Photograph by Erik Campos/The State/AP Photo

A law enforcement official talks to unidentified people during a round up in Columbia, South Carolina in this file photo.

Updated at 2:05 PM EDT

South Carolina isn’t a border state, yet its radio and television airwaves will soon be saturated with advertisements by groups leading the charge both for and against a broad immigration overhaul taking shape in Congress.

The reason: The state is home to two Republican lawmakers who are playing central roles in the immigration effort, both of them preparing to face voters in the 2014 elections. Sen. Lindsey Graham is one of a bipartisan group of eight senators drafting immigration legislation that would provide a path to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants estimated to be living in the United States.

And Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina chairs the House subcommittee that has jurisdiction over immigration legislation in his chamber, where another bipartisan group of lawmakers is working on a plan.

NumbersUSA, a leading opponent of a sweeping immigration rewrite, last month began airing radio spots against Graham throughout South Carolina, backed by a six-figure ad buy — Bloomberg was first to report this.

“Who elected Lindsey Graham to demand millions more immigrant workers when so many South Carolinians are jobless?” the ad asks.

A group of evangelical organizations that are pressing for a measure that legalizes undocumented immigrants announced today that they were launching a five-figure ad buy of their own that seeks to bolster Graham’s position.

“Christ calls us evangelicals to compassion and justice, so please join a growing movement of Christians asking our political leaders for immigration solutions rooted in Bible values,” Rev. Jim Goodroe, who hails from Gowdy’s district, says in the ad.

While neither Graham’s nor Gowdy’s name is mentioned, the group made it clear its object was in large part to insulate Graham from criticism for his role in the immigration effort, and persuade Gowdy that he wouldn’t pay a political price for backing it.

“It’s up to us to convince him that the majority of the members of his district support comprehensive immigration reform, and we believe they do,” said Richard Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Update:

A separate group of Republicans backing a broad immigration overhaul also announced today it was spending $60,000 to begin airing television ads in the state touting the economic benefits of immigration to South Carolina and praising Graham for leading the charge to revamp the system. Republicans for Immigration Reform, a super political action committee formed to back Republicans backing the legislative effort, is teaming with the Partnership for a New American Economy on the effort.

Jeremy Robbins, the partnership’s director, said the group was working to get business leaders to back lawmakers who would have to take tough votes to push through a broad immigration rewrite.

“Lindsey Graham for years has shown incredible courage to lead on this issue, at real potential cost to himself,” Robbins said.

Republicans for Immigration Reform Treasurer Charlie Spies said his group would go so far as to “step into primaries and defend” Republicans if they were being attacked for supporting the effort.

The partnership is co-chaired by New York Mayor City Michael Bloomberg, the majority owner of Bloomberg LP, parent of Bloomberg News.

Original post is Immigration: All Roads, South Carolina by Political Capital.

Photograph by Ida Mae Astute/ABC via Getty Images

Former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was critically injured two years ago when a gunman opened fired in Tucson, Arizona, and her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly talk to Diane Sawyer about the need for changes in gun control laws and greater awareness of mental health issues on Jan. 5, 2013 in New York City.

Two years after the Tucson, Arizona, shootings that critically injured former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, she and her husband are adding their voices to a movement for gun control.

Big-city mayors are marking the anniversary with a TV ad tailored for the Washington market and communities that have suffered mass shootings featuring the mother of a 9-year-old girl killed in the Tucson shootings.

“Enough,” Giffords says in an interview on  ABC”s “World News with Diane Sawyer” airing tonight.

“After the shooting in Tucson, there was talk about addressing some of these issues, [and] again after [a movie theater massacre in] Aurora,” Colorado, her husband Mark Kelly, the astronaut, says in an interview also following the Dec. 14 killings of 20 young schoolchildren and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut. “I’m hopeful that this time is different, and I think it is. Twenty first-graders’ being murdered in their classrooms is a very personal thing for everybody.”

Gifffords and Kelly visited Newtown to meet with families of the victims.

The “first couple that we spoke to, the dad took out his cell phone and showed us a picture of his daughter and I just about lost it, just by looking at the picture,” Kelly says in the interview, excerpts released by ABC. “It was just very tough and it brought back a lot of memories about what that was like for us some two years ago.”

Giffords and Kelly are proposing “common sense” changes through “Americans for Responsible Solutions.”  They propose a comprehensive background check for the private sale of firearms and controls on large magazines of ammunition.

