Venezuela postpones inauguration for cancer-stricken Chavez

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela will postpone the inauguration of President Hugo Chavez for a new term due to health problems, the government said on Tuesday, another sign the socialist leader's cancer may be bringing an end to his 14 years in power.
The 58-year-old former soldier who has dominated the South American OPEC nation since 1999 has not been heard from since surgery on December 11 in Cuba - his fourth operation since he was diagnosed with an undisclosed type of cancer in June 2011.
The announcement outraged opposition leaders who insist that Chavez must be sworn in before the National Assembly on January 10 as laid out in the constitution, or temporarily step aside and leave an ally in power.
"The commander president wants us to inform that, based on his medical team's recommendations, the post-operative recovery should extend past January 10," said Vice President Nicolas Maduro, Chavez's chosen successor, in a letter read to the legislature.
"As a result, he will not be able to be present at the National Assembly on that date."
The letter said authorities would seek another date for the inauguration ceremony but did not say when it would take place or give a time frame for Chavez's return from Havana.
Rather than being sworn in by the legislature, he would take his oath at a later date before the Supreme Court, the letter said, as allowed by the constitution.
Government leaders insist Chavez is completely fulfilling his duties as head of state, even though official medical bulletins say he has a severe pulmonary infection and has had trouble breathing.
The government has called for a massive rally outside the presidential palace on Thursday, and allied presidents including Uruguay's Jose Mujica and Bolivia's Evo Morales have confirmed they will visit Venezuela this week despite Chavez's absence.
Argentine President Cristina Fernandez has announced plans to visit Chavez in Havana on Friday.
But the unprecedented silence by the president - famous for regularly speaking for hours in meandering broadcasts - has left many convinced he could be in his last days.
His resignation or death would upend politics in the oil-rich nation, where he enjoys a deity-like status among poor supporters thankful for his social largesse.
His critics call him a fledgling dictator who has squandered billions of dollars from crude sales while dashing the independence of state institutions.
CONSTITUTION DISPUTE
The constitution does not specify what happens if the president does not take office on January 10.
The Supreme Court, controlled by Chavez allies, called a news conference for Wednesday. It is widely expected to announce an interpretation of the constitution that will give Chavez leeway to take office when he is fit to do so.
If he dies or steps aside, new elections would be called within 30 days. Before leaving for Havana in December, the president instructed his supporters to back Maduro in that vote if he were unable to continue.
Opposition leaders argue that Congress chief and Chavez ally Diosdado Cabello should take over, as mandated by the constitution if the president's absence is formally declared.
Cabello has ruled that out, saying the president continues to be in charge.
"Who could have believed the opposition would be screaming for Diosdado Cabello to be given the presidency of the republic?" he said during a rambunctious session of Congress. "That's crazy, the opposition is losing it."
Meanwhile opposition deputies accused the Socialist Party of failing to follow Chavez's instructions - a scene that would have been unimaginable before Chavez's prolonged absence.
"President Chavez is the only one among you who has spoken clearly," said opposition leader Julio Borges.
He was drowned out by pro-Chavez deputies clapping and chanting the socialist leader's name and rebuffed by Cabello, who had long been considered a potential successor to Chavez until he was passed over for Maduro.
"It's not my fault you weren't chosen, don't take your frustration out on me," Borges quipped.
Another opposition deputy complained that during the debate a copy of the constitution was thrown across the chamber from the direction of the Socialist Party's deputies.
Chavez's supporters have held near-daily vigils for his recovery, while opposition activists accuse the president's allies of a Cuban-inspired manipulation of the situation.
Maduro has taken over the day-to-day running of the government and looks set to continue in the role past Thursday.
The mustachioed former bus driver lacks Chavez's charisma, but he has sought to imitate the president's style with vituperative attacks on the opposition and televised ribbon-cutting ceremonies.
With the micro-managing Chavez away, major policy decisions in Venezuela, such as a widely expected devaluation of the bolivar currency, appear to be on hold.
Venezuelan bond prices, which had soared in recent weeks on Chavez's health woes, dipped on Monday and Tuesday as investors' expectations of a quick government change apparently dimmed.
"The 'regime change' euphoria seems excessive taking into account the unclear legal transition and perhaps, more importantly, the risk that regime change does not allow for policy change," New York-based Jefferies' managing director Siobhan Morden said in a note on the bonds.

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Officials: US may leave no troops in Afghanistan

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration gave the first explicit signal Tuesday that it might leave no troops in Afghanistan after December 2014, an option that defies the Pentagon's view that thousands of troops may be needed to keep a lid on al-Qaida and to strengthen Afghan forces.
"The U.S. does not have an inherent objective of 'X' number of troops in Afghanistan," said Ben Rhodes, a White House deputy national security adviser. "We have an objective of making sure there is no safe haven for al-Qaida in Afghanistan and making sure that the Afghan government has a security force that is sufficient to ensure the stability of the Afghan government."
The U.S. now has 66,000 troops in Afghanistan, down from a peak of about 100,000 as recently as 2010. The U.S. and its NATO allies agreed in November 2010 that they would withdraw all their combat troops by the end of 2014, but they have yet to decide what future missions will be necessary and how many troops they would require.
At stake is the risk of Afghanistan's collapse and a return to the chaos of the 1990s that enabled the Taliban to seize power and provide a haven for Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network. Fewer than 100 al-Qaida fighters are believed to remain in Afghanistan, although a larger number are just across the border in Pakistani sanctuaries.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has said he foresees a need for a U.S. counterterrorism force in Afghanistan beyond 2014, plus a contingent to train Afghan forces. He is believed to favor an option that would keep about 9,000 troops in the country.
Administration officials in recent days have said they are considering a range of options for a residual U.S. troop presence of as few as 3,000 and as many as 15,000, with the number linked to a specific set of military-related missions like hunting down terrorists.
Asked in a conference call with reporters whether zero was now an option, Rhodes said, "That would be an option we would consider."
His statement could be interpreted as part of an administration negotiating strategy. On Friday Afghan President Hamid Karzai is scheduled to meet President Barack Obama at the White House to discuss ways of framing an enduring partnership beyond 2014.
The two are at odds on numerous issues, including a U.S. demand that any American troops who would remain in Afghanistan after the combat mission ends be granted immunity from prosecution under Afghan law. Karzai has resisted, while emphasizing his need for large-scale U.S. support to maintain an effective security force after 2014.
In announcing last month in Kabul that he had accepted Obama's invitation to visit this week, Karzai made plain his objectives.
"Give us a good army, a good air force and a capability to project Afghan interests in the region," Karzai said, and he would gladly reciprocate by easing the path to legal immunity for U.S. troops.
Karzai is scheduled to meet Thursday with Panetta at the Pentagon and with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at the State Department.
Without explicitly mentioning immunity for U.S. troops, Obama's top White House military adviser on Afghanistan, Doug Lute, told reporters Tuesday that the Afghans will have to give the U.S. certain "authorities" if it wants U.S. troops to remain.
"As we know from our Iraq experience, if there are no authorities granted by the sovereign state, then there's not room for a follow-on U.S. military mission," Lute said. He was referring to 2011 negotiations with Iraq that ended with no agreement to grant legal immunity to U.S. troops who would have stayed to help train Iraqi forces. As a result, no U.S. troops remain in Iraq.
David Barno, a former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, wrote earlier this week that vigorous debate has been under way inside the administration on a "minimalist approach" for post-2014 Afghanistan.
In an opinion piece for ForeignPolicy.com on Monday, Barno said the "zero option" was less than optimal but "not necessarily an untenable one." Without what he called the stabilizing influence of U.S. troops, Barno cautioned that Afghanistan could "slip back into chaos."
Rhodes said Obama is focused on two main outcomes in Afghanistan: ensuring that the country does not revert to being the al-Qaida haven it was prior to Sept. 11, 2001, and getting the government to the point where it can defend itself.
"That's what guides us, and that's what causes us to look for different potential troop numbers — or not having potential troops in the country," Rhodes said.
He predicted that Obama and Karzai would come to no concrete conclusions on international military missions in Afghanistan beyond 2014, and he said it likely would be months before Obama decides how many U.S. troops — if any — he wants to keep there.
Rhodes said Obama remains committed to further reducing the U.S. military presence this year, although the pace of that withdrawal will not be decided for a few months. Last year the U.S. military pulled 23,000 troops out of Afghanistan on Obama's orders.

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Rwanda opposes use of drones by the U.N. in eastern Congo

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Rwanda on Tuesday opposed the use of surveillance drones in eastern Congo as proposed by the United Nations until there is a full assessment of their use, saying it did not want Africa to become a laboratory for foreign intelligence devices.
Envoys said U.N. peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous told the Security Council during a closed-door session that the U.N mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo plans to deploy three unmanned aerial vehicles, also known as drones, in the country's conflict-torn eastern provinces.
The United Nations has wanted surveillance drones for eastern Congo since 2008. Alan Doss, the former head of the U.N. peacekeeping force there at the time asked the Security Council for helicopters, drones and other items to improve real-time intelligence gathering.
The request was never met, but the idea generated new interest last year after M23 rebels began taking over large swathes of eastern Congo.
Rwanda, which has denied allegations by U.N. experts that it has been supporting M23, made clear it considered Ladsous' call for deploying drones premature.
"It is not wise to use a device on which we don't have enough information," Olivier Nduhungirehe, Rwanda's deputy U.N. ambassador, told Reuters. "Africa shall not become a laboratory for intelligence devices from overseas."
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is expected to submit a report to the Security Council in the coming weeks recommending ways of improving the U.N. force in Congo, known as MONUSCO.
The U.N. force in Congo suffered a severe blow to its image in November after it failed to intervene when well-equipped M23 rebels seized control of the eastern Congolese city of Goma. The rebels withdrew after 11 days.
Congolese troops, aided by U.N. peacekeepers, have been battling M23 - who U.N. experts and Congolese officials say are backed by both Rwanda and Uganda - for nearly a year in the mineral-rich east of the country.
Diplomats said the Rwandan delegation informed the Security Council behind closed doors on Tuesday that MONUSCO would be a "belligerent" if it deployed drones in eastern Congo now.
Nduhungirehe explained this position, saying it was vital to know before deploying drones what the implications would be for individual countries' sovereignty. He said Rwanda had no problem with helicopters, night-vision equipment or other high-tech gadgetry for the U.N. peacekeeping force.
Other diplomats, including some from Europe, have also expressed reservations. They said there were unanswered questions about who would receive the information from the drones and how widely it would be disseminated. They expressed discomfort at the idea of the United Nations becoming an active gatherer of intelligence.
Russia and China are among the nations on the council that have concerns about the deployment of drones in eastern Congo, diplomats told Reuters.
Western diplomats from countries that support the deployment of drones say Rwanda's opposition is the first manifestation of the difficulties they expect to face over Congo while Rwanda is on the Security Council for the next two years.

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Son says Romney was reluctant to run for president again: report

 Republican Mitt Romney's family had to convince him to make a second bid for the presidency because he was reluctant to run again after failing to secure his party's nomination in 2008, Romney's son told the Boston Globe on Sunday.
In an article that examined what went wrong with Romney's losing 2012 presidential campaign, Tagg Romney said his father Mitt said he had no intention of running again after he did not become the Republican presidential nominee in 2008.
Arizona Senator John McCain secured the Republican nomination that year and lost to Democrat Barack Obama in the presidential election.
In order to overcome his father's reluctance, Tagg Romney told the Globe he and his mother Ann worked to change his mind.
"He wanted to be president less than anyone I've met in my life," Tagg Romney told the paper. "If he could have found someone else to take his place ... he would have been ecstatic to step aside."
Despite predictions that the 2012 election would be close, Romney, a former Massachusetts governor and businessman, fell well short of the 270 electoral votes needed to defeat President Obama.
In November, Obama won re-election with 332 electoral votes and won most of the battleground states, including Ohio and Florida.

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Deportations of illegal immigrants in 2012 reach new US record

The United States deported more than 400,000 illegal immigrants in 2012, the most of any year in the nation’s history, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reports.
The record number, released Friday, is also important for another reason: It is a stinging reminder to Latinos that President Obama failed during his first term to pursue the comprehensive immigration reform that they seek.
The Obama administration framed its 2012 work in immigration enforcement as focused mainly on criminals – 55 percent of deportations came from convicted criminals, a record high – rather than on indiscriminately rounding up illegal immigrants and sending them home. ICE on Friday also issued new detention guidelines intended to emphasize legal action against those who have committed crimes above and beyond immigration violations.
Recommended: Second Amendment Quiz
“While the [fiscal year] 2012 removals indicate that we continue to make progress in focusing resources on criminal and priority aliens, we are constantly looking for ways to ensure that we are doing everything we can to utilize our resources in a way that maximizes public safety,” ICE Director John Morton said in a statement.
In four years, the Obama administration has deported three-quarters of the number of people that President George W. Bush’s administration did in eight. And unlike Mr. Bush, Obama made no concerted effort to reform the US immigration system – a history that’s not lost on the president’s Latino supporters.
"This is nothing to be proud of,” said Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D) of Illinois, a leading lawmaker on immigration reform for a decade, in a statement on the deportation statistics.
While Representative Gutierrez lauded the crackdown on criminals as necessary, he said some 90,000 undocumented parents of American-born children continue to be deported each year.
“We must also realize that among these hundreds of thousands of deportations are parents and breadwinners and heads of American families that are assets to American communities and have committed no crimes,” the Gutierrez statement said. "Solving this problem in a humane and sensible way requires Congress to act on immigration reform and do what we have been unable to do for 25 or 30 years.”
The closest the Obama administration came to reshaping immigration policy was the summer 2012 implementation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, whereby some young unauthorized immigrants could gain a two-year deferral of deportation and access to work permits and driver's licenses.
Some 355,000 people have applied under the program, and just over 100,000 have been approved through mid-December, according to the latest data from US Citizenship and Immigration Services. As many as 1.7 million undocumented immigrants could be eligible for the program over time, experts say.
While immigration advocates cheered the president's DACA order, they also remember his unfulfilled promise at the start of his term in 2009 to take on immigration reform, as well as the record number of deportations under his watch.
“The credibility of the president is on the line,” says Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum. “The president has to lead. The president has to show Republicans and Democrats that he’s serious about this and that he’s not just going to use it as a political lightning rod.”
Obama has promised to tackle immigration reform early in 2013, and congressional discussions about potential legislation are under way between lawmakers from both parties in the House and Senate.
If Obama doesn’t, Republicans will be eager to point out that Democrats once again broke their promises to some of the left’s key voting blocs.
“I just want to remind all of you, though, that the Democrats had two years to do something about immigration reform,” said Rep. Raul Labrador (R) of Idaho after a vote on a GOP-led bill that would have[would have? didnt that pass?] killed the diversity visa lottery in favor of more visas for highly educated immigrants in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields.
“They had a White House. They had the House. They had the Senate. And they did nothing about immigration reform,” he said.
And that could make Latino and Asian voters, who sided overwhelmingly with Democrats in the 2012 election, susceptible to Republican overtures in the future.
“Everybody talks about the incredible turnout of the new American vote in 2012, but Latinos, Asians, and other voters are not die-hard Democrats,” Mr. Noorani says. “There’s a lot of space there for Republicans to step into.”
Until Obama and reform-minded members of Congress make good on their vows that 2013 will yield a comprehensive fix to America’s immigration system, however, Latino, Asian, and other pro-immigration forces will continue to feel uneasy about the high level of deportations under a Democratic president.

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Republicans Turn to An Unlikely Name for Inspiration: George W. Bush

As Republicans reassess their future in the presidential wilderness, seeking a message and messenger to resonate with a new generation of voters, one unlikely name has popped up as a role model: former President George W. Bush.
Prominent Republicans eager to rebuild the party in the wake of the 2012 election are pointing to Bush’s successful campaigns for Hispanic votes, his efforts to pass immigration reform, and his mantra of “compassionate conservatism.” Bush won 35 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2000 and at least 40 percent in 2004, a high-water mark for a Republican presidential candidate.
In contrast, Romney received only 27 percent of the Latino vote, after taking a hard-line approach to illegal immigration during the Republican presidential primaries, touting “self-deportation” for undocumented workers. In exit polls, a majority of voters said that Romney was out of touch with the American people and that his policies would favor the rich. While Romney beat Obama on questions of leadership, values, and vision, the president trounced him by 63 points when voters were asked which candidate “cares about people like me.”
These signs of wear and tear to the Republican brand are prompting some of Bush’s critics to acknowledge his political foresight and ability to connect with a diverse swath of Americans, although the economic crash and unpopular wars on his watch make it unlikely he will ever be held up as a great president.
“I think I owe an apology to George W. Bush,” wrote Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large of the conservative National Review Online, after the election. “I still don't like compassionate conservatism or its conception of the role of government. But given the election results, I have to acknowledge that Bush was more prescient than I appreciated at the time.”
The ebb in Bush-bashing could help pave the way for a 2016 presidential bid by his brother, former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, another proponent of immigration reform with proven appeal in the Hispanic community. “The Bush family knows how to expand the party and how to win,” said GOP consultant Mark McKinnon, a former George W. Bush political aide, when asked about a possible Jeb Bush campaign. Voter wariness toward a third Bush administration could ease if the former president and his father, who served one term, are remembered less for their failures and more for their advocacy of “compassionate conservatism” and “a kinder, gentler nation.”
“I think all that certainly helps if Jeb decides to do so something down the road, though I think he will eventually be judged on his own,” said Al Cardenas, chairman of the American Conservative Union, who led the Florida Republican Party when Bush was governor.
President Bush’s press secretary, Ari Fleischer, was tapped last week by the Republican National Committee to serve on a five-member committee examining what went wrong in the 2012 election. Two days earlier, a survey released by Resurgent Republic and the Hispanic Leadership Network found that a majority of Hispanic voters in Colorado, Florida, Nevada, and New Mexico  don’t think the GOP “respects” their values and concerns.
“One of the party’s biggest challenges going forward is the perception that Republicans don’t care about people, about minorities, about gays, about poor people,” Fleischer said. “President Bush regularly made a push to send welcoming messages, and one of the lessons of 2012 is that we have to demonstrate that we are an inclusive party.”
President Bush’s success with minority voters stemmed in large part from his two campaigns for governor in Texas. He liked to say, “Family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande.” Unlike Romney, who invested little in Spanish-language advertising until the final two months of his campaign, Bush began reaching out to Hispanics early; he outspent his Democratic opponents in Spanish media in both the 2000 and 2004 campaigns.
“I remember people grumbling about making calls in December 2003, but we kept pushing,” said Jennifer Korn, who led Bush’s Hispanic outreach in his 2004 campaign. The president’s upbeat Spanish-language ads depicted Latino families getting ahead in school and at work. “I’m with Bush because he understands my family,” was the theme of one spot.
Korn, who now serves as executive director of the Hispanic Leadership Network, said Republicans are constantly asking her how the party can win a bigger share of the Latino vote.
“I tell them we already did it,” she said. “President Obama just took Bush’s plan and updated it.”
Republicans are also looking at the groundwork that Bush laid on immigration reform. He has kept a low profile since leaving office, but he waded into the debate in a speech in Dallas last month. The legislation he backed in his second term would have increased border security, created a guest-worker program, and allowed illegal immigrants to earn citizenship after paying penalties and back taxes.
“America can be a lawful society and a welcoming society at the same time,” Bush said in Dallas. “As our nation debates the proper course of action related to immigration I hope we do so with a benevolent spirit and keep in mind the contributions of immigrants.”
Bush is even a presence in the current high-stakes budget negotiations between Capitol Hill and the White House. Although the tax cuts enacted by the Bush administration for the wealthiest Americans have been a major sticking point, the tax policy it put in place for the vast majority of households has bipartisan support.
“When you consider that the Obama administration is talking about not whether to extend the Bush tax cuts but how much of them to extend, you see that Bush is still setting the agenda,” said Republican consultant Alex Castellanos, who worked on Bush’s 2004 campaign.
While a possible presidential bid by Jeb Bush heightens the impact of his brother’s evolving legacy, it’s not unusual for a president’s image to change after leaving office. (Look at former President Clinton, who enjoyed positive ratings during most of his presidency, infuriated Obama supporters during Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2008, and emerged after the election as a better Democratic spokesman than Obama.)  Gallup pegged Bush’s presidential approval at 25 percent at the end of his second term, the lowest ranking since Richard Nixon. But after President Obama spearheaded unpopular spending packages and health care reforms, Bush’s popularity began to tick up.
A Bloomberg News survey in late September showed Bush’s favorability at 46 percent, 3 points higher than Romney’s rating. Still, with a majority of voters viewing the former president unfavorably, Romney rarely, if ever, mentioned his name during the campaign. Asked to address the differences between him and the former president in one of the debates, Romney said, “I’m going to get us to a balanced budget. President Bush didn’t.” Obama seized on the comparison, taking the unusual tack of praising the Republican successor he had vilified in his first campaign to portray Romney as an extremist.
“George Bush didn’t propose turning Medicare into a voucher,” Obama said. “George Bush embraced comprehensive immigration reform. He didn’t call for self-deportation. George Bush never suggested that we eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood.”
Democrats and moderate Republicans found themselves cheering for Bush, if only for a moment. A majority of voters said that Bush is more to blame for the current economic problems than Obama, according to exit polling. If Bush wasn’t the bigger scapegoat, Obama may not have won a second term.
Veterans of Bush’s campaigns and administrations say that while learning from his mistakes, Republicans should also take note of the political risks he took by proposing reforms to immigration and education laws and boosting funding for community health centers and AIDS outreach in Africa.
“One of the issues we ran into in the 2012 campaign is that there weren’t a lot of differences between Mitt Romney and Republican orthodoxy,” said Terry Nelson, Bush’s political director in the 2004 campaign. “I think that’s something Republican candidates in the future have to consider.  The public respects it when you can show you can stand up to your party on certain issues. Bush did that.

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Why the Election Polls Missed the Mark

In the days following an election in which his organization's polls proved to be inaccurate, Gallup Editor in Chief Frank Newport published a blog post warning of "a collective mess."
The results of the election--President Obama's 4-point victory--was not the only indication that Gallup's polls were biased in favor of Republican Mitt Romney. Websites that average and aggregate polls showed, on balance, that Obama was in a stronger position than Gallup's polls did, which allowed some observers to paint the longtime pollster as an outlier, both before and after the votes were tallied.
Newport, in his blog post three days after the election, saw these aggregators as a threat--not only to the Gallup Organization but to the entire for-profit (and nonprofit) public-opinion industry. "It's not easy nor cheap to conduct traditional random sample polls," Newport wrote. "It's much easier, cheaper, and mostly less risky to focus on aggregating and analyzing others' polls. Organizations that traditionally go to the expense and effort to conduct individual polls could, in theory, decide to put their efforts into aggregation and statistical analyses of other people's polls in the next election cycle and cut out their own polling. If many organizations make this seemingly rational decision, we could quickly be in a situation in which there are fewer and fewer polls left to aggregate and put into statistical models."
Newport's hypothetical--that because aggregators that averaged polls or used polls to model the election results more accurately predicted the results than his traditional, phone polling--sounds a little paranoid on its face. But it underscores the effects that increasing costs and decreasing budgets are having on media organizations that cover politics and typically pay for this kind of survey work.
It also reopens a long-standing debate over poll aggregation. Some pollsters and media organizations think the practice of averaging polls that survey different universes or are conducted using different methodologies is bunk. They warn that considering cheaper, less rigorous polling on the same plane as live-caller polls that randomly contact landline and cell-phone respondents allows the averages to be improperly influenced by less accurate surveys. And, ultimately, while the poll averages and poll-based forecasts accurately picked the winner, they underestimated the margin of Obama's victory by a significant magnitude.
But others, including the poll aggregators themselves, maintain that averaging polls, or using poll results as part of a predictive model, produces a more accurate forecast than considering any one individual poll. Before an election, it's difficult to predict which polls will be more accurate and which polls will miss the mark. Averaging results together also provides important context to media and consumers of political information when every new poll is released, proponents argue.
Ultimately, this is a debate that also goes beyond the statistical questions about averaging polls. It touches on the nature of horse-race journalism and the way in which we cover campaigns.
The First Number Crunchers
Real Clear Politics began the practice of averaging polls before the 2002 midterm elections. RCP was joined by Pollster.com--which is now part of The Huffington Post--four years later. "Pollster started in 2006, and we were really building on what Real Clear Politics did," founding Coeditor Mark Blumenthal said. The statistician Nate Silver began a similar practice in 2008, and his site, FiveThirtyEight, was acquired by The New York Times shortly thereafter. More recently, the left-leaning website Talking Points Memo started its PollTracker website before the 2012 election.
Each of these organizations differ in their approaches. Real Clear Politics does a more straightforward averaging of the most recent polls. TPM's PollTracker is an aggregation involving regression analysis that uses the most recent polls to project a trajectory for the race. FiveThirtyEight and HuffPost Pollster use polls, adjusting them for house effects--the degree to which a survey house's polls lean consistently in one direction or another. FiveThirtyEight also uses non-survey data to project the election results.
All four of these outlets underestimated Obama's margin of victory. Both Real Clear Politics and PollTracker had Obama ahead by only 0.7 percentage points in their final measurements. HuffPost Pollster had Obama leading by 1.5 points, while FiveThirtyEight was closest, showing Obama 2.5 points ahead of Romney in the last estimate. The aggregators that came closest to Obama's overall winning margin were the ones that attempted to account for pollsters' house effects.
"The polls, on balance, understated President Obama's support," said John McIntryre, cofounder of Real Clear Politics. "Our product is only as good as the quality and the quantity of the polls that we use."
These sorts of house effects were why HuffPost Pollster moved to a model that attempted to control for them, but their average still underestimated Obama's margin of victory by a sizable magnitude. "One of the main reasons why we moved to using a more complex model that controlled for house effects was precisely to prevent that phenomenon from happening," Blumenthal said. "Our goal is to minimize that to next to zero."
Pros and Cons
John Sides, a political-science professor at George Washington University and the coauthor of the blog The Monkey Cage, is one of the more prominent proponents of using polling averages--and a critic of press coverage that doesn't. "You're better off looking at averages, because any individual poll may be different from the truth because of sampling error and any idiosyncratic decisions that pollsters make," he said.
Sides believes that news coverage of campaigns tends to overemphasize some polls at the expense of others. In some cases, a poll is considered newsier because it shows something different than the balance of other polling in the race. In other words, polls that are outliers are given more attention than polls that hew more closely to the average, and those outlier polls are more likely to be inaccurate, Sides argues.
"I'm not overly optimistic that the averages are going to become a more important factor in news coverage. I think there are still strong incentives to seek drama where you can find it. And that may mean chasing an outlier," Sides said. "I would like to think that it would start to creep in at the margins. So instead of saying, 'Some polls say ___,' it may say, 'A new poll showed ___, but other polls haven't showed that yet.' "
But, as this year's results show, the averages aren't perfect, and they all showed a closer race than the actual outcome. Comparing polls that accurately predicted the election--the final poll from the Pew Research Center, for example--to the poll averages at the time would have made those more accurate polls appear to be outliers.
Part of that problem, at least when it comes to the national presidential race, were the daily tracking polls from Gallup and automated pollster Rasmussen Reports. Both firms reported results that were biased in favor of Romney this cycle, but by publishing a new result every day, their polls could be overrepresented in the averages. "The one sort of Achilles' heel of the regression trend line that we've done classically on our charts, there are two pollsters that contribute most of the data points," said Pollster's Blumenthal. "Not only does that make the overall aggregate off, it can also create apparent turns in the trend line that are [because] we've had nothing but Gallup and Rasmussen polls for the last 10 days."
In addition to the ubiquitousness of surveys from some firms, poll aggregators also worry that partisans may try to game the system by releasing polls with greater frequency, or by skewing or fabricating results. A prominent Democratic strategist told National Journal last month that some outside groups conducted polls in presidential swing states and released them to the public as a means of countering polls from Rasmussen Reports that were less favorable to President Obama. Blumenthal told National Journal that his biggest fear was not the increase in partisan polls but the possibility that groups would release rigged or fabricated results, as outfits like Strategic Vision and Research 2000 apparently have over the past handful of years, to influence the averages. "My biggest concern over the last two or three years has been the potential for the repeat of something like that," Blumenthal said.
"Champagne" of Polls
The blog post written by Gallup's Newport after the election demonstrates another source of opposition to poll averages: the pollsters themselves. Pollsters all make choices about how best to sample the probable or likely electorate, and those choices vary. Additionally, more expensive live-caller polls compete in the averages with cheaper automated-phone and Internet polls that may not make the same efforts to obtain random samples of voters; merits aside, those live-caller pollsters surely want to protect their businesses from less expensive competitors. Moreover, news organizations that spend tens of thousands of dollars to conduct a poll are likely to report and trumpet their poll's results over other surveys.
"If you're merely an information aggregator, it's very hard for me to see how you're adding value to the proposition," Gary Langer, whose firm Langer Research Associates produces polls for ABC News, told National Journal in a phone interview last month. "Averaging polls is like averaging champagne, Coca-Cola, and turpentine," Langer added.
Overall, 2012 brought more attention than ever to poll aggregators, with their methods becoming more sophisticated. But where do they go from here?
"I don't think there are great advances in averaging or modeling horse-race polling data," Blumenthal said. "We are ultimately reliant on the quality of the data that's collected."
There is evidence that data are becoming less reliable, but supporters of using polling averages argue the underlying changes that are leading to more variable polls bolster their case for using averages instead of individual poll results. "It's a powerful piece of information, and it's a very good piece of information, and I think it's better than any one single poll in terms of using it as a data point to analyze a race," said RCP's McIntyre.
The questions remain open over how much attention the averages will get in the next election--and how much attention they deserve. But, for the horse-race media, 2016 is right around the corner, and some aggregators have already started keeping score.

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The Tea Party's War on Itself Now Includes a Literal Armed Rebellion

It's been more than a month since the 2012 election was decided, but the postmortems continue, particularly for the Tea Party, which continues to have its relevance questioned after a tumultuous year. Both The Washington Post and The New York Times published Christmas Day stories about competing factions within the movement — gun-toting infights and all — and how they will fight to control its mission looking forward to 2014.
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The Post story in particular underscores how deep and bitter the division can run, even among the most devoted activists. In the middle of this year's election season, former House majority leader Dick Armey found himself at odds with fellow executives at FreedomWorks, the libertarian-leaning group they helped build and run together. Armey was the chairman, while author and activist Matt Kibbe is the president.
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For years, the two men had created an effective partnership. But on September 10, according to the Post, Armey showed up at the FreedomWorks offices with his wife, and aide, and a unidentified man wearing a gun on his hip. The armed man escorted Kibbe and his top deputy out of the building, while Armey began suspending other staffers.
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However, two weeks later, it was Armey who found himself forced out. A member of the board of director threw his support behind Kibbe, pledging $8 million in new donations to FreedomWorks, which expanded into a super-PAC this election cycle, if Armey resigned and the suspended workers returned to their jobs. That's a lot more money than what Politico originally reported as a spat over a book deal.
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In addition to just being plain scary — the incident happened just two weeks after a man had been shot trying to break into the Family Research Council, another conservative lobbying group — the tale of Armey and the gun-wielding suspensions also raises questions about just who is really running the Tea Party movement. FreedomWorks has long portrayed itself as a grassroots organization, yet the donation shows how it's really become a handful of wealthy individuals who are calling the shots for these groups. The man behind the pledge, Illinois millionaire Richard Stephenson, gave more than $12 million to FreedomWorks donations before this election cycle, funneling the money through two dummy corporations set up just one day apart in Tennessee.
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The Times story, meanwhile, examines how much of the Tea Party's efforts are being redirected from major nationwide issues like taxes and Obamacare, to smaller pet causes on the state or local level. Some are pushing states to nullify health care law, while others are pursuing voter fraud cases. Meanwhile, others are focusing on individual races, which can make the Tea Party a greater election headache for moderate Republicans than Democratic opponents.
The strength of the Tea Party has always worked better when directed at smaller campaigns than through national causes. And those smaller campaign are often the pet causes of the millionaires who fund their activities. Stephenson founded Cancer Treatment Centers of America, a for-profit health care company. (Kibbe and Stephenson became close after Kibbe was treated at his centers.) One of biggest issues for FreedomWorks has been the repeal of Obamacare. That's not happening any time soon, but Stephenson, FreedomWorks, and the other Tea Party activists aren't giving up; they're just trying a different path.

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NRA returns to public debate, to meet with media

One week after the mass shootings that killed 26 people at a Connecticut elementary school — 20 of them children — the nation's largest gun-rights lobby is returning to the spotlight as Congress prepares to consider tighter restrictions on firearms in the new year.
The 4.3 million-member National Rifle Association largely disappeared from public debate after the shootings in Newtown, Conn., choosing atypical silence as a strategy as the nation sought answers after the rampage. The NRA took down its Facebook page and kept silent on Twitter.
Unlike its actions in the wake of other mass shootings, the group did not put out a statement of condolence for the victims while simultaneously defending the rights of gun owners.
That strategy, however, is set to change, starting with a news conference Friday.
In the lead-up, the group re-activated its Facebook account — it has 1.7 million members — and its Twitter feed now warns supporters that "President Obama supports gun control measures, including reinstating an assault weapons ban." The group also announced that its top lobbyist, Wayne LaPierre, planned to appear Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" program.
It's an about-face from the group that ignored requests for comment and shunned media attention for four days following last week's shootings.
"The National Rifle Association of America is made up of 4 million moms and dads, sons and daughters and we were shocked, saddened and heartbroken by the news of the horrific and senseless murders in Newtown," the group said in its first public statement since the shootings, released Tuesday. "Out of respect for the families, and as a matter of common decency, we have given time for mourning, prayer and a full investigation of the facts before commenting."
The group also promised "meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again" and announced plans for Friday's news conference on what is, in reality, the last real work day before Washington scatters for the long Christmas holiday.
Since the slayings, President Barack Obama has demanded "real action, right now" against U.S. gun violence and called on the NRA to join the effort. Moving quickly after several congressional gun-rights supporters said they would consider new legislation to control firearms, the president said this week he wants proposals on reducing gun violence that he can take to Congress by January.
Obama has already asked Congress to reinstate an assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 and pass legislation that would end a provision that allows people to purchase firearms from private parties without a background check. Obama also has indicated that he wants Congress to pursue the possibility of limiting high-capacity magazines.

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NRA calls for armed police officer in every school

Guns and police officers in all American schools are what's needed to stop the next killer "waiting in the wings," the National Rifle Association declared Friday, taking a no-retreat stance in the face of growing calls for gun control after the Connecticut shootings that claimed the lives of 26 children and school staff.
"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," said Wayne LaPierre, the group's chief executive officer.
Some members of Congress who had long scoffed at gun-control proposals have begun to suggest some concessions could be made, and a fierce debate over legislation seems likely next month. President Barack Obama has demanded "real action, right now."
The nation's largest gun-rights lobby broke its weeklong silence on the shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School with a defiant presentation. The event was billed as a news conference, but NRA leaders took no questions. Twice, they were interrupted by banner-waving protesters, who were removed by security.
Some had predicted that after the slaughter of a score of elementary-school children by a man using a semi-automatic rifle, the group might soften its stance, at least slightly. Instead, LaPierre delivered a 25-minute tirade against the notion that another gun law would stop killings in a culture where children are exposed daily to violence in video games, movies and music videos. He argued that guns are the solution, not the problem.
"Before Congress reconvenes, before we engage in any lengthy debate over legislation, regulation or anything else; as soon as our kids return to school after the holiday break, we need to have every single school in America immediately deploy a protection program proven to work," LaPierre said. "And by that I mean armed security."
He said Congress should immediately appropriate funds to post an armed police officer in every school. Meanwhile, he said the NRA would develop a school emergency response program that would include volunteers from the group's 4.3 million members to help guard children.
His armed-officers idea was immediately lambasted by gun control advocates, and not even the NRA's point man on the effort seemed willing to go so far. Former Republican Rep. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, whom LaPierre named national director of the program, said in an interview that decisions about armed guards in schools should be made by local districts.
"I think everyone recognizes that an armed presence in schools is sometimes appropriate," Hutchinson said. "That is one option. I would never want to have a mandatory requirement for every school district to have that."
He also noted that some states would have to change their laws to allow armed guards at schools.
Hutchinson said he'll offer a plan in January that will consider other measures such as biometric entry points, patrols and consideration of school layouts to protect security.
LaPierre argued that guards need to be in place quickly because "the next Adam Lanza," the suspected shooter in Newtown, Conn., is already planning an attack on another school.
"How many more copycats are waiting in the wings for their moment of fame from a national media machine that rewards them with wall-to-wall attention and a sense of identity that they crave, while provoking others to try to make their mark?" LaPierre asked. "A dozen more killers, a hundred more? How can we possibly even guess how many, given our nation's refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill?"
While there is a federally maintained database of the mentally ill — people so declared by their states — a 1997 Supreme Court ruling that states can't be required to contribute information has left significant gaps. In any case, creation of a mandatory national database probably would have had little impact on the ability of suspected shooters in four mass shootings since 2011 to get and use powerful weapons. The other people accused either stole the weapons used in the attacks or had not been ruled by courts to be "mentally defective" before the shootings.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the NRA is blaming everyone but itself for a national gun crisis and is offering "a paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America where everyone is armed and no place is safe."
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., called the NRA's response "both ludicrous and insulting" and pointed out that armed personnel at Columbine High School and Fort Hood could not stop mass shootings. The liberal group CREDO, which organized an anti-NRA protest on Capitol Hill, called LaPierre's speech "bizarre and quite frankly paranoid."
"This must be a wake-up call even to the NRA's own members that the NRA's Washington lobbyists need to stand down and let Congress pass sensible gun control laws now," CREDO political director Becky Bond said in a statement.
The NRA's proposal would be unworkable given the huge numbers of officers needed, said the president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, Craig Steckler.
He pointed to budget cuts and hiring freezes and noted that in his hometown of Fremont, Calif., it would take half the city's police force to post one officer at each of the city's 43 schools.
The Department of Education has counted 98,817 public schools in the United States and an additional 33,366 private schools.
There already are an estimated 10,000 school resource officers, most of them armed and employed by local police departments, in the nation's schools, according to Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers.
Gun rights advocates on Capitol Hill had no immediate comment. They will have to walk a tough road between pressure from the powerful NRA, backed by an army of passionate supporters, and outrage over the Sandy Hook deaths that has already swayed some in Congress to adjust their public views.
A CNN/ORC poll taken this week found 52 percent of Americans favor major restrictions on guns or making all guns illegal. Forty-six percent of people questioned said government and society can take action to prevent future gun violence, up 13 percentage points from two years ago in the wake of the shooting in Tucson, Ariz., that killed six and wounded then Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
Since the Connecticut slayings, President Obama has demanded action against U.S. gun violence and has called on the NRA to join the effort. Moving quickly after several congressional gun-rights supporters said they would consider new legislation to control firearms, the president said this week he wants proposals that he can take to Congress next month.
Obama has already asked Congress to reinstate an assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 and to pass legislation that would stop people from purchasing firearms from private sellers without background checks. Obama also has indicated he wants Congress to pursue the possibility of limiting high-capacity firearms magazines.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said former President Bill Clinton called her with an offer to help get an assault weapons ban reinstated. Clinton signed such a ban into law in 1994, but it expired after 10 years.
Feinstein said she's not opposed to having armed guards at schools, but she called the NRA proposal a distraction from what she said was the real problem: "easy access to these killing machines" that are far "more powerful and lethal" than the guns that were banned under the old law.

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Few report sex assaults at military academies

New details in a Pentagon report show that military academy students report just a fraction of the sexual assaults they say occurred in the past school year, signaling a continued reluctance by victims to seek criminal investigations.
As reported earlier this week, the report shows that reported sexual assaults at the nation's three military academies jumped by 23 percent overall this year. But officials say that at least some of the increase is the result of ongoing efforts to encourage military members and students to report unwelcome sexual contact.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in a memo released Friday that he's concerned there hasn't been greater progress in preventing sexual assault and harassment at the academies. He has asked officials to beef up prevention programs.
According to an anonymous survey of academy students, more than 50 percent of women and 10 percent of men said they experienced sexual harassment during the last school year. At the same time, a bit more than 12 percent of women and 2 percent of men enrolled in the three military academies said they experienced "unwanted sexual contact."
Those percentages are largely the same as previous years, but they indicate that far more students experience either sexual harassment or assault than the 80 who reported it in the past year. There were 65 reported sexual assaults in the 2010-2011 academic year, and 41 the previous year.
Of the 80 reported assaults, 42 victims provided information to law enforcement or their commands for an investigation, while 38 accessed medical care and other services but declined to seek an investigation.
According to Maj. Gen. Gary Patton, director of the sexual assault prevention and response office, sexual assault "continues to be a persistent problem" at the academies. But he noted that based on the survey, as much as 84 percent of the crimes go unreported.
That number is a concern, he said, and noted that sexual assaults are a problem in society more broadly. Still, he said, the military must be held to a higher standard.
Of the cases investigated this year, just eight people have been sent to court martial. Five cases have been completed and four were convicted of at least one charge. Three cases are continuing. In some cases the person being investigated was not a member of the military and thus did not fall under the jurisdiction of the department.
The documents also show that cadets and midshipmen are three times as likely to be victims of assault as active-duty troops.
Navy officials expressed concerns that the data suggests there is the perception among some Naval Academy students that a culture persists that discourages the reporting of these crimes.
"I am disappointed that we have apparently not instilled in each and every midshipman the sense that being loyal to one another means first being loyal to the service and to the uniform," said Navy Secretary Ray Mabus.
Mabus said he has asked Navy leaders to take steps to "deglamorize the use of alcohol" and foster a command climate that is more conducive to the reporting of sex crimes.
Protect Our Defenders, an advocacy group for military personnel who have been sexually assaulted, said the report shows a continuing need for changes in the command structure and the culture of the military.
"Victims are afraid to come forward because of the retaliation they face, including victim-blaming, isolation and bad performance reviews, to being kicked out with errant medical discharge like personality disorders," said the group's president, Nancy Parrish. "It's a shameful blight on our nation."
Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, co-chairman of the Military Sexual Assault Prevention Caucus, said that while the statistics are troubling, "the increased rate of reporting is in response to efforts combating this issue, both by leadership at the Defense Department, and by Congress." Those efforts, he said, will continue.

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Iran claims it has circumvented sanctions

Iran's oil minister claims his country has successfully circumvented sanctions on the sale of its oil.
State TV on Sunday broadcast comments by Rostam Ghasemi that the industry was in "bad shape" about two months ago due to the oil embargo by the West, "but we left the bottleneck behind, almost."
Ghasemi also said that Iran has set up its own insurance for ships that carry its oil after Western companies refused to cover them.
Iran's oil exports have fallen by about half in recent months due to the punitive oil and banking measures enacted by the U.S. and Europe over concerns Tehran is pursuing nuclear weapons. The currency has also plummeted.
Iran denies that it is developing weapons. It has taken a consistently defiant tone toward the sanctions.

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Linguist charged under Espionage Act is released

A federal judge has released a linguist for the Navy in Bahrain who is facing charges, under the Espionage Act, of possessing classified documents without authorization. But the judge ordered him to be kept under surveillance by an electronic monitoring device.
James Hitselberger, who is fluent in Arabic, has pleaded not guilty to the charges. His job as a federal contractor was to translate documents for the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Gulf Cooperation Council. The council contains a unit conducting unconventional warfare, counterterrorism and special reconnaissance.
An FBI affidavit unsealed last month says Hitselberger copied documents that discussed military troop activities in the region and gaps in U.S. intelligence in Bahrain.
In his ruling Wednesday, Judge Rudolph Contreras ordered Hitselberger to stay within 25 miles of the Washington area.

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