Mitt Romney – praag.org

Ilana Mercer: No Trump Apology Tour

CNN anchor Don Lemon conducted an interview with Donald Trump. It went very well, for Mr. Trump, that is. So well that Lemon’s scoop is difficult to locate on CNN’s website. Instead, Mediate.com scooped the telephonic exchange.

Lemon was at a loss. He got more sour-looking by the minute, as Trump bulldozed him with the force of his convictions and personality. There was no interrupting Trump’s train of thought. The “builder-businessman” was going to say his piece.

Americans have been listening intently. “A CNN/ORC poll released Wednesday,” reported National Journal, “showed Trump had 12 percent of the vote among Republicans and Republican-leaners, second only to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who earned 19 percent.”

Trump’s retort: “I’m not happy being behind Jeb Bush.” He went on to ponder beguilingly how Bush 3 (a man he would fire) could be soaring in the polls:

I don’t get it. He’s in favor of Common Core, extremely weak on immigration. He thinks people come over for love. I don’t understand why he’s in first place. Maybe it’s the Bush name. Last thing we need is another Bush. But I will tell you, I’m a little surprised he’s in the position he’s in.

As Trump sees it, his countrymen are being betrayed by the Beltway. To make America great, he’d have to restore American prosperity. Jeb Bush will not do America’s bidding. It’s not his thing.

True. Jeb Bush will not lead America to the Promised Land, in Trump’s words. No politician will. The hope is that Trump, who does not need to ride us like the others, will get the parasites-in waiting off our backs.

Trump’s strength is that he keeps coming back to the stuff of life: business, economics, making a living. Politics is the stuff that kills all that.

To Trump, actions are measures by their outcomes. Mitt Romney, by Romney’s own admission, “left everything on the field.” He gave his all in the 2012 presidential campaign. But from Trump’s perspective, “Romney did a poor job.” He didn’t win. “It’s a race that should have been won,” asserted Trump.

Still, Lemon kept trying to trip Trump: “You’re being clobbered by Republican leaderships.” While voters take Donald Trump very seriously; his party’s leadership does not.

But Trump knew better. He was not going to keep the GOP’s dirty little secrets. He doesn’t have to; he can fund his own political action committee. Yes, his rivals, opponents, the consultants, Rudy Giuliani—they may go on TV to denounce him; make light of him. But his lead in the polls is making that harder. Behind the scenes, the schemers are calling on Trump, sending him little love notes.

Lemon fastened his limp-wristed grip. Trump’s ostensible lack of gravitas was the tack to take: “Will you really be there on the stage with the other Republican candidates?” the anchor persisted in disbelief. A pumped Trump snapped, “Why would I not?!”

He, Trump, had attended the Wharton School of Business; was a great student at one of the toughest schools to get into; went on to make a tremendous fortune; wrote a business book that became the bestselling business book of all time; built a great company, employed tens of thousands of people over the years, and is a great success. How is he, Trump, unfit to stand on stage with “some governor who is nothing, and some senator who is not very good and has not done a good job?!”

Note that Trump resorts to self-praise, primarily, when denigrated by denizens of the political process. People have forgotten. So he must remind them: Success is about creating value for people in the free market; not wielding force against them in the political arena.

Our country is being run by people who don’t know what they’re doing. Our politicians are not smart. I want our country to thrive.

And:

Illegal immigration is killing our country. You got to have a border. If you don’t have a border, you don’t have a country.

Lemon was aghast. Truth has that effect on the gormless. The anchor shifted the focus to Macy’s fit of pique, hoping he’d score some points against Trump in that department. The department store had discontinued Trump’s clothing line. Donald was “divisive,” Macy’s whined.

Trump’s one-two punch: “Macy’s folded under pressure. It’s not a big business for me; it’s very small. It’s ties and stuff. It’s a peanut. CEO Terry Lundgren folded under pressure. That’s the problem with our country; everyone folds under pressure. Two picketers arrive outside Macy’s and the store folds. People can’t handle pressure. That’s OK with me. It’s a very small business; let them do what they want to do. You have to ride through the pressure. They can’t handle pressure. It’s fine.”

Would that militant gay couples were as tolerant toward the poor baker who doesn’t wish to bake them a wedding cake as Trump is toward those who shun his business.

The unremitting influx of peasants pouring over the U.S. border with Mexico is having a disastrous impact on America—on crime rates, urban sprawl, traffic congestion, overcrowding, pollution, infrastructure, the loss of rural and protected land and species. Malfunctioning media—overbearing fools like Fox News’ ubiquitous Juan Williams—believe Trump’s pronouncements on these effects is “divisive.”

Au contraire. Trump’s impolitic truth-telling seems to have united a hell of a lot of hopeless Americans.

The best of Trump Lemon left for last. “Is there anything you’d like to clear up while I have you here?”

“Nothing, absolutely nothing,” Donald fired back.

There will be no Trump apology tour.

The glories of Hussein’s proctology

by Ilana Mercer

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The message that greeted future Obamacare patients who logged on to Healthcare.gov was as follows: “Please wait. We have a lot of visitors on our site right now and we’re working to make your experience here better. Please wait here until we send you to the login page. Thanks for your patience.”

Healthcare.gov is the deluxe version of Obamacare.

The interminable waits on Healthcare.gov are a harbinger of things to come under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. This so-called “Health Insurance Marketplace” is using the good name of the marketplace in vain. A healthcare cauldron of Obama’s creation, government-run exchanges constitute a planned economy, not a market economy. As such, they will result in long lines precipitated by the inevitable inability of central planners to bring demand and supply into balance.

Like Canadian, Cuban and British nationalized healthcare, Obamacare’s motto will become, “We have boatloads of patients, too few doctors, supplies and equipment and not nearly enough of your money. Don’t like it? Go jump in the lake.”

Like me, you must know Obama-heads (doctors included) who shrugged off the idea that a further centralization of healthcare by Obama’s politburo of proctologists—a modest expansion totaling $2 trillion—would cost them anything at all. (Doctors for Obamacare ought to revel in the 140,000 added codes into which they’ll have to categorize care rendered. These include nine new codes for injuries sustained from the common macaw! You’re more likely to be felled by an Obama-guided drone than by that gentle hook bill.)

I’m already feeling the care. How about you?

Mitt Romney was not “lying” when he told stupid voters that the cost of their healthcare would rise under Obamacare by about $2000 to $3000 annually. Before Obamacare, this household enjoyed 100 percent coverage. Shortly after Obamacare became law, we were notified, like millions around the country, that healthcare experts were hard at work hammering out the details of how to continue caring for us under current conditions (and keep operating).

Our healthcare plan has since altered for the first time ever. The complete coverage we were previously afforded is now a high-deductible, cost-sharing plan with a health-savings account. It has already cost us over 2000 additional dollars in 2013.

