Obama to Host Dinner for Top House Democrats

Continuing his Capitol Hill outreach, President Obama is set have dinner with the House Democratic leadership on Wednesday at the Jefferson Hotel, including Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, according to a White House official.

Most of the legislative focus early in Obama’s second term has been in the Senate. But as the president pursues a comprehensive immigration overhaul and a grand bargain on the budget, it is critical that the Democratic Party’s left flank does not abandon him.

The attendees of the dinner include Democratic Reps. Steny Hoyer, James Clyburn, Xavier Becerra, Joe Crowley, Chris Van Hollen, Rosa DeLauro, Rob Andrews, Steve Israel, and Mike Thompson, the official said.

Already, many House Democrats have agitated about the president’s willingness to cut entitlement spending in exchange for additional tax revenues. There is also growing concern about the immigration package getting tugged too far right, as Republicans are pushing for tighter border security.

The dinner is the latest in a months-long series of outreach efforts that Obama has made to lawmakers. The meal comes days after the president played golf with three senators, Democrat Mark Udall of Colorado, Republican Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and Republican Bob Corker of Tennessee.

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Obama launches fund-raising blitz to help Democrats in Congress

By Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama will launch a fund-raising drive for the 2014 U.S. mid-term elections on Wednesday with addresses to deep-pocketed donors in California, hoping the Democratic Party can defy the odds and gain congressional seats in the polls.

The party in power in the White House usually loses seats in election years in which the presidency is not up for grabs. This means Democrats have their work cut out for them in trying to win a majority in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and add to their majority in the Senate.

"An off-year is always tough for the party in power," said Democratic strategist Bud Jackson. "But never say never, and I think it's possible that you could swing some seats. At the very least you make the attempted grab."

The president has an interest in making the effort, because without a significant change in the make-up of Congress, he faces possible paralysis for many of the initiatives laid out in his inaugural address and State of the Union speech.

His second term, won decisively in the election last November over Republican Mitt Romney, has opened with a repeat of the partisan tensions that marked his first term and with an unrelenting stalemate over taxes and spending.

A bid to tighten gun regulations, which Obama will address at a stop in Denver on Wednesday, is in danger as pro-gun groups pressure lawmakers who for decades have been reluctant to take on the powerful gun lobby. Only an immigration overhaul looks promising as Republicans smarting over Hispanic vote losses in 2012 need a victory on it as much as Obama does.

This does not mean Obama is abandoning his priorities until after the mid-terms. His team in general sees the need for action as soon as possible before the country's attention turns to the 2014 and 2016 elections.

OBAMA MAY TEMPER MESSAGE

As a result, Obama may offer a more restrained message when he speaks at fund-raising events in San Francisco, talking up his party's agenda without antagonizing political opponents.

Some Republican senators told Obama when he visited Capitol Hill in March that it did not help their fiscal negotiations with him when he traveled around the country criticizing them.

Obama aides said Obama can both support his own party's campaign apparatus while still seeking compromise with Republicans.

"There's plenty of work to do here in Washington D.C. before we turn our attention to the midterm elections," said White House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest.

Obama's San Francisco stop will kick off 14 events he intends to stage this year to raise money for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, its Senate counterpart or the Democratic National Committee. The party is still trying to pay off its debts from the last election.

In San Francisco, Obama has two evening events planned to help House Democratic campaigns. California Democratic Representative Nancy Pelosi, the top House Democrat who was dethroned as speaker in 2010, is expected to attend.

Democrats need to win 17 seats in 2014 to win control of the House.

"The confidence that the president is showing by dedicating his efforts to our efforts is a shot in the arm for House Democrats," said Jesse Ferguson, spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

The first event - a cocktail reception priced at $5,000 a person - is at the home of billionaire former asset manager Tom Steyer and his wife, Kat Taylor. After that, a $32,500-per-person dinner will be held at the home of billionaires Ann and Gordon Getty.

The next day Obama will attend two DNC fundraisers.

