Photograph by Charles Dharapak/AP Photo

Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney greets Asian American supporters as he campaigns at Van Dyck park in Fairfax, Va., on Sept. 13, 2012.

Jeb Bush has called Asian-Americans the canary in the Republican Party’s coal mine.

Look past the 71 percent of Hispanic voters who sided with President Barack Obama in November, the Florida Republican has suggested, and one will find the 74 percent of Asian-Americans supporting the Democrat.

Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman who has commissioned an autopsy of his party’s poor performance last year — not only in the national race, but also in Senate contests in which it could have challenged the Democrats for control of the Senate — is putting some of its findings into play.

As he and the rest of the Republican National Committee head to Los Angeles for their spring meeting  later this week — what the Los Angeles Times calls “a visit meant to illustrate the party’s commitment to broadening its reach even in the bluest of states” — Priebus has announced two new party hires to step up the RNC’s engagement with voters in Asian and Pacific Islander communities.

 The L.A. Times notes: Stephen Fong as national field director and Jason Chung as a national communications director — “the first in a series of changes that will be announced this week as the party’s members debate actions intended to reverse their losses in the 2012 presidential race.”

Fong, a California native, will lead party activists “rooted in the communities they serve to engage people where they live, work, and worship.” Chung, who has worked with Republican candidates in Connecticut, Maryland and Virginia, will oversee outreach to Asian and Pacific Islander media, the Times’ Maeve Reston reports.

“We’ve made a commitment to being a party for every state, every community, and every neighborhood,” Priebus told the Times. “This is one of many steps toward keeping that commitment.”

Original post is RNC’s Asian-American Outreach: Hires by Political Capital.

It was Bobby Jindal who warned his party to “stop being the stupid party.”

And Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, said today that his party needs to stop running around saying “biologically stupid things” — and avoid the “traveling circus” of last year’s 20-plus debates.

Priebus, overseeing a move to reset the party for the next round of elections, says: “It’s all about branding, marketing, telling a story and the history of the Republican Party.”

“One, I think mechanically we’ve got to be a permanent campaign,” he said, pointing to the success of Mitt Romney’s campaign in contacting more voters than a nominee traditionally had — yet noting that the Democrats is already out there in communities today with clipboards collecting data.

“It’s tone as well,” Priebus said in an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” today. “It’s not necessarily what you say, but it’s how you say it, and if you go around and you say a lot of biologically stupid things and you poison the well and you create a caricature, or you at least allow a caricature to become reality, it hurts your ability to win an election.”

It was Todd Akin, the Republican candidate for Senate in Missouri, who famously introduced the concept of “legitimate rape” during the 2012 election campaigns and suggested that rape is less likely to result in pregnancy. He apologized for all that — “the fact is, rape can lead to pregnancy,” Akin allowed — but not before sinking his party’s hopes of taking the seat from Sen. Claire McCaskill, the Democratic incumbent.

Priebus’s party has been handed a prescription for changing direction and tone by a group that recommended hundreds of ideas.

“We need to break a few pieces of China in order to get some things straight,” he said. “One is our tone, our mechanics — who disagrees that our digital data needs to be updated?”

The roadmap calls for fewer presidential party debates and an earlier convention. The party doesn’t want to see its “candidates run around in a traveling circus” doing 20 debates, “slicing and dicing each other,” he said.

Presumably, its candidates next time around will also be able to name the three agencies of the federal government they’d cut — “oops.” 

And that brings us back to Jindal, the Louisiana governor who delighted the audience at this year’s Gridiron Club dinner with more talk about the party that set out to defeat itself last year.

“They say this is a place where you can come and tell jokes about the president, poke fun at yourself, set political ambition aside and just generally say anything you want,” Jindal, a supporter of Republican Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign for president, said in his stand-up routine — “kind of like the Romney campaign.”

Original post is Priebus: ‘Traveling Circus’ Out — ‘Biologically Stupid’ Talk Forbidden by Political Capital.

Photograph by Rick Gershon/Getty Images

A student during spring break on South Padre Island, Texas.

Lawmakers, like college students, are looking forward to Spring break, with two weeks away from Washington to relax and celebrate Easter and Passover with family and constituents.

But first, that small matter of keeping the government funded past next week.