Jared Loughner, the accused shooter in Tucson, used a magazine with 33 rounds. Adam Lanza, the Newtown shooter who also  killed his mother and himself, used numerous 30-round magazines in a Bushmaster AR-15.

Mayors Against Illegal Guns today released a new TV ad featuring Roxanna Green, mother of Christina-Taylor Green, the 9-year-old killed in Tucson. It opens with a scene from the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. In the ad, Green demands that elected officials in Washington take immediate action to curb gun violence in America.

“I have one question for our political leaders,” Green says in the ad. “When will you find the courage to stand up to the gun lobby?  Whose child has to die next?”

The ad is airing on Washington, DC, cable through Jan. 14, the group says, and in markets where there have been mass shootings:  Tucson, Waco, Texas, Roanoke, Denver, Binghamton, N.Y., and Milwaukee.

“How many more children must die before Washington does something to end our gun violence problem?” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, co-chair of the mayors’ group and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, says in a statement accompanying the ad’s release.

“Roxanna Green knows all too well the pain of losing a loved one gun violence – sadly, there are parents and siblings and friends who learn this every day in our country,” says co-chair Thomas Menino, mayor of Boston. “It’s time for Washington to act to reduce gun violence — for the 33 Americans that are killed every day and for all of our children.”

President Barack Obama has charged Vice President Joe Biden with assembling an agenda for legislative action following the Newtown shootings, asking for those goals by the end of this month.

The National Rifle Association has proposed stationing an armed guard at every school.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said Wayne LaPierre, NRA executive vice president, urging Congress after the Newtown shootings  “to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation.”

“I bought a gun at Walmart recently and I went through a background check,” Kelly says in the ABC interview. “”Why can’t we just do that and make it more difficult for criminals and the mentally ill to get guns?”

Giffords has undergone a long and arduous recovery aided by physical therapy, speech therapy and yoga. She has been able to ride a horse and is preparing for a tandem bicycle ride with her husband, a space shuttle pilot. She plans to apply the same resolve toward the mission of gun control, Kelly says. “Gabby works very hard in her rehab,” he says. “Now we intend to work very hard on this new project.”

Original post is Tucson Two Years Later, Newtown: `Whose Child Has to Die Next?’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty Images

Workers lay gas pipeline outside the town of Waynesburg, PA on April 13, 2012.

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, called on President Barack Obama today to use his statutory power instead of new legislation to boost U.S. exports of natural gas.

Wyden called natural gas “a strategic American advantage” and “the envy of the world,” which is forced to buy its natural gas at prices five to six times higher than what the U.S. pays. Still, the U.S. has to recognize that the exploitation of natural gas has been “abrupt,” Wyden said at an event hosted by Bloomberg Government and Google Inc. in Charlotte near the site of the party’s presidential convention.  As a result, natural gas exploitation is not devoid of controversy.

Natural gas output is on the rise largely because of hydraulic fracturing, which has given drillers access to reserves in shale rock formations once too costly to produce. The so-called fracking injects millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals thousands of feet below the surface to free fossil fuels trapped there, a process that Obama’s environmentalist allies say increases air and water pollution.

Fracking is aiding natural gas production — and Obama’s poll ratings — in Ohio and Pennsylvania, swing states with 38 electoral votes combined even as Obama is a self-professed green-energy president.

The president has done little to stall the expansion of fracking, even with pressure from within his Democratic Party.

Wyden today said that there are “serious” fracking questions, yet he said the industry should work towards a “technological fix” to the problem. Wyden will become chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee if the Democrats retain their majority in the Senate.

 Jim Snyder contributed to this report.

Original post is Wyden Presses Obama: Natural Gas by Political Capital.

Photograph by Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images

Philadelphia Mayor Michael A. Nutter.

For about an hour today, the Democrats appeared to be reading from Mitt Romney’s playbook.

Appearing at a panel on the nation’s fiscal plight, cosponsored by Bloomberg and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter gave a bracing summary of his philosophy, one that would not have been out of place last month at the Republican convention in Tampa.

“Government is a business,” Nutter said, adding that he helms the equivalent of a $4 billion corporation.

Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado chimed in with a swipe at Washington politicians for bringing the economy to the edge of the so-called fiscal cliff. Automatic spending cuts agreed as part of last year’s debt ceiling showdown would indiscriminately savage good programs and bad, he said.

“Any business would look at that as a reckless decision,” Hickenlooper said of the Doomsday machine approach to governance.

For her part, Gina Raimondo, Rhode Island state treasurer, championed the wisdom of bringing greater “transparency” to her road shows for investors in the financially-troubled state’s municipal bonds.

These are the socialists?

Original post is Democrats Read Romney Playbook? by Political Capital.

Photograph by David Goldman/AP Photo

Volunteer Ginny Barahona of Washington, hands out buttons before first lady Michelle Obama spoke at a Hispanic caucus.

Updated at 12:10 pm EDT

President Barack Obama has a good chance of approaching former President Bill Clinton’s performance among Latino voters in November, says Julian Castro, the mayor of San Antonio, Texas.

“The president is the only one in Washington who’s tried to do anything on immigration reform,” Castro said at a breakfast in Charlotte today sponsored by Bloomberg and the Washington Post.  And Obama has addressed issues that are critical to a community that thirsts for education and needs health care. “They don’t have health care,” he said of many within the nation’s fast-growing Latino community — “If they see they’re going to have health care under the (president’s) affordable care act,” he said, that’s a major draw.

For Republican Mitt Romney, the challenge faced within the Latino community “is not the personalities,” Castro said. “It’s the policies.”

Obama was elected in 2008 with a two-to-one advantage among Latino voters, collecting 67 percent of the vote in his contest with Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, who had been a champion of comprehensive immigration reform in the Senate which never passed.

Clinton garnered 73 percent of the vote — indeed it was his share of the Cuban-American vote in Florida in 1996 that enabled the former Democratic president to claim the Sunshine State in his re-election bid after initially losing it to former President George H.W. Bush in 1992. Obama, too, won Florida in 2008 with the help of younger Cuban-American voters and swing-voting Puerto Rican-born voters in Central Florida.

Not only can Obama hope to surpass his vote among Latinos in November, Castro said today — the turnout also should be robust. “I believe that once he makes the case, voters will turn out.”

The president should be able to make his case that things are getting better economically in what is sure to be a “frank” convention address tonight accepting his party’s nomination, Castro said. On the gridlock in Washington, he said: “It takes two to Tango.”

Asked when the nation might be ready for a Latino mayor, Castro replied: “Now.”

Obama, he said, has “broken barriers.” Asked about his own aspirations, the mayor  – who holds a nonpartisan office but was raised in a Democratic household and looked to the late Bobby Kennedy assassinated seeking the presidency, farm-workers union leader Cesar Chavez and San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros as political role models growing up — says he hasn’t given it a single thought.

Asked if Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor who was raised in Texas and whose wife is Mexican-born , could reclaim some of the Latino vote that Republicans have lost, if he were to run for president in 2016, Castro said: “Certainly he has more of a claim than anybody else.”

Yet the political landscape has changed since 2000, when Bush’s older brother, another Texas-born politician who understands Latino issues, was elected president, Castro said — “we’re in a different place.” With the anti-immigrant initiatives spurred by Arizona’s governor and others, he said, the Republican Party is carrying a lot more “baggage” in the Latino community heading into future elections.

Obama also may even be making inroads among a community that holds family values dear, with his support of same-sex marriage, the mayor suggested. “We live in this society — especially after Obama’s election — that’s supposed to be post-racial,” he said, and that extends to rights of all kinds.’

Asked about his own keynote address to the Democratic National Convention this week, Castro called it a speech jointly written by him and party speechwriters — “They wanted it to resonate with the American people on the American Dream story.”

Original post is Julian Castro: Obama Near Clinton by Political Capital.

He knows former President Bill Clinton well.

All is well with them, says Emanuel, mayor of Chicago, former White House chief of staff for Obama and former White House adviser to Clinton. At the Bloomberg/Washington Post breakfast with Emanuel in Charlotte this morning, he spoke about an evolving relationship.

Emanuel has resigned as co-chairman of Obama’s re-election campaign to raise money for super-PACs supporting Obama — there is far more money to be raised in bigger sums in those hunting grounds. He already has raised $3 million for Priorities USA Action, a super-PAC formed by other former Obama aides.

Emanuel maintains that Republicans aren’t “too happy with their nominee” and are already looking toward the 2016 presidential campaign, including the potential presence then of Romney’s unning mate, Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.

The Romney camp rejects that notion: “The differences between President Obama and Mitt Romney couldn’t be clearer,” Romney spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg said in a statement today. “Middle class Americans have been crushed in he Obama economy, and even President Obama has admitted that mericans are not better off than they were four years ago.”

Obama and Clinton have grown closer, and any distance in their relationship during the first part of Obama’s presidency s understandable, given the 2008 Democratic primary fight that Obama waged with Clinton’s wife, Emanuel said.