Perhaps like Michelle Malkin, I too will lose my coverage. It is not impossible that even a mammoth like Microsoft, whose chairman trumpets Big Government at every turn, will see the benefits to the bottom line of dropping spouses like myself. In this case, Avik Roy of the Manhattan Institute has more bad news. On the individual-market, “Obamacare will increase average … insurance premiums by 99% for men, 62% for Women.” Middle-class Americans Obamacare subsidies will not protect. They “face the double-whammy of higher insurance premiums, and higher taxes to pay for other people’s subsidies.”

Well before Roy, a healthcare expert had warned John Stossel’s viewers that the employer mandate forces every employer of more than 50 workers (insurers are employers) to provide them with a one-size fits all government-designed plan.

The costs of the employer mandate are such that it’s economically more viable for a proprietor to deny coverage and pay a penalty, considering that compliance will add about $1.75 per hour to the cost of a worker and may see a business go under.

Who does this onerous mandate hurt? Entry level hires. An additional $1.75 an hour doesn’t much matter when one is hiring a neurosurgeon. However, 2000 additional dollars a year for a relatively unskilled worker whose productivity—output per unit of labor—is not that high; this is a proposition only government can entertain, given that it derives its revenue fromtaxing, borrowing and minting money.

Not even CNN’s resident physician, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, can doctor the reports any longer. Sad to say, but across the country people have been reporting what Gupta admitted only yesterday. Those who had full-time employment and healthcare insurance may now find themselves downgraded to part-time employees with no insurance, or to the ranks of the unemployed bereft of a job and insurance.

Our staggeringly pompous president is incapable of comprehending that a businessman cannot pay a worker in excess of his productivity and hope to stay solvent.

This same belief plagues the simple-minded pinkos at Politico.com, where two female reporters gushed that “[d]espite the unceasing GOP campaign to sink the law, Obamacare has exceeded expectations in some significant ways.” The gush and tosh was over the fact that the central planner had instructed insurers on how to “better” allocate resources, forcing them “to issue more than $500 million in rebate checks to consumers because they failed to spend at least 80 percent of premiums on medical care.”

Another tenet of this prevailing worldview is that an act of force—a law—is all it takes to make medical manna fall from the heavens.

In April came news that Big Brother will be appointing “navigators” to show the beneficiaries of the bankrupting Affordable Care Act the way: 21,000 navigators in California alone translates into 140,000 of them nationwide, a bureaucratic army that will swell the already swollen federal oink sector. By Pat Buchanan’s telling, navigator pay will run from $20 to $48 an hour, almost $100,000 a year for one federal oinker, for a total of between $5 and 10 billion.

In California alone navigators will cost between $871 million and $2 billion a year.

These navigators will likely be members if the entrenched minorities who speak the languages of the welfariat for which Obamacare has been sculpted. Since the chosen workers will be Obama’s pepes—community organizers, union folks and PlannedParenthood advisers—recruiting new Democrats will be part of their job description.

Despotism is upon us when, as one wag put it, “government officials write laws that apply only to us and not to them.” Lawmakers and staff were supposed to have lost their generous Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, to be replaced by health insurance purchased at the comically calamitous Healthcare.gov.

The proctologist-in-chief caved to the squealing quislings. The 535 members of the Senate and House of Representatives and thousands of their Capitol Hill staff will still retain the subsidies provided by taxpayer largess. Obamacare for thee, but not for me.

That’s what you call the law of rule, not the rule of law.

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Will the US Follow South Africa Down the Path of White Decline?

by Dan Roodt

In the aftermath of President Obama’s victory, the Wall Street Journal described the GOP as the WOP, the White Old Party. Indeed, the Republican Party finds itself in a demographic death spiral as youth, single women, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians overwhelmingly vote Democrat.

In fact, the Democratic Party could become the American version of South Africa’s ANC as immigration and high non-white birth rates ensure a steady stream of Democratic voters eager for “change” or even South African-style “transformation:” the ANC’s term for racial revolution and ever tighter anti-white measures.
The latest proposal is for all charities, such as orphanages or soup kitchens to lose their non-profit status if they serve any whites at all. It would mean that charitable organizations could serve only blacks and that whites would not be allowed to help each other in any organized way, even to alleviate poverty or care for orphaned white children.

In the United States, such extreme anti-white measures are probably unthinkable today, but as recently as the early 1980s the idea of a black president in South Africa was deemed equally unthinkable. Even Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s spokesman Bernard Ingham said at the time: “Anyone who thinks the ANC will form the government of South Africa is living in cloud cuckoo-land.”

In the 1960s, so-called apartheid South Africa was still considered such a desirable place to live that 500,000 Britons emigrated there, fleeing socialist Britain.

The question therefore arises: how could South Africa, once seen as a leading Western power more or less on par with Canada or Australia, collapse so quickly to become “just another African country?” And what lessons can white Americans draw from our tragic demise, as they ponder the outcome of a Presidential election in which the evidence of a demographic turn for the worse is clear for all to see?

Ilana Mercer’s book, Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa went some way towards portraying the horrors and mayhem of whites living under a hostile black government, but the underlying causes of South Africa’s spectacular collapse still need explanation.

A century ago, South African whites still enjoyed demographic parity with blacks and were a majority in most towns and cities. In 1950, demographers sympathetic to the National Party shocked everyone at a Stellenbosch University conference by stating that the black population could grow from 8 million to 20 million by 2000. This prediction seemed so outlandish no one believed it. The recent census confirmed that blacks now represent 40 million, far overshooting the “nightmare scenario” of 1950.

South African whites feared communism more than anything else, but American racial ideologies such as affirmative action and so-called BEE (“black economic empowerment—our version of minority procurement) are doing vastly more damage to them. At least under communism the Bolshoi ballet still functioned and the Soviet Union still had a space program. The pursuit of diversity and multiculturalism in South Africa has, however, led to across the board decline; some small towns regularly suffer water and electricity shortages.

In my opinion, America’s future will not resemble its past, but will look more like today’s South Africa. As the number of whites declines, loss of power will follow, leading to aggressive legislation pushing whites out of jobs and most positions of power.

Many whites will emigrate or move to the remaining red states, just as South Africa’s whites have emigrated since 1994. But ultimately there will be no place to go as the global demographic decline of whites means that even European countries suffer the same fate of dispossession.

Demography is destiny, as Auguste Comte said. There is a mysterious process whereby whites react to racial domination not by rioting or claiming special privileges as other races do, but by working harder, having even fewer children, and quarrelling among themselves. We see this happening in South Africa, in Western Europe and, of course, in America where white Republicans and Democrats are like two dogs fighting over a bone, while a third is about to run away with it and leave them with nothing.