The Democrat-controlled Senate is to begin debate on a budget framework for FY2014 that calls for $1 trillion in revenue increases over 10 years. The Republican-led House plans to adopt its own budget resolution that calls for fewer tax increases and deeper cuts in domestic programs. Congress will also try to complete an appropriations bill to fund the government for the remaining six months of this fiscal year. Without action, the government will run out of money to operate on March 27.

Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, will speak on defense policy today at the Council on Foreign Relations. Levin, a Michigan Democrat who plays a lead role on issues from the defense budget to the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, said last week that he won’t seek re-election so that he can spend his final two years in Congress “without the distraction of campaigning.”

Speaking of campaigning, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus holds discussion on party strategy at the National Press Club. An RNC report out today says the party should change the way it recruits candidates, talks to voters, uses technology, raises money and reaches out to minorities in an effort to appeal to a broader base of voters and win elections.

President Obama speaks at a Women’s History Month event at the White House. Vice President Joe Biden meets with Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti in Rome. The U.S., U.K., France, China, Russia and Germany hold an expert-level meeting to review a proposal on resolving issues over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Also today, Southern Co. CEO Thomas Fanning will lay out his company’s approach to meeting U.S. energy needs in a speech today at the National Press Club in Washington. Southern is building two nuclear reactors near Augusta, Georgia — the first in the U.S. since the 1970s — with the aid of an $8.3 billion U.S. loan guarantee. Low natural-gas prices have put on hold plans for an atomic revival at other utilities.

The Supreme Court to hear oral arguments today through Wednesday in cases including whether states can demand proof of citizenship from people registering to vote.

Jury selection begins today in Alexendria, Virginia, in a patent-infringement case by 01 Communique Laboratory against LogMeIn Inc. over a system to provide remote access to personal computers using the Internet. ITC Judge Thomas Pender releases his findings in another infringement case by Dover Corp.’s Knowles Electronics against Analog Devices Inc. over microphones in digital devices.

And this evening former Surpreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor discusses her book, “Out of Order: Stories from the History of the Supreme Court” at the Sixth & I Synagogue, hosted by Politics and Prose bookshop.

 John Hughes, Juliann Francis, Kim Chipman, Chelsea Mes and Jim O’Connell contributed.

Original post is Washington Daybook: Not Quite Spring by Political Capital.

Photograph by Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Texas delegates during the 2012 Republican National Convention at the Tampa Bay Times Forum in Tampa, Florida on August 30, 2012.

Updated at 9:40 am EDT

A Republican National Committee report says the party should change the way it recruits candidates, talks to voters, uses technology, raises money and reaches out to minorities in an effort to appeal to a broader base of voters and win elections.

Republicans have become too insular, too often sound like bookkeepers and need to be more inclusive in dealing with those who disagree with the party platform on abortion rights and gay marriage, the report, released today, says. Party leaders commissioned the review after 2012 election losses spotlighted demographic and technological shortfalls with Democrats.

“There’s no one reason we lost,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus says in remarks prepared for delivery this morning at the National Press Club in Washington. “Our message was weak, our ground game was insufficient, we weren’t inclusive, we were behind in both data and digital, our primary and debate process
needed improvement.”

some of the report’s proposed mechanical changes could be accomplished with adequate funding, while those that call for a philosophical pivot to being more accepting of those who disagree with the party’s positions will be harder to enforce.

Those who have strayed from Republican doctrine in recent years have bee penalized by the party’s base in elections.

“Our standard should not be universal purity,” Sally Bradshaw, one of the report’s authors and a longtime consultant to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, said at a briefing today.

The report is often blunt in its findings.

“The Republican Party needs to stop talking to itself,” it says. “We have become expert in how to provide ideological reinforcement to like-minded people, but devastatingly we have lost the ability to be persuasive with, or welcoming to, those who do not agree with us on every issue.”

The report calls for the party to be more inclusive, or risk becoming further marginalized.

“When it comes to social issues, the party must in fact and deed be inclusive and welcoming,” the report says. “If we are not, we will limit our ability to attract young people and others, including many women, who agree with us on some but not all issues.”

The report suggests no more than a dozen debates should be held during the primary season, with the first no earlier than Sept. 1, 2015. It also says the party should consider penalizing candidates through the loss of convention delegates if they don’t abide by the party’s debate structure.

On wooing more women voters, the report calls for the creation of a surrogate list based on their policy and political expertise and calls on the RNC’s media team to focus on “booking more women on TV on behalf of the party and be given metrics to ensure that we aren’t just using the same old talking heads.”