“President Obama beat Hillary Clinton,” he said. “Bill Clinton is a very protective husband and very competitive. It ook him more time to get over it. He got over it.”

Obama made Clinton secretary of state.

Clinton voted for Obama in 2008, Emanuel said, and will do so again in 2012, Emanuel said. Clinton will deliver the speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte tonight that places Obama’s name in nomination for re-election.

Clinton is featured in an Obama campaign commercial speaking the choice voters face.

“And he’s going to campaign vigorously for him wherever he wants,” Emanuel said.

Emanuel, a former congressman, also ran his party’s midterm congressional election campaigns in 2006, which briefly gave Democrats a majority in the House. Joining reporters and editors from Bloomberg and the Post today at a center Bloomberg is operating across the street from the convention hall, Emanuel predicted Republicans in November will lose seats in the House, where the party enjoys a 240 to 190 edge with five vacancies.

Asked why enthusiasm for Obama isn’t as strong among more voters as it was in 2008, Emanuel said: “They know he inherited a bad deal… He has made changes and significant progress, but not enough that they have felt it.”

Since his own election in February 2011 to run the third-most-populous U.S. city, Emanuel maintains, infrastructure projects he’s pushing are “putting a lot of people to work” in his city.

Original post is Obama, Clinton Closer Today: Rahm by Political Capital.

Photograph by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Sam Ruffin of Brooklyn, New York, during CarolinaFest 2012 ahead of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte.

Aides to President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign said today that his speech to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte will be “aspirational” and “pragmatic” — and it will contain detail.

Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter and other campaign aides spoke at a Bloomberg Breakfast in Charlotte about the speech that Obama will deliver in acceptance of his party’s nomination for re-election on Thursday night.

The president plans to “lay out a tangible path forward” in the recovery from the worst recession since the 1930s, Cutter told reporters and editors assembled at the Bloomberg center across the street from the arena where the convention opens today.

Obama plans to offer “a pretty clear sense of what the second term will be about,” she said.

Original post is Obama’s `Tangible Path Forward’ Promised in Convention Speech by Political Capital.

Photograph by Gerald Herbert/AP Photo

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, right, talks with his son, George P. Bush.

A George Bush from Texas held court in Tampa today.

He isn’t a former president, but, given his lineage, he could be considered as a future one.

And he may be in the right place for that.

“We’re already a majority-minority state — we’ll be a majority Hispanic state within the next 10 years,” said Bush, joining a panel on employment,  education and training in the new American workforce convened by Bloomberg at its site across a waterway from the Republican National Convention.

George P. Bush, 36 — the P stands for Prescott — is of the fourth generation of a family whose political line started with Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut.  His grandfather, George H.W. Bush, was the 41st president. His father, Jeb Bush, was governor of Florida.

He is of the American melting pot as well. His mother, Columba Bush, is Mexican-born. He settled in Texas after law school there because, with his heritage, and name, it seemed a good place to work.  As a young man between college and law school, “P” campaigned for his uncle, former President George W. Bush. He has since taken his own party role in Texas, where his uncle was governor in the 1990s.  He is serving as deputy finance chairman for the Republican Party of Texas. He is a founding partner of St. Augustine Partners in Texas.

If there is any question about his politics, Bush started at today’s forum by quoting Ronald Reagan: “Some of the most dangerous words you’ll ever hear in your life are, `Don’t worry, I’m from the government, I’m here to help.”

Opinion polling shows a wide gap between President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney among  Hispanic voters – just as Obama led Senator John McCain of Arizona by a similar margin in 2008.

The Pew Research Center has found that “kitchen-table issues” — jobs, the economy and immigration — are shared as strong concerns among Hispanics and non-Hispanics, Bush noted today. “Governor Romney is a known job creator — I think people have an impression of Bain Capital as this big, bad organization,” he said. Once people get to know his record, he said, “People will see that we’re on the winning side.”

We heard from his father today on this as well, with Jeb Bush telling reporters and editors from Bloomberg and the Washington Post that Romney can narrow the gap among Hispanics as voters get to know him.

It ultimately “comes down to family values, job creation and the growth of our economy,” George P. Bush said. “These are issues that our party does fairly well on… I think we win on those discussions.”

Original post is George P. Bush: Republicans Will Win on `Kitchen-Table Issues’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Michael Dwyer/AP Photo

Then Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney escorts China's Premier Wen Jiabao on Wen's arrival at Logan International Airport in Boston in this 2003 file photo.

The president of an association of chief executives of major U.S. companies said today that he doubts Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney will follow through with a threat to brand China a currency manipulator on his first day in office as president.

