Newt Gingrich announces for president

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich formally entered the 2012 Republican presidential race today, announcing his intentions in a web video.

“I believe we can return America to hope and opportunity,” Gingrich said. “We’ve done it before, we can do it again.”

Gingrich is scheduled to appear on Fox News Channel’s “Sean Hannity Show” this evening, his first public appearance as an official candidate. He is also set to sit down for an extended interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” this Sunday.

Gingrich is the first major 2012 candidate to enter the race. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty have both formed presidential exploratory committees and are expected to formalize their bids soon.

Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman is moving quickly toward the race while Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin remain on the sidelines — for now.

For Gingrich, his presidential candidacy is the realization of a long time ambition.

Elected Speaker following his central role in the 1994 Republican takeover of the U.S. House, Gingrich was floated as a potential challenger to President Bill Clinton in 1996.

He passed on that race and by the end of 1998 he was out of Congress entirely, resigning after his prediction of Republican seat gains in that election proved drastically incorrect.

In 2008, Gingrich took a very serious look at running but backed away at the last minute citing his inability to leave American Solutions, the web of fundraising and policy groups he has created since leaving office.

Gingrich’s long life in the national spotlight is both his greatest strength and greatest weakness in the 2012 campaign.

He is universally well known — and generally well liked — by Republican primary voters, a positioning that other lesser-known candidates like Pawlenty and Huntsman will have to spend millions to rival.

Gingrich is also widely respected in GOP circles as a serious and innovative policy mind. “Newt Gingrich has always been an ideas man, and I’m sure will provide a lot of positive input in the debate,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.) said of the Georgia Republican.

But, Gingrich’s notoriety hasn’t always been a good thing. His personal life — he has been married three times — is likely to become an issue for some social conservatives and his penchant for rhetorical excess could well get him into trouble.

For more on Gingrich, make sure to check out:

* Gingrich’s Political Inner Circle

* Good Newt vs Bad Newt

* Newt Gingrich: Serious candidate or sideshow?

Felicia Sonmez contributed to this report

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President Obama, the compassion candidate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fixbits:

Mitt Romney accuses Obama of demagoguery.

Obama thinks birtherism works in his favor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Must-reads:

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

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

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

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

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What President Obama’s immigration speech tells us about 2012

President Obama has a delicate dance to do on immigration reform. Mark Wilson/Pool via Bloomberg President Obama’s speech Tuesday in Texas was cast as an attempt at restarting the conversation about comprehensive immigration reform but will almost certainly land with a dull thud in a Congress wary of taking on an issue so fraught with political pitfalls.

Obama, of course, knows that. And so, his speech today is rightly understood — and analyzed — as a political document rather than a policy one.

So, what does the speech tell us about how immigration fits into Obama’s broader political strategy in 2012?

Viewing it through that political lens, the speech is — on its face -- trying to serve two very different constituencies.

On the one hand are Hispanics, the fastest growing demographic group in the country and one that has voted heavily for Democrats in recent elections. (Obama carried the Latino vote with 67 percent in 2008, Democrats won the group with 60 percent in 2010.)

Hispanics, broadly, support the idea of a comprehensive immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for the 11 million (or so) people in the country illegally.

Obama made a bow to this sentiment early in the address; “We define ourselves as a nation of immigrants — a nation that welcomes those willing to embrace America’s precepts,” he said.

The other constituency at which Obama’s speech was aimed is independent/swing voters who tend to view the idea of comprehensive immigration reform more skeptically.

Obama touted a series of border enforcement successes under his watch — the construction of a border fence, the seizure of 31 percent more drugs etc. — as evidence that he had listened to (and answered) critics who said that securing the border was a sine qua non for comprehensive immigration reform.

“The presence of so many illegal immigrants make a mockery of all those who are trying to immigrate legally,” he added.

It’s a delicate political dance. Obama has to make clear to Hispanics that he shares their vision of the American dream while simultaneously sending a message to swing voters that the rule of law matters and that he has put policies in place that are actually making the border more secure.

His strategy to do just that — at least judging from his speech in Texas — is two-pronged: a straight-forward economic appeal and a broader (and oft-repeated) message about the need for Washington to take on big problems.

Several times in his speech in El Paso, the president sought to cast the need for immigration reform in economic terms.

“Immigration reform is an economic imperative,” he said at one point; At another, he argued that “one way to strengthen the middle class is to reform our immigration system, so that there is no longer a massive underground economy that exploits a cheap source of labor while depressing wages for everyone else.”

Obama and his political team know that the economy is, by far, the most important issue for most voters heading into 2012. Immigration, well, isn’t. But, by twinning the two — rhetorically at least — Obama is seeking to make clear that immigration should matter to anyone worried about the future of the country’s economy, giving it a relevance beyond what it currently has in many peoples’ minds.

Then there is Obama’s less specific appeal to the widespread belief — across voters of all demographic groups — that Washington is playing politics at the expense of the public.

“We’ve seen good faith efforts — from leaders of both parties — fall prey to the usual political games,” he said. Later, Obama said that “we have to put the politics aside”, adding: “Washington is behind the country on this.”

That idea is indicative of Obama’s larger messaging as he heads into his 2012 reelection campaign — that Washington is resistant to doing big things but that he has demonstrated an ability to make the gears of political power work for average people.

It’s a complicated approach to a complicated issue. But it’s one with significant political implications as the President seeks to re-build — and grow — the coalition that helped elect him in 2008.

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