The party also needs to “educate Republicans on the importance of developing and tailoring a message that is non-inflammatory and inclusive to all,” the report says.

On immigration, the report calls on the party to “embrace and champion comprehensive” changes.

“If we do not, our party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only,” it says. “Comprehensive
immigration reform is consistent with Republican economic policies that promote job growth and opportunity for all.”

In courting younger voters, the report says Republican leaders need to more actively participate in interviews on the programs they watch. It also calls for all party digital and data efforts to have the young voter as a major focus.

To match the Democrats’ advantage in technology, the RNC should hire a chief technology and digital officer by May 1, the report says.

It also calls for the creation of a data platform for the party that would be accessible to all qualified Republican
organizations and campaigns as a way to share voter information.

The report also recommends a more populist tone.

“We have to blow the whistle at corporate malfeasance and attack corporate welfare,” it says. “We should speak out when a company liquidates itself and its executives receive bonuses, but rank-and-file workers are left unemployed. We should speak out when CEOs receive tens of millions of dollars in retirement packages but middle-class workers have not had a meaningful raise in years.”

Formally known as the Growth and Opportunity Project, the effort was initiated by Priebus on Dec. 10 as a way to study how Republicans can find more electoral success — from the local level to Congress and the presidency.

The study group’s members included Bradshaw; Henry Barbour, nephew of former Mississippi governor and RNC chairman Haley Barbour; Ari Fleischer, White House press secretary under President George W. Bush;  and RNC members Zori Fonalledas of Puerto Rico and Glenn McCall of South Carolina. Priebus also said he wants to see the party’s national convention, typically held in late August or early September in presidential election years, moved to June or July.

In an interview yesterday on the “Face the Nation” program on CBS, he argued that 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was hampered by his inability to use funds slated for after he was formally nominated to defend himself against Democratic attacks ahead of a late-August convention.

Earlier this year, Priebus also called for less frequent presidential primary debates, telling Bloomberg News in January that he’d like to see far fewer than the more than 20 held in 2011 and 2012 during the Republican primary.

Before any of the proposed fixes can take full effect, Republican leaders may face their internal fissures that have led to the nomination of candidates viewed by independent voters as too extreme.

Some Republicans unhappy with losses in 2012 are pushing for a new core message and moderation on social issues and views on how to deal with undocumented immigrants, while others arearguing the party needs to stick to principles.

That tension was on display this past weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference near Washington, where most of the speakers called on the party to stick to its core beliefs and there was no indication the party base is willing to change the type of candidates it backs.

Exit polls of voters in the Nov. 6 election showed President Barack Obama dominated Romney among single women, Hispanics, blacks and younger voters en route to carrying eight of nine states both camps viewed as the most competitive. Obama won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote, the exit polls showed. That translated to a 44-percentage-point advantage over Romney, who won just 27 percent of the Hispanic vote — down from 31 percent for the party’s presidential ticket in 2008, 44 percent in 2004 and 35 percent in 2000.

Blunting those Democratic advantages is critical for Republicans, as Hispanics are the fastest growing minority bloc of voters and the party risks losing much of an entire generation if they can’t appeal to younger voters.
One area not directly addressed by the study group is how the party goes about selecting its candidates for statewide races in the era of the anti-tax Tea Party movement.

Losses by Tea Party-backed U.S. Senate candidates in Missouri and Indiana who drew controversy with comments about rape and pregnancy cost Republicans seats that they were poised to win a year before the election. When combined with similar defeats in 2010, some Republicans have complained that the primary fights that led to Democratic victories prevented them from gaining control of the Senate.

“The squabbling among Republicans turns off people who are not Republicans, and so we’ve got to stop this circular firing squad and recognize that we all need each other if we are going to have a chance of winning a presidential election again,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres said in an interview before the report’s release. “It’s the message, it’s the messenger, and it’s the tone. Some people like to delude themselves into thinking the message has been just fine; we just need to communicate it better. If that’s the case, you don’t lose 5 of 6
popular votes in presidential elections.”

Original post is RNC Told: Fewer Debates, More Populism, More Women on TV by Political Capital.

Photograph by Patrick Fallon/Zuma Press

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal in Iowa.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is a “shining star” of the Republican Party, “someone you can believe in,” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said last night in Charlotte as he introduced the RNC winter convention’s keynote speaker.

Jindal proceeded to call his party “stupid” and advise that while it doesn’t need to change its principles, it does need to change just about everything else.