The Republican Party is poised to adopt the attitude of South Africa’s liberal opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, which has forsaken its core white support and practices affirmative action in its own ranks. There are three women on its election posters: one white, one colored or mixed-race, and one black, at once expressing the party’s diversity and its disdain for the white male.

Jared Taylor asks that the Republican Party be loyal to its electorate and become the unabashed champion of white interests. Again, the history of South Africa is instructive. British Prime Minister Harold McMillan made a famous speech in the South African parliament on February 3, 1960 in which he warned us that “the wind of change is blowing through the African continent” and that ultimately we would have to surrender power to the nonwhite majority. Our brilliant leader, Hendrik Verwoerd, promptly replied in an unprepared speech that “the tendency in Africa for nations to become independent, and at the same time to do justice to all, does not only mean being just to the black man of Africa, but also being just to the white man of Africa.”

Verwoerd’s slogan of “justice for the white man too” was rejected by most of the Western world. Lest we forget, the rank and file of the Republican Party rebelled against Ronald Reagan’s veto and passed sanctions against South Africa on Sept. 29, 1986.

Since that time, the U.S. has consistently pursued an anti-white foreign policy. In Southern Africa it supported black Marxist movements such as the African National Congress (ANC) and the South West African Peoples Organization (SWAPO). In Europe, it has called for a large Muslim state, Turkey, to be included in the European Union. Would the American elite ever adopt a pro-white policy domestically while pursuing the opposite of such a policy externally?

There are three forces that are likely to determine the Republican Party’s position on white interests. The first is the wishes of its own electorate; the second is the corporate sector that funds the party, and the third is the mainstream media. America’s large corporations support affirmative action and diversity, while the media support multiculturalism. The GOP will follow their bidding and betray its voters.

Like the whites of the former Rhodesia, South West Africa, and South Africa, Republicans will embark on a forlorn search for conservative allies “of color” whom non-white voters will reject as “traitors.” Even if a black woman such as Condoleezza Rice could be fielded as the next Republican presidential candidate, it is doubtful whether many blacks or Hispanics would vote for her.

Pat Buchanan and others have already chronicled “the death of the West,” but we need to understand the laws of this process, because it follows a pattern of false hopes, interspersed with successive betrayals by white leaders. The final days of the Roman Empire followed the same fatal chain of events.

The crisis is far deeper than most Americans realize. South Africa went from being a powerful, Western country to capitulation in just ten years: from 1980 to 1990. President Barack Obama has already started to fire some of his best generals, just like F.W. de Klerk purged his army of all pro-white generals prior to surrendering to the ANC.

I fear that white Americans take false comfort in “still being the majority.” They do not realize how quickly they will lose that status as global demographics change, and immigration to the US accelerates. South Africa is now being overrun by immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. But America too will become a haven for African immigrants as the population of our continent doubles from the current one billion to two billion within the next 30 or 40 years.

It could even be that Africa’s burgeoning population poses a far greater demographic risk to Americans than Mexicans. Unprecedented technological change, especially in communications, has put immigration information at the disposal of Africans in even the remotest villages.
American whites could become a minority much sooner than they think. That has been our experience in South Africa; people appreciate the enormity of the changes only after it is too late.

Some white Americans may clamor for self-determination, and the South may want to secede again. However, any breakaway group will find itself in the political wilderness, without media support and fighting the forces of demography and history.

We need to form a global network to keep America from falling into the hands of anti-white zealots. We should constantly compare notes on successes and failures, taking heart from every advance. The United States is such a military and economic power that the battle now taking shape within its borders could well determine the fate of the West. If the United States goes the way of South Africa, whites everywhere will be in danger.

The D-bomb has dropped

by Ilana Mercer

In our democracy – for we are no longer a republic that upholds individual rights and limits central power – you vote not for the representative who will defend your inalienable, individual rights. Rather, if you are The Rich – whom the left treats as a reified, rigid state-of-being – you vote defensively. If you are The Poor, you vote extractively – you empower your guy to steal The Other Guy’s stuff and hand it over.

Elections are when the politically dominant majority gets to thump the politically weak minority.

The Moron Media, left and right, are sticking to their story. Barack Obama had “out-hustled” Mitt Romney. Obama ran a better “ground game.” He triumphed “in the trenches,” “neutralized” his rival. He had not stopped campaigning since 2008. The president’s mega-machine was unbeatable, even though his vision was lacking. (As I like to say, a visionary bureaucrat is a voracious one. The best leader is one who leads in limiting his leadership.)

Had Romney, say some of the analysts, been a better tactician, scrappier, less of a patrician – he’d have won.

The media so arguing have advocated for immigration policies that have helped, over the decades, to replace the American people with a new, vastly different people. Although whites broke for Romney in a big way – as a proportion of the voting public, the founding majority is teetering on minority status. It has shrunk to the point where it is becoming powerless against a coalition in opposition.

As an extension of their life’s work, the “news” people aforementioned have anointed a string of progressive commentators who are distinguished from the Democrats with whom they cavort in studios in one way only: They call themselves Republicans.

This lot’s line on the Republicans’ Nov. 6 defeat went as follows: Be nicer to the axis of Asians, blacks, browns (and brown-nosing bimbos) who handed the Democrats a handy victory.

In a word, neutralize the D-Bomb.

Order lIana Mercer’s brilliant polemical work, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa”

For years, those of us who’ve warned about demographics have been dubbed racists. But the D- Bomb has dropped. Its debris is scattered across “the field” upon which Mitt Romney said he “left everything.”

Asians, blacks and Latinos united for Obama.

As always, women voted with their wombs, although married sisters were less wild for big daddy O. (Oh, how we suffer for the female suffrage! I once vowed to “give up my vote if that would guarantee that all women were denied the vote.”)

To the pox of the 19th Amendment – it granted women the vote – add the 26th Amendment. Smuggled into the Constitution by statute, it artificially swelled the ranks of Democratic voters by millions of 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds. While they don’t work for a living, the vote grants youngsters a claim on the livelihood of those who do.

Overlapping voter categories notwithstanding, Obama thus curried favor with females – single ladies, in particular – the faithless, kids and minorities.

Put differently, those earning less than $50,000 trended Barack Obama; those earning more than $50,000, and certainly individuals in the upper-income tax bracket, preferred Mitt Romney.

People with higher incomes constitute a minority, an economically dominant minority (to paraphrase Amy Chua). People with low incomes are in the majority, a politically dominant majority.

The rich are politically impoverished; the poor politically rich. The rich dominate the economy; the poor dominate the polity.

When elections roll around, the politically powerful exact their revenge against the economically powerful.

What kind of a right gives one man control over another man’s life? In a democracy, the right to vote does just that.

