearings into the pipeline opened last month and could drag on for years, after which the project looks set meander through Canada's slow-paced court system.

"The challenge of exporting energy from Canada to China is a domestic challenge ... so I would not place any false hopes on the China visit with respect to a breakthrough on the energy file," said Yuen Pau Woo, president of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.

Harper nevertheless says he is serious about diversifying the market for oil exports after U.S. President Barack Obama last month vetoed TransCanada's Corp's Keystone XL pipeline that would have carried crude from Alberta to Texas refineries.

The Keystone pipeline is a hot political issue in the United States, where the Republicans are choosing a presidential candidate to run against Obama in the November 2012 election.

"My message to the people of Canada is don't cut a deal with the Chinese, help is on the way. By January (2013), you're going to build the right pipeline to the right place," Republican contender Newt Gingrich told supporters on Tuesday night.

Canada, now the single largest supplier of energy to the United States, says it is unwise to keep on relying on one customer. Beijing welcomes the idea of Canadian diversification.

"China is undergoing rapid industrialization and urbanization, and its demand for energy and resources is simply huge," said Zhang Junsai, China's ambassador to Canada.

"The two countries have every reason to forge a stable and win-win partnership in the long run in the field of resources," he said in a statement on the embassy's website this week.

Chinese firms are interested in the oil sands and since July 2011 have quietly snapped up around C$5.5 billion ($5.5 billion) worth of Canadian assets. On Thursday, PetroChina Co Ltd announced the latest deal, an agreement to buy a 20 percent stake in a shale gas project in Canada from Royal Dutch Shell Plc for an estimated $1 billion.

More Chinese purchases are set to follow.

"Before the negative sides of the investment(s) surface, such as poor profitability and the massive challenges in managing an acquired foreign target, Chinese energy firms will maintain strong appetite for mergers and acquisitions," said a Beijing-based Chinese oil executive.

At some stage this could cause domestic friction, since a major poll last year showed 76 percent of Canadians opposed the idea of a state-owned Chinese firm trying to buy a controlling stake in a Canadian company. It also said more Canadians saw China's growing strength as a threat than as an opportunity.

Houlden said the Canadian government's position on foreign purchases had yet to be tested and the real challenge would be if a Chinese company decided to buy a Canadian oil giant such as Nexen Inc or Suncor Energy Inc.

"I personally think the Chinese would like to have that scale of participation - it's well within their means. But I think they're ... becoming more politically sophisticated as they recognize there probably is a tolerance limit," he said.

Harper kept China at a distance after his Conservative Party took power in early 2006. But under pressure from companies keen to take advantage of the enormous Chinese market, the government has since warmed up to the idea of much more trade with China.

"That's consistent with the message that the business community has been sending to them. China is just too important," said John Manley, CEO of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives.

Ottawa's stance is complicated by the complaints of some Conservatives about human rights in China. Activists say Harper must raise the issue in Beijing.

"With obvious Chinese interest in Canada's natural resource sector ... it is time to be confident and recognize that human rights can be put on the table without damaging trade," Amnesty Canada Secretary-General Alex Neve told reporters on Thursday.

Although Foreign Minister John Baird last week slammed China for what he called "abhorrent acts" against religious believers, both Houlden and Woo said the attack would not cause China inordinate grief.

"These comments ... allow the venting of frustrations and well-held concerns about human rights challenges in China and may in fact take the pressure off the prime minister," Woo said.

View the original article here