John Engler, president of the Business Roundtable and a former Republican governor of Michigan, made the comments at a breakfast discussion of international trade at the Republican National Convention sponsored by Bloomberg and the Tampa Bay Host Committee.

Asked whether he supported Romney’s pledge of an immediate designation, Engler responded, “I don’t think that he will” – though the business association leader added, “I think he will take a look at it.”

Engler called designation of China as a currency manipulator “very politically delicate,” given the sensitivities of the Chinese government leadership. Still, he added, “a lot of economists” have concluded that China’s currency is undervalued.

Engler said Romney also would confront procedural hurdles in making the designation on his first day. Engler added that he hoped the Chinese government would “react” to a potential Romney election by allowing the country’s currency to rise in value during the transition period before the Republican took office.

Engler added that pressing to the Chinese government to take more effective action to protect intellectual property such is “for many more important.”

Romney’s campaign Web site says that one of five executive orders the Republican would issue on his first day in the White House would be one that directs the Treasury Department to list China as a currency manipulator and instructs the Commerce Department “to assess countervailing duties on Chinese imports if China does not quickly move to float its currency.”

Original post is Romney’s China Promise Questioned by Political Capital.

Photograph by Paul Bowen/Science Faction/Corbis

A Cessna Citation

Updated on Aug. 28 at 2:38 pm EDT

President Barack Obama has zeroed in on tax breaks for corporate jets as a way to reduce the federal deficit.

Now, some of those jet passengers may be returning fire.

Corporate jets are starting to buzz air control at Tampa International Airport, where Republicans are holding their political convention to nominate Mitt Romney for president. Cessna’s Citations appear to be the craft of choice, outpacing French-made Dassaults, as well as the Gulfstream V, the president’s plane for unofficial business.

A three-engine, ten-seat Dassault Falcon 50, registered to John R. Miller Enterprises III LLC of Salt Lake City Utah, landed at Tampa at 2:57 PM today, according to Flightaware.com, a website that tracks the registration and routes of airplanes. That’s likely the aeroplane belonging to Salt Lake City Romney donor, John R. Miller, the former CEO of National Beef Packing Company. He was also national co-chairman of Romney’s finance committee in 2008.

A message left for Miller at Solamere Capital LLC, a Boston-based private equity firm where Miller is an operating partner, wasn’t returned.

In the last 48 hours, four Cessna Citations have landed at Tampa. A pair of Dassault Falcons have touched down and two different makes of Gulfstreams, according to Flighware.com. Republican planners expect more to arrive later in the week, leading up to Romney’s August 30 acceptance speech.

Obama has proposed ending tax break for corporate jet owners, which could save Treasury an estimated 3 billion over a decade.

“It would be hard for the Republicans to stand there and say that the tax break for corporate jets is sufficiently important that we’re not willing to come to the table and get a deal done,” Obama said during at a White House news conference on June 29, 2011 as he sought to pressure Republicans to increase the debt limit. He mentioned corporate jets six times in that single press conference.

But if members of the corporate jet-set are easily vilified, they are not easily traced. Most of the mid-sized, long-range corporate jets that have landed in Tampa are registered to private charter companies like Flight Options or Netjets, making it difficult to know just which corporations — or people, as Romney would say — are reclining in their leather seats at 35,000 feet.

For example, a Cessna Citation X, which is billed as fastest civilian aircraft in production, with a top speed of Mach .92, arrived from Chester, PA, at 11:30 AM this morning. Its tail number, OPT732, is registered to a Flight Options, a Cleveland, Ohio-bassed company that claims to be the second-largest company in the private jet industry.

A Gulfstream V, operated by Executive Jet Management, landed yesterday from New Jersey Teterboro’s airport, which has shorter security lines than Newark.

For those unawares, the Citation v. Gulfstream debate comes down to speed v. distance. The Citations X is faster, but the G-V has a range of close to 6,000 nautical miles, which can get you to Tokyo without refueling.

Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, has access to a private jet for its executives’ use.

And Obama himself is not unfamiliar with the mosquito ascent and wood-paneled interior of the G-V, even if he wants to change their tax depreciation schedule.

He boarded one of the Air Force’s G-Vs when he hopped to New York City in June 2009 to take First Lady Michelle Obama to a dinner and a show. By virtue of the president being on the plane, it was Air Force One for the night.

The press flew off his wing in an identical plane, and yes, the world looks different from a G-V.

Original post is Corporate Jets Arriving in Tampa by Political Capital.