As for demographics, they have become destiny. They were not necessarily so. Demographics have been the excuse central planners have advanced to persevere with immigration policies that destroy civil society and shore up the welfare state.

The now-waning West became great not because it outbred the rest of the world. The West was once great because of its human capital – innovation, exploration, science, philosophy; because of superior ideas and the willingness to defend such a civilization, not because it was more populated than the rest of the world.

America doesn’t need more people; it needs better people.

Making nice with constituencies that vote repeatedly and habitually for the candidate who promises them more stuff is tantamount to sleeping with the enemy. The only voters who could be swayed by the promise of the free market are the Democratic Party’s Asian supporters, since they enjoy higher incomes and stabler families than the party’s Hispanic and black devotees.

Ultimately, elections are about perception – the way in which the people perceive the political planks of the two parties.

The American people perceive the Democratic Party as the party of entitlements. They think of the Republican Party as the party of austerity.

History and reality tell us that both parties have grown government into the gigantic, intractable, wealth-gobbling Thing that it is. But in the age of reality TV, reason and reality are meaningless.

Perception is everything.

The idea of an American People is yet another misconception. The extravaganza that had one adorable, carrot-topped kid bawling “no more ‘Bronco Bamma’ and Mitt Romney, please” has ended. But if this advance auction of stolen goods – H. L. Mencken’s definition of an election – proved anything, it is that America is a mass of competing factions.

Some vie to keep more of their rightful property; others fight to get their paws on that very property.

And the tipping point has arrived. This, Nov. 6, 2012, has proven.

Ilana Mercer is a classical liberal (libertarian) writer and a fellow at the “Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.” She is the author of “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” “The titular tease,” explains Ilana in the book, “is meant as a metaphor and is inspired by Ayn Rand’s wise counsel against prostrating civilization to savagery.” Ilana’s website is IlanaMercer.com.. She blogs at www.barelyablog.com.

Romney-Obama debate aggressive

DENVER (AP) — In a showdown at close quarters, an aggressive Mitt Romney sparred with President Barack Obama in their first campaign debate Wednesday night over taxes, deficits and strong steps needed to create jobs in a sputtering national economy. “The status quo is not going to cut it,” declared the Republican challenger.

Democrat Obama in turn accused his rival of seeking to “double down” on economic policies that actually led to the devastating national downturn four years ago — and of evasiveness when it came to prescriptions for tax changes, health care, Wall Street regulation and more.

With early voting already under way in dozens of states, Romney was particularly assertive in the 90-minute event that drew a television audience likely to be counted in the tens of millions — like a man intent on shaking up the campaign with a little less than five weeks to run.

He seemed at ease in debate with the man who has been in the White House for four years. “It’s fun, isn’t it?” Romney said. In a rare post-debate concession, some Democratic strategists not involved in the campaign conceded the president was not at his best and missed opportunities to challenge his rival.

The former Massachusetts governor virtually lectured Obama at one point after the president accused him of seeking to cut education funds. “Mr. President, you’re entitled to your own airplane and your own house, but not your own facts,” he said.

The economy dominated the evening, as it has the race for the White House all year. Pre-debate opinion polls showed Obama with a slight advantage in key battleground states and nationally.

Romney said he had plans to fix the economy, overhaul the tax code, repeal Obama’s health care plan and replace with a better alternative, remake Medicare, pass a substitute for the legislation designed to prevent another financial crash and reduce deficits — but he provided no new specifics despite Obama’s prodding.

Said Obama: “At some point the American people have to ask themselves: Is the reason Governor Romney is keeping all these plans secret, is it because they’re going to be too good? Because middle class families benefit too much? No.”

The two men debate twice more this month, but they were first going their separate ways on Thursday. Obama had campaign stops in Colorado and then Madison, Wis., while Romney was booked into Virginia. All three states are among the nine battlegrounds likely to settle the race.

At times the debate turned into rapid-fire charges and retorts that drew on dense facts and figures that were difficult to follow. The men argued over oil industry subsidies, federal spending as a percentage of the GDP, Medicare cuts, taxes and small businesses and the size of the federal deficit and how it grew.

Obama sometimes seemed somewhat professorial. Romney was more assertive and didn’t hesitate to interrupt the president or moderator Jim Lehrer, who seemed to struggle to maintain control.

The wonky tone of the debate was a stark contrast to the harsh, broad-brush and sometimes personal attacks the two men make in person and in multimillion-dollar television advertising.

At the same time, Romney managed to make some points by personalizing his comments with recollections of people he said he had met on the campaign trail. In another folksy reference, Romney told Lehrer, a veteran of the Public Broadcasting Service, that he would stop the federal subsidy to PBS even though “I love Big Bird.”

Generally polite but pointed, the two men agreed about little if anything.

Obama said his opponent’s plan to reduce all tax rates by 20 percent would cost $5 trillion and benefit the wealthy at the expense of middle income taxpayers.

Shot back Romney: “Virtually everything he just said about my tax plan is inaccurate.”

The former Massachusetts governor and businessman added that Obama’s proposal to allow the expiration of tax cuts on upper-level income would mean tax increases on small businesses that create jobs by the hundreds of thousands.

The two campaign rivals clasped hands and smiled as they strode onto the debate stage at the University of Denver, then waved to the audience before taking their places behind identical lecterns.

There was a quick moment of laughter, when Obama referred to first lady Michelle Obama as “sweetie” and noted it was their 20th anniversary.

Romney added best wishes, and said to the first couple, “I’m sure this is the most romantic place you could imagine, here with me.”

Both candidates’ wives were in the audience.

Without saying so, the two rivals quickly got to the crux of their race — Romney’s eagerness to turn the contest into a referendum on the past four years while the incumbent desires for voters to choose between his plan for the next four years and the one his rival backs.

Romney ticked off the dreary economic facts of life — a sharp spike in food stamps, economic growth “lower this year than last” and “23 million people out of work or stropped looking for work.”

But Obama criticized Romney’s prescriptions and his refusal to raise taxes and said, “if you take such an unbalanced approach then that means you are going to be gutting our investment in schools and education … health care for seniors in nursing homes (and) for kids with disabilities.”

Not surprisingly, the two men disagreed over Medicare, a flash point since Romney placed Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan on his ticket.

The president repeatedly described Romney’s plan as a “voucher program” that would raise out-of-pocket costs on seniors.

He continued, directly addressing the voters at home: “If you’re 54 or 55 you might want to listen because this will affect you.”

Romney said he doesn’t support any changes for current retirees or those close to retirement.

“If you’re 60 or 60 and older you don’t need to listen further,” he said, but he contended that fundamental changes are needed to prevent the system from becoming insolvent as millions of baby boom generation Americans become eligible.

Romney also made a detailed case for repealing Obamacare, the name attached to the health care plan that Obama pushed through Congress in 2010. “It has killed jobs,” he said, and argued that the best approach is to “do what we did in my state.”

Though he didn’t say so, when he was governor Massachusetts passed legislation that required residents to purchase coverage — the so-called individual mandate that conservatives and he oppose on a national level.

Romney also said that Obamacare would cut $716 billion from Medicare over the next decade.

The president said the changes were part of a plan to lengthen the program’s life, and he added that AARP, the seniors lobby, supports it.

With a two-minute closing statement, Obama said he had spent his first four years in office fighting for those in the middle class and those seeking to make it there. “If you’ll vote for me, I’ll fight just as hard in my second term,” he said.

Romney was as critical of Obama’s tenure as he was the moment the two men walked onto the stage.

If the president is re-elected, he predicted continued economic trouble for the middle class, chronic unemployment, higher costs for health insurance and “dramatic cuts to the military.”

Obama took office in the shadow of an economic crisis but promised a turnaround that hasn’t materialized. Economic growth has been sluggish throughout his term, with unemployment above 8 percent since before he took office.

The two presidential rivals also are scheduled to debate on Oct. 16 in Hempstead, N.Y., and Oct. 22 in Boca Raton, Fla.

Vice President Joe Biden and Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin have one debate, Oct. 11 in Danville, Ky. Both men have already begun holding practice sessions.

Chasing non-white votes

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney says he would honor temporary work permits for young illegal immigrants who were allowed to stay in the U.S. because of a decision by President Barack Obama.

Romney told The Denver Post, in an interview appearing in Tuesday’s edition, that people who are able to earn the two-year visas to stay and work wouldn’t see them revoked under a Romney administration.

“The people who have received the special visa that the president has put in place, which is a two-year visa, should expect that the visa would continue to be valid. I’m not going to take something that they’ve purchased,” Romney told the Post, promising to put a comprehensive immigration reform plan into place before those visas expire.

In June, Obama issued a new policy that allows some young illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children to avoid deportation. Romney criticized Obama for circumventing Congress to make the change a few months before the presidential election.

During the Republican presidential primary, Romney said he would veto legislation to provide a path to citizenship for some of the young people who benefited from Obama’s new policy.

The Denver Post interview comes as Romney and Obama are fighting a heated battle for Colorado, whose significant Hispanic population could determine which candidate receives the state’s nine electoral votes.

Obama has steady lead over Romney

Five weeks to Election Day, President Barack Obama is within reach of the 270 electoral votes needed to win a second term. Republican Mitt Romney’s path to victory is narrowing.

To overtake Obama, Romney would need to quickly gain the upper hand in nearly all of the nine states where he and Obama are competing the hardest.

Polls show the president with a steady lead in many of them as Romney looks to shift the dynamics of the race, starting with their first debate Wednesday night in Denver.

Obama headed to Las Vegas for an evening rally and planned to stay in Nevada as he prepared for the debate. Romney remained in Boston on Sunday, going through preparations of his own for Wednesday’s event.

Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan says there’s time for the Republican ticket to win. “In these kinds of races people focus near the end, and that’s what’s happening now,” he told “Fox News Sunday.”

A prominent Romney supporter, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said he expected Romney’s debate performance in Denver to shake up the campaign after a “tough couple of weeks.” Christie predicted Romney would do “extraordinarily well,” and that come Thursday morning, “this whole race is going to be turned upside down.”

But a top Obama adviser, David Plouffe, cast doubt on how much the debate would turn around the race.

“They expect to come out of this with the race fundamentally changed. Now, what does that mean?” asked Plouffe. “If it’s going to fundamentally change, that means in seven or 10 days from now you’ll see states like Ohio tied, the state of Iowa tied because that’s what really matters here. So they have set the bar quite high.”

If the election were held today, an Associated Press analysis shows Obama would win at least 271 electoral votes, with likely victories in crucial Ohio and Iowa along with 19 other states and the District of Columbia. Romney would win 23 states for a total of 206.

To oust the Democratic incumbent, Romney would need to take up-for-grabs Florida, Colorado, Nevada, North Carolina, New Hampshire and Virginia, which would put him at 267 votes, and upend Obama in either Ohio or Iowa.

U.S. presidents are elected not by national popular vote but in state-by-state contests. Each state gets one electoral vote for each of its representatives in the House and Senate. There are 538 votes in the Electoral College, and a candidate must have at least 270 to win. Except for Maine and Nebraska, states award all their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the state.

The AP analysis isn’t meant to be predictive. Rather, it is intended to provide a snapshot of a race that until recently has been stubbornly close in the small number of the most contested states.

It is based on a review of public and private polls, television advertising and numerous interviews with campaign and party officials as well as Republican and Democratic strategists in the competitive states and in Washington.

In the final weeks before the Nov. 6 vote, Obama is enjoying a burst of momentum and has benefited from growing optimism about the economy as well as a series of Romney stumbles. Most notably, a secret video surfaced recently showing the Republican nominee telling a group of wealthy donors that 47 percent of Americans pay no federal income taxes and consider themselves victims dependent on the government.

To be sure, much could change in the coming weeks, which will feature three presidential and one vice presidential debate. A host of unknowns, both foreign and domestic, could rock the campaign, knocking Obama off course and giving Romney a boost in the homestretch.

Barring that, Romney’s challenge is formidable.

Obama started the campaign with a slew of electoral vote-rich coastal states like New York and California already in his win column. From the outset, Romney faced fewer paths to cobbling together the state-by-state victories needed to reach the magic number.

It’s grown even narrower in recent weeks, as Romney has seen his standing slip in polls in Ohio, with 18 electoral votes, and Iowa, with six. That forced him to abandon plans to try to challenge Obama on traditionally Democratic turf so he could redouble his efforts in Ohio and Iowa, as well as Colorado, Florida, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Nevada and Virginia.

Romney is hoping that come Election Day, on-the-fence voters tip his way. But there are hurdles there, too.

Early voting is under way in dozens of states, and national and key state surveys show undecided voters feel more favorably toward Obama than Romney.

Ohio’s shifting landscape illustrates Romney’s troubles over the past few weeks. No Republican has won the presidency without taking Ohio.

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Republicans and Democrats agree that Obama’s solid lead in public and private polling in the state is for real. Over the past month, the president has benefited from an improving economic situation in the state; its 7.2 percent unemployment rate is below the 8.1 percent national average. Obama’s team also attributes his Ohio edge to the auto industry bailout and General Motors plant expansions in eastern Ohio.

Obama and his campaign have hammered Romney on his tax policies, arguing that the former Massachusetts governor favors the rich while the president is a defender of everyone else.

Underscoring his challenges, Romney also has been forced to spend millions of dollars a week defending himself in North Carolina, a Republican-leaning state that’s more conservative than most of the states that will decide the election.

Polls now show a competitive race there. Democrats boast of having registered 250,000 new voters in the state since April 2011. It’s an eye-popping total in a state that Obama won by just 14,000 votes four years ago. A flood of new voters, presumably a chunk of them Democrats, could help keep that state within Obama’s reach this year.

Romney now faces an extraordinarily tight path and few options but to bear down in the states where he is competing aggressively. Time, though, is running out.

Plouffe appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and ABC’s “This Week.” Christie spoke on NBC, ABC and CBS’ “Face the Nation.” – AP

Treat Iran like South Africa – Romney

Mitt Romney accused President Barack Obama on Tuesday of trying to “paper over” deadly unrest and crises in the Middle East and failing to stand up to Iran in its quest for a nuclear bomb.

Shortly after the president laid out an unapologetic defense of his under-fire Arab Spring policy in a speech to the UN General Assembly in New York, the Republican nominee insisted the White House was shrinking from its responsibility to lead through strength in the volatile region.

He particularly took issue with Obama’s weekend characterization of Middle East troubles as “bumps in the road” while countries like Egypt and Tunisia undergo sensitive transitions to democracy.

“Those developments include 20,000 people being killed in Syria, a Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt, Iran on the cusp of becoming a nuclear power, and of course the assassination of our ambassador in Libya,” Romney told CNN while campaigning in the critical battleground state of Ohio.

“I’m not sure whether any of those qualifies as a bump in the road. They certainly don’t in my view.”

“The White House’s failure to acknowledge that the assassination of our ambassador was a terrorist attack, a terrorist event, suggests that they’re trying to paper over the seriousness of what’s happening in the Middle East.”

His comment came despite the White House last week describing the assault on the US consulate in Benghazi, which killed four Americans including ambassador Chris Stevens, as a “terrorist attack” that could have links to Al-Qaeda.

Romney also said Obama has pledged time after time to prevent Iran and its President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from acquiring a nuclear weapon, but that “it’s very clear that his policies with regards to Iran have not dissuaded them from becoming nuclear by one iota.”

The Republican also reiterated his charge that the Obama administration should be “indicting Ahmadinejad under the Genocide Convention for incitation to genocide, (and) treating the diplomats of Iran like the pariah they are, the way we treated the diplomats under South Africa under apartheid.”

Mitt Romney ‘dyeing his face brown’ in attempt to lure Hispanic voters

US-VOTE-2012-REPUBLICAN CAMPAIGN — US Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney waves to one of his sons and grandsons before addressing the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Los Angeles on September 17, 2012.

Mitt Romney appeared on Univision Wednesday alongside Jorge Ramos and Maria Elena Salinas, but something was a little peculiar about his appearance — his skin tone. Looking back at the hundreds of photos logging his every moment on the campaign trail, the Republican presidential nominee is usually not so shockingly tan.

While his orangey-brown appearance on Univision could have been the result of bad lighting or a makeup mishap, left-wing blog the Democratic Underground concluded that Romney “dyed his face brown for his Univision interview.”

The claim is not completely out of the ballpark. After all, as Gawker points out, Romney did say “it would be helpful to be Latino,” in a video secretly recorded at a campaign fundraiser earlier this year.

Appearing at a campaign fundraiser in Atlanta, Georgia, before his Univision interview, Romney showed a bit more color, but nowhere near the amount of bronze as seen on stage at the 6:30 p.m. ET filming.

If Romney did indeed alter his skin tone, it was likely done in the past few days. Three days earlier, on Sunday, Sept. 16, Romney appeared much paler when he landed in Missouri.

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And on Monday, Sept. 17, when Romney addressed Los Angeles’ Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, his face was a bit redder than usual.

With his bustling campaign schedule, Romney spending enough time outside to develop a natural tan of that color within the time frame is doubtful — making it even more possible that he somehow altered his skin tone as Democratic Underground suggests.

Though the intentions behind this plausible move are a mystery, some have ventured to make a guess, speculating that Romney’s “brownface” is an attempt to appeal to Latino voters — a voting bloc Romney desperately needs if he hopes to win the election.

Romney is currently trailing nearly 40 points behind Obama in Latino support.

To aid in his effort to lure Hispanic voters, the campaign released two new ads on Monday detailing Romney’s 5-point economic plan and criticizing Obama’s record. Romney also made a major push for Hispanic voters Monday, speaking at the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Los Angeles and granting interviews to Univision and Telemundo.

But that push could be partially undermined by another of the covert video clips, where Romney candidly discusses some of the problems encountered by his campaign, including trouble attracting female and Hispanic voters.

Romney jokes of his father, who was born in Mexico, “Had he been born of Mexican parents, I’d have a better shot of winning this.”

Later, Romney admits that Republicans are having a difficult time attracting Hispanic voters — and there could be severe repercussions for the party.

“We are having a much harder time with Hispanic voters, and if the Hispanic voting bloc becomes as committed to the Democrats as the African-American voting bloc has in the past, why, we’re in trouble as a party and, I think, as a nation,” Romney said.

Romney also told donors the campaign was using his wife, Ann, “sparingly … so that people don’t get tired of her.”

And he admits that the president remains popular with many voters, which makes attacking him difficult.

“But when you say, ‘Are you disappointed that his policies haven’t worked?’ they say yes,” Romney said. “And because they voted for him, they don’t want to be told that they were wrong, that he’s a bad guy, that he did bad things, that he’s corrupt. Those people that we have to get, they want to believe they did the right thing, but he just wasn’t up to the task.” – various sources

Accusations of racism at Republican national convention

Tampa – Two people were ejected from the Republican National Convention for throwing nuts at an African-American camera operator for CNN and telling her: “This is how we feed animals,” the cable network said.

The incident happened on Tuesday in the Tampa Bay Times Forum where delegates officially nominated Mitt Romney as the Republican candidate to face President Barack Obama in the Nov. 6 election.

“Two attendees tonight exhibited deplorable behavior. Their conduct was inexcusable and unacceptable. This kind of behavior will not be tolerated,” CNN quoted the convention as saying in a statement.

Multiple witnesses saw the incident and RNC security and police immediately removed the two people from the forum, CNN said. – Reuters

Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan attacks Obama’s economic ‘record of failure’

NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — Appearing for the first time as Mitt Romney’s running mate, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan is attacking President Barack Obama for what he calls a “record of failure.”

The seven-term congressman says Obama has led the “worst economic recovery in 70 years.” He notes that unemployment has been above 8 percent for more than three years – the longest stretch since the Great Depression.

He spoke in remarks prepared for delivery at the first public appearance of the new GOP ticket.

Ryan, the architect of a controversial budget plan, is promising not to “duck the tough issues.” And he says he has the courage to tell the truth.

Mitt Romney’s ‘comments racist and out of touch’

JERUSALEM – Mitt Romney told Jewish donors Monday that their culture is part of what has allowed them to be more economically successful than the nearby Palestinians, outraging Palestinian leaders who called his comments racist and out of touch.

“As you come here and you see the GDP per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000 dollars, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality,” the Republican presidential candidate told about 40 wealthy donors who breakfasted around a U-shaped table at the luxurious King David Hotel.

The reaction of Palestinian leaders to Romney’s comments was swift and pointed.

“What is this man doing here?” said Saeb Erekat, a top Palestinian official. “Yesterday, he destroyed negotiations by saying Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, and today he is saying Israeli culture is more advanced than Palestinian culture. Isn’t this racism?”

The economic disparity between the Israelis and the Palestinians is actually much greater than Romney stated. Israel had a per capita gross domestic product of about $31,000 in 2011, while the West Bank and Gaza had a per capita GDP of just over $1,500, according to the World Bank.

Romney, seated next to billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson at the head of the table, told donors at his fundraiser that he had read books and relied on his own business experience to understand why the difference is so great.

“And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things,” Romney said, citing an innovative business climate, the Jewish history of thriving in difficult circumstances and the “hand of providence.”

Romney, in comparing the Israeli and Palestinian economies, made no mention of the fact that Israel has controlled the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem since capturing them in the 1967 war. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but continues to control access, and has enforced a crippling border blockade since the Islamic militant Hamas seized the territory in 2007.

In the West Bank, Israel retains overall control, and Palestinians only have limited self-rule. Israel controls all border crossings in and out of the West Bank, and continues to restrict Palestinian trade and movement.

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have said repeatedly that the Palestinian economy can only grow if Israel lifts those restrictions.

“It’s Israeli occupiers and Palestinians under occupation, and that’s why Palestinians cannot realize their potential,” Erekat said.

The breakfast with top donors – including Adelson, New York Jets owner Woody Johnson and hedge fund manager Paul Singer – concluded Romney’s visit to Israel, the second leg of a three-nation overseas tour designed to bolster the his foreign policy credentials.

Standing on Israeli soil for the first time as the GOP’s presumptive presidential nominee, Romney on Sunday declared Jerusalem to be the capital of the Jewish state and said the United States has promised never to “look away from our passion and commitment to Israel.”

The status of Jerusalem is a critical issue in peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

During his visit to Israel, Romney did not meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas or visit the West Bank. He held a brief meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

Romney’s campaign says his trip abroad, which began in England last week, is aimed at improving the former Massachusetts governor’s foreign policy experience through a series of meetings with foreign leaders. The candidate has largely avoided direct criticism of U.S. President Barack Obama while on foreign soil.

The Jerusalem fundraiser, however, was a political event that raised more than $1 million for Romney’s campaign. It marks at least the second finance event during his tour. The first, in London, attracted about 250 people to a $2,500 per person fundraiser.

Both presidential candidates have aggressively courted American donors living abroad, a practice that is legal and has been used for decades.

Romney’s declaration that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital was keeping with claims made by Israeli governments for decades, even though the United States, like other nations, maintains its embassy in Tel Aviv.

His remarks on the subject during his speech drew a standing ovation from his audience, which included Adelson, the American businessman who has promised to donate more than $100 million to help defeat Obama.

Adelson was among a several donors who flew to Israel for a day of sightseeing with Romney in addition to private meetings with top Israeli officials.

A group of donors also met with a top aide to President Benjamin Netanyahu, one donor said on the condition of anonymity to discuss private meetings.

Romney met with Netanyahu and other leaders before his speech Sunday. He also visited the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site, where he was mobbed by worshippers.

In his remarks, Romney steered clear of overt criticism of Obama, even though he said the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran “has only become worse” in the past five years.

Romney flew to the Middle East from Britain, where he caused a stir by questioning whether officials there were fully prepared for the Olympic Games. A stop in Poland will complete his trip.

Four years ago, Obama visited Israel as a presidential candidate, part of a five-nation trip meant to establish his own foreign policy credentials.

A goal of Romney’s overseas trip is to demonstrate his confidence on the world stage, but his stop in Israel also was designed to appeal to evangelical voters at home and to cut into Obama’s support among Jewish voters and donors. A Gallup survey of Jewish voters released Friday showed Obama with a 68-25 edge over Romney.

Romney and other Republicans have said Obama is insufficiently supportive of Israel.

Obama, Romney silent on gun control after theater shooting

The shooting that killed 12 people at a Colorado movie theater sidetracked the U.S. presidential race but President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney both stayed away from the polarizing topic of gun control.

The massacre Friday obliged both candidates to cast aside the increasingly bitter tone of the race and reach for a rare moment of American harmony. Obama and Romney swiftly stripped their day of overt campaigning that surely would have seemed crass given the enormity of the tragedy.

“There are going to be other days for politics,” Obama said from one key electoral state, Florida. From another one, New Hampshire, Romney said much the same.

A man opened fire on people watching the new Batman movie in an Aurora, Colorado, theater outside Denver. Twelve people were killed and dozens more were wounded by a suspect said to be using an assault rifle, a shotgun and a handgun in the attack.

“This is a time for each of us to look into our hearts and remember how much we love one another, and how much we love and how much we care for our great country,” Romney said at a podium stripped of campaign paraphernalia, in front of a large American flag.

Amid their calls for unity and prayer, neither Obama nor Romney said anything of gun control, an issue that has been all but absent from the campaign debate this year. Both men have shifted with the times, moving away from stances that favored tougher gun control laws.

The issue may rise anew.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a gun control advocate, said, “You know, soothing words are nice, but maybe it’s time that the two people who want to be president of the United States stand up and tell us what they are going to do about it.”

Twenty years ago, polls showed that a substantial majority of Americans – nearly 80 percent in 1990 – supported stricter limits on guns. Now Americans appear evenly divided between those who want tougher restrictions and those who want to stick with current laws.

Gun rights groups are a powerful lobby in the United States, where easy access to guns is a way of life in many of the more conservative and rural areas. The right to bear arms is guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, alongside such basic rights as free speech and freedom of religion.

During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama called for reinstating a federal ban on assault weapons that began during the administration of former President Bill Clinton and expired under President George W. Bush. But since his election he hasn’t tried to get that done or pushed other gun control proposals, either.

The powerful National Rifle Association has attacked Obama as an anti-gun zealot nonetheless.

At the same time, the president has deeply disappointed gun-control advocates. In its most recent assessment, in 2010, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence failed Obama on seven issues it deemed important.

“As someone who has suffered the lasting impact of gun violence, and president of Brady, I can tell you that we don’t want sympathy. We want action,” Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said in a statement.

As a U.S. senator, Obama voted to leave gun makers and dealers open to civil lawsuits, and as an Illinois state lawmaker he supported a ban on all forms of semiautomatic weapons and tighter state restrictions generally on firearms.

Romney backed some gun control measures when he was governor of Massachusetts, and when he challenged Sen. Edward Kennedy in 1994 he declared, “I don’t line up with the NRA.”

This spring, competing for the Republican presidential nomination, Romney told the NRA he was a guardian of the Second Amendment of the Constitution that guarantees the right to bear arms.

Following last year’s killing of six people and the wounding of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, Obama called for a series of steps to “keep those irresponsible, law-breaking few from getting their hands on a gun in the first place.”

Among those steps was a better background check system. And White House spokesman Jay Carney said Friday that system has improved.

But the administration has offered no legislation or detailed updates about how it is pursuing the president’s previous promises.

“The president believes that we need to take common-sense measures that protect Second Amendment rights of Americans, while ensuring that those who should not have guns under existing law do not get them,” Carney said.

Others, including Mayor Bloomberg, were looking for more specificity. The question is simple, he said in a radio interview: “What are they going to do about guns?” – AP

Romney takes Wisconsin, Maryland, DC

MILWAUKEE (AP) — Mitt Romney tightened his grip on the Republican presidential nomination Tuesday night, sweeping primaries in Wisconsin, Maryland and Washington, D.C., with time left over to swap charges with President Barack Obama.

“Four more years?” Romney asked sarcastically of the president as supporters cheered in Milwaukee.

He said Obama was “a little out of touch” after spending four years surrounded by the trappings of power and had presided over near-record job losses as well as increases in poverty, home foreclosures, government debt and gasoline prices. In Washington, Obama said things could be worse – and he predicted they would be if Romney and the Republicans got their way.

The victories enabled Romney to pad his already-wide delegate lead over Republican rival Rick Santorum, who flashed defiance in the face of pressure to abandon his own candidacy in the name of party unity.

Wisconsin was the marquee contest of the night, the only place of the three on the ballot where Santorum mounted a significant effort. Romney’s victory there marked his fourth in little more than a month in a belt of industrial states that also included Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois.

Returns from 80 percent of the state’s precincts showed Romney with 42 percent of the vote to 38 percent for Santorum, 12 percent for Ron Paul and 6 percent for Newt Gingrich.

Returns from 92 percent of Maryland’s precincts showed Romney with 47 percent of the vote to 29 percent for Santorum, 11 percent for Gingrich and 10 percent for Ron Paul.

With all precincts counted in Washington, Romney had 70 percent of the vote to 12 percent for Paul and 10 percent for Gingrich. Santorum was not on the ballot.

“We won `em all,” Romney declared, a former Massachusetts governor now the nominee-in-waiting for a party eager to reclaim the White House.

For Romney, the end of the contested primary campaign could hardly come soon enough. Obama has gained in the polls in recent months, particularly among women, as Republicans vie among themselves for support from a conservative party electorate. Santorum has devoted more time to social concerns – including birth control – than Romney, who has generally stayed focused on economic issues.

Additionally, surveys indicate Americans are growing more optimistic about the overall state of the economy. Unemployment has fallen in recent months, but it is still at a relatively high 8.3 percent of the workforce.

Romney won at least 74 delegates in the three races, with 21 yet to be allocated.

That pushed his total to 646 of the 1,144 needed to clinch the nomination. Santorum has 272 delegates, Gingrich 135 and Paul 51.

Interviews with voters leaving Republican polling places in Maryland and Wisconsin showed an electorate more concerned with a candidate’s ability to ability to defeat Obama than with the strength of his conservatism, his moral character or his stand on the issues. Similar soundings in earlier states have consistently worked to Romney’s advantage.

Voters in both states were less apt to be born again or evangelical Christians than in most previous contests – 37 percent in Wisconsin and 33 percent in Maryland. Based on earlier contests, that, too, suggested an advantage for Romney.

Increasingly, Romney and many senior figures in his party have begun behaving as if the primaries were an afterthought, hoping to pivot to the fall campaign and criticism of Obama.

“He gets full credit or blame for what’s happened in this economy and what’s happened to gasoline prices under his watch and what’s happened to our schools and what’s happened to our military forces,” Romney said of the president while campaigning in Waukesha, Wis.

Obama, in a speech to the annual meeting of The Associated Press, said a House-passed budget written by Republicans was “antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who’s willing to work for it. … It is a prescription for decline.”

When he wasn’t focusing his rhetoric on Obama, Romney prodded Santorum to quit the race, suggesting a refusal to do so could cost the party the election in November.

“The right thing for us, I think, is to get a nominee as soon as we can and be able to focus on Barack Obama,” Romney said in an interview with Fox News. “You have to remember that it was Ross Perot that allowed Bill Clinton to win” in 1992, he added, a reference to the Texan who ran as an independent that year.

Santorum, in his home state of Pennsylvania, took note of the calls for him to exit the race.

“Ladies and gentleman, Pennsylvania and half the other people in this country have yet to be heard, and we’re going to go out and campaign here and across this nation to make sure that their voices are heard in the next few months.”

Santorum made little or no effort in Maryland, was not on the ballot in Washington, D.C., and concentrated much of his time in Wisconsin in rural areas.

He all but conceded defeat in advance in Wisconsin, retreating to Mars, Pa., for an election night appearance in his home state.

Wisconsin was the fourth industrial state to vote in a little more than a month after Michigan, Ohio and Illinois, a string that Romney has exploited to gain momentum as well as a growing delegate lead in the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. He and a super PAC supporting him have greatly outspent his rivals in state after state.

The surveys of voters in Maryland’s and Wisconsin’s GOP presidential primaries were conducted for AP and the television networks by Edison Research. They included results among 1,243 voters interviewed Tuesday as they left polling places at 25 randomly selected sites in Maryland, and among 2,095 Wisconsin voters as they left 35 polling places across that state. Results from both states had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Already, the early outlines of a general election ad war are visible. Obama’s re-election campaign is airing commercials in a half-dozen battleground states that accuse Romney of siding with Big Oil “for their tax breaks, attacking higher mileage standards and renewables.”

The ads are a rapid response to $3 million in commercials aired by an outside group, American Energy Reliance, blaming the president for rising gasoline prices.

In his campaign for the Republican nomination, Romney has collected endorsements from former President George H.W. Bush, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a tea party favorite, and Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, author of a conservative budget that Republicans pushed through the House last week and is certain to play a prominent role in the fall campaign for the White House.

At the same time, Romney continues to struggle for support from some of the party’s most reliable conservative voters. In the past five weeks, while winning across the Midwest, he has lost to Santorum in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, all part of the traditional Southern political base.