A governor who embraces a wonk persona, Jindal suggested a seven-point plan of action. It was filled with blunt talk: “Stop being the stupid party” and “stop insulting the intelligence of voters.”

Republicans have become too focused on the size of the federal government, he said. The party can reclaim its mantle of “growth and opportunity” by paying more attention to what’s going on outside the Washington Beltway.

Jindal spoke so rapidly that he barely took a breath between sentences.

He didn’t need to pause for applause; there was little.

The lukewarm response to exhortations to change makes some sense: Despite Republicans’ failure to oust the president or capture the Senate, the same group that listened to Jindal last night will today re-elect Priebus.

Original post is Jindal’s Warning to ‘The Stupid Party’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

The Lincoln Memorial in Washington.

As Republican National Committee members meet in Charlotte to plot a way toward more electoral success, state parties are copying the national party’s reinvention study.

Pat Brady, chairman of the Illinois Republican Party, announced today that he’s forming his own Illinois Republican Party “Growth and Opportunity Project,” mirroring the name being used by the national party’s study effort.

In a statement, Brady said he was forming the committee to “conduct an in-depth analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the 2012 election cycle efforts” and “develop a comprehensive plan for the 2014 and 2016 elections.”

The RNC’s Growth and Opportunity Project was formed Dec. 10 by national Chairman Reince Priebus. Those working on the effort, which is focused on finding a more winning formula for the GOP from the local level to Congress and the presidency, are scheduled to brief reporters this afternoon on their progress. The group’s findings are expected to be released in March.

Finding a winning formula for Illinois Republicans in presidential races is an uphill battle. President Barack Obama won his home state by 16 percentage points in November, and Illinois hasn’t backed a Democrat for president since 1988.

Brady is pitching the reinvention study as part of an effort to try to retake the governor’s office from Pat Quinn, a Democrat with low job approval ratings who may be vulnerable.

“The Illinois Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, is at a critical point in its history,” he said. “The unfortunate reality is, that Illinois is run by Chicago Democrats who have brought our state to the brink of financial collapse and have exhibited no inclination towards getting our fiscal house in order.”

Original post is Republican Re-branding Mirrored by States: ‘Lincoln Republicans’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Tampa, Florida, on Aug. 27, 2012.

As members of the Republican National Committee gather today in Charlotte, Chairman Reince Priebus is facing what’s expected to be an easy ride to re-election on Friday.

That doesn’t mean his second, two-year term won’t be filled with plenty of challenges. As he looks to the future, Priebus reflected on the financial mess he inherited — in an interview with Bloomberg News.

“The RNC’s credit cards, both of them were suspended for lack of payment,” he said. “And it took time to get them reinstated, so for the first couple of months, all of the travel by me and the staff was paid for on my credit cards.”

Read the full story on Priebus and the party at Bloomberg.com.

Original post is Rebranding Republicans No Tea Party for Priebus, Re-Election Ready by Political Capital.

Photograph by Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg

Delegates sit at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Tampa.

The Republican National Committee has created a study group to examine ways to improve the party’s image and win more elections.

The initiative, called the Growth and Opportunity Project, was announced today by party chairman Reince Priebus and comes after the November election revealed demographic, messaging and technological shortfalls in the competition with Democrats.

The effort will focus on eight areas: campaign mechanics and ground game, messaging, fundraising, demographic partners and allies, third-party groups, campaign finance issues, presidential primaries and lessons learned from Democratic campaign tactics.

Priebus appointed five party leaders to chair the group, including Mississippi National Committeeman Henry Barbour, Puerto Rico National Committeewoman Zori Fonalledas, South Carolina National Committeeman Glenn McCall, Florida and national political strategist Sally Bradshaw and former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer.

Bradshaw is a longtime political consultant to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and Fleischer served the governor’s brother, former President George W. Bush, as a press secretary. Bradshaw also came up in politics working for their father, former President George H.W. Bush.

The group will reach out to hundreds of individuals, including RNC Members, grassroots activists, donors, elected officials, community leaders and others to gain insight and help the Republican Party form a solid path forward.

“I look forward to working with these outstanding Republicans as they conduct rigorous analysis and engage in important conversations,” Priebus said in a statement. “The work of the Growth and Opportunity Project will be critical as we move forward as a party and take our message to every American.”

Priebus is seeking a second term as the party’s chairman and will face election next month at a gathering in Charlotte, the city where Democrats held their national convention nominating President Barack Obama for a second term in September.

Original post is RNC Asks What Went Wrong — Working on Getting it Right in 2016 by Political Capital.

“We’ll pay for our own birth control, thank you very much,” says the female narrator at the end of a minute-long political action committee ad.

It is the president who is waging a war on women, the ad contends, reeling off the number of women who have lost jobs since the recession, college graduates having trouble finding jobs and the alleged impact of the president’s health-care law on women and the elderly.

It’s the work of The Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama PAC, a relatively small group that has raised a lot of its funds, $2.5 million this year, from small donors. The committee had about $300,000 in the bank as of Oct. 17.

There’s a war on women, all right, the left-leaning American Bridge 21st Century PAC maintains — it’s coming from Republicans such as Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri, who added the concept of “legitimate rape” to the Senate race there, and Indiana Republican Richard Mourdock, who maintained in a Senate debate that children born of rape fulfill God’s will.

And it includes Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who has said he supports abortion in cases of rape or a threat to the life of the mother, but is shown in an interview with Mike Huckabee saying he’d “absolutely” support a constitutional amendment saying life begins at conception.

American Bridge has drawn $1 million from billionaire George Soros.

“If the Democrats said we had a war on caterpillars, then we’d have problems with caterpillars,”  Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus famously said in an interview with Bloomberg’s Al Hunt for the television program, “Political Capital with Al Hunt.”

There’s small money and big money talking in these ads.

The war here is central to the gender gap that benefits Obama, one which Romney hopes to erode on Nov. 6.

Greg Giroux contributed. 

Original post is War Over Women, Not Caterpillars by Political Capital.

Photograph by Ty Wright/Bloomberg

Rolled steel sections wait to welded together to form an oil tank at Westerman Companies Inc., a company that manufactures oil tanks for the fracking industry in Bremen, Ohio.

It could all come down to fracking.

While polls show President Barack Obama may have bested Republican challenger Mitt Romney in last night’s debate on foreign policy, what just might decide who wins the Nov. 6 elections isn’t overseas, it’s underground.

Thanks to new recovery techniques including fracking, about 1.7 million energy-related jobs will be created in the U.S. this year, according to a report out today by forecaster IHS Global Insight. The gusher of jobs is easing concerns about the economy, especially in swing states such as Ohio, which has added 176,000 jobs since 2009.

“Ohio has just done considerably better than most other states, and a large part is attributed to fracking,” said Daniel Close, of Nuveen Investments in Chicago. No Republican has won the presidency without winning Ohio.

In a CBS poll of uncommitted voters conducted immediately after the final presidential debate last night, 53 percent said Obama was the winner, 23 percent thought Romney won and 24 percent felt the debate was a tie. Of 448 registered voters surveyed by CNN/ORC International, 48 percent said Obama fared better, compared with 40 percent for Romney.

The race is tight nationally, with the economy remaining the main focus of concern. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will focus on Ohio at campaign rallies in the state today, while Romney and running mate Paul Ryan head out West for stops in Nevada and Colorado. Here in D.C., the Federal Open Market Committee begins two days of meetings on interest rates, with an announcement tomorrow afternoon.

During the debate, a confident Obama declared that automatic budget cuts that are scheduled to take effect next year without action from Congress “will not happen,” while Romney said he’d cut discretionary spending 5 percent.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus appears on Bloomberg Television this morning to discuss the debate, while the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund holds a briefing on “Election 2012″ at the National Press Club.

Speaking of underground, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission meets today to discuss spent fuel storage after the Department of Energy said its oldest double-shell tank at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state is actively leaking radioactive and hazardous chemical waste from its inner shell. The Electricity Storage Association holds a luncheon on energy storage and the power grid, while Squire Sanders hosts a discussion on using public-private partnerships through renewable energy to satisfy offset obligations.

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission meets to prepare its annual report to Congress. The Washington International Trade Association holds a discussion on “Trade Policy in Next Administration: How Would Romney and Obama Differ?” And NASA Administrator Charles Bolden speaks at Atlantic Council on strategic partnerships in space.

Also today, National Highway Transportation Safety Administration head David Strickland and Google’s autonomous car chief speak at a Volvo-sponsored briefing on driverless cars. And the Washington International Horse Show begins at the Verizon Center, with the Children’s Hunter Championship set for 7 p.m.

Original post is Washington Daybook: Going Underground by Political Capital.