Obama's trip is all the more important because of the need to pay off debt hanging over party organizations since the 2012 election. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee owed $10.8 million as of the end of February, according to Federal Election Committee disclosure forms, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee owed $15 million.

Republicans note that Obama's electoral sway is not so powerful when his name is not on the ballot. Democrats lost 63 seats and control of the House in 2010 midterms, as well as six Senate seats.

"There's something to his appeal when he's on the ballot. I'm not sure they can deliver the same vote when he's not," said Republican strategist Charlie Black.

(Reporting By Steve Holland; Editing by Marilyn W. Thompson and David Brunnstrom)

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GOP moves to plug technology gap with Democrats

WASHINGTON (AP) — Embarrassed by how the last presidential election exposed their yesteryear technology, Republicans are turning to a younger generation of tech-savvy social media experts and software designers to improve communications with voters, predict their behavior and track opponents more vigorously.

After watching President Barack Obama win re-election with help from a technology operation unprecedented in its sophistication, GOP officials concede an urgent need for catch up.

"I think everybody realized that the party is really far behind at the moment and they're doing everything within their realistic sphere of influence to catch up," said Bret Jacobson, a partner with Red Edge, a Virginia-based digital advocacy firm that represents the Republican Governors Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Heritage Foundation.

Democrats began using related technology years ago, giving Obama a significant advantage last fall in customizing personalized fundraising and get-out-the-vote appeals to prospective supporters. With the blessing of party leaders, a new crop of Republican-backed outside groups is developing tools to do the same in 2014 and 2016.

Alex Skatell, former digital director for the GOP's gubernatorial and Senate campaign operations, leads one new group that has been quietly testing a system that would allow Republicans to share details about millions of voters — their personal interests, group affiliations and even where they went to school.

With no primary opponent last year, Obama's re-election team used the extra time to build a large campaign operation melding a grass-roots army of 2.2 million volunteers with groundbreaking technology to target voters. They tapped about 17 million email subscribers to raise nearly $700 million online.

Data-driven analytics enabled the campaign to run daily simulations to handicap battleground states, analyze demographic trends and test alternatives for reaching voters online.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, in contrast, had only a few months after a lengthy primary fight to try to match Obama's tech advantage. He couldn't make up the difference. Romney's technology operation was overwhelmed by the intense flow of data and temporarily crashed on Election Day.

A 100-page report on how to rebound from the 2012 election, released last week by Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus, includes several technology recommendations.

"The president's campaign significantly changed the makeup of the national electorate and identified, persuaded and turned out low-propensity voters by unleashing a barrage of human and technological resources previously unseen in a presidential contest," the report said. "Marrying grass-roots politics with technology and analytics, they successfully contacted, persuaded and turned out their margin of victory. There are many lessons to be learned from their efforts, particularly with respect to voter contact."

Skatell, 26, is leading one new effort by Republican allies to fill the void. His team of designers, software developers and veteran Republican strategists is now testing what he calls an "almost an eHarmony for matching volunteers with persuadable voters" that would let campaigns across the country share details in real time on voter preferences, harnessing social media like Facebook and Twitter.

Other groups are working to improve the GOP's data and digital performance.

The major Republican ally, American Crossroads, which spent a combined $175 million on the last election with its sister organization, hosted private meetings last month focused on data and technology. Drawing from technology experts in Silicon Valley, the organization helped craft a series of recommendations expected to be rolled out later this year.

"A good action plan that fixes our deficiencies and identifies new opportunities can help us regain our advantage within a cycle or two," said Crossroads spokesman Jonathan Collegio.

A prominent group of Republican aides has also formed America Rising, a company that will have a companion "super" political action committee that can raise unlimited contributions without having to disclose its donors. Its purpose is to counter Democratic opposition research groups, which generated negative coverage of Romney and GOP candidates last year.

America Rising will provide video tracking, opposition research and rapid response for campaign committees, super PACs and individual candidates' campaigns but does not plan to get involved in GOP primaries. It will be led by Matt Rhoades, who served as Romney's campaign manager, and Joe Pounder, the research director for the Republican National Committee. Running its super PAC will be Tim Miller, a former RNC aide and spokesman for former GOP presidential candidate Jon Huntsman.

Romney and several Republican candidates were monitored closely by camera-toting Democratic aides during the campaign, a gap that Miller said American Rising hopes to fill on behalf of Republicans.

Brad Woodhouse, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, said his party has "a several years' lead on data and analytics infrastructure and we're not standing still."

Of the GOP effort, Woodhouse said, "We don't see them closing the gap anytime soon."

___

Peoples reported from Boston.

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Congress Democrats Holding Out on Gay Marriage in the Minority

The number of Democrats who publicly oppose gay marriage dwindled this week as arguments in two Supreme Court cases drew national attention - and political pressure - to the issue.

In a matter of four days, six Democratic senators issued statements indicating that their view of the marriage debate had changed in favor of allowing Americans to marry regardless of gender. Only nine of the 53 Democrats in the Senate continue to oppose marriage equality in some way, and of those, few come down staunchly on the side of preserving the traditional one-man, one-woman definition.

Those nine senators are Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Tom Carper of Delaware, Bill Nelson of Florida, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Tim Johnson of South Dakota. Of the nine, some oppose DOMA, some have adopted a wait-and-see attitude, others are less specific.

Manchin's answer is straightforward: Spokesperson Katie Longo said that guided by his faith, Manchin "believes that a marriage is a union between one man and one woman" and wants to uphold DOMA.

Nelson is a more complicated case. In May 2012 he told the Miami Herald he believes the issue should be left to the states, but a spokesperson for his office told TIME this week that Nelson supports the one-man, one-woman vision of traditional marriage.

Some of those with more complicated stances on the issue tend to value a term President Obama once used to describe his views on gay marriage: "evolving."

"Senator Carper was proud to support Delaware's efforts to enact civil union legislation and earlier this month he joined 211 of his Congressional colleagues in co-signing the amicus brief that urges the Supreme Court to invalidate Section 3 of DOMA," a spokesperson for Carper told ABC News this week. "Like many Americans including Presidents Obama and Clinton, Senator Carper's views on this issue have evolved, and continue to evolve."

"Change" is another favorite.

"We'll have to see what the Supreme Court says about gay marriage," Landrieu told POLITICO on Tuesday. "And I just think that people's views about it are changing quite rapidly, a more progressive position. I'm just going to continue to talk to the people of my state."

An ABC/Washington Post poll released last week showed support for legal gay marriage among Americans had grown from 37 percent in 2003 to 58 percent. Almost 84 percent of Democratic Congress members signed an amicus brief for the Supreme Court asking them to overturn DOMA.

That said, not all those who signed the brief have come out in favor of legalizing gay marriage in their state - Carper, for example.

Even Republicans, typically a group staunchly opposed to gay marriage, have seen some switching up in the past month. More than 80 signed on to a similar amicus brief, led by former George W. Bush White House political director Ken Mehlman. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, announced his support for marriage equality earlier this month, and Wednesday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, announced she was "evolving" on the issue, after her Democratic counterpart, Sen. Mark Begich, endorsed it.

Political strategist Jason Johnson predicts the flood of politicians piling onto the other side isn't going to dry up any time soon. Any hesitancy to express support for same-sex marriage on either side of the aisle stems from uncertainty in how important gay marriage is to voters, according to Johnson.

"No one has been able to figure out with any effective consistency how gay voters vote and how straight voters vote on gay issues," Johnson told ABC News on Thursday. "It's very hard to determine what percentage of your population in your constituency are openly out gay voters and if gay marriage is their driving issue."

For Democrats, though, he said pressure is only going up.

"It's going to become a litmus test for Democrats and they're going to receive money pressure, and really at this point there's not much of a benefit … to standing against it, because it's the direction that the entire country is going in."

Also Read

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GOP moves to plug technology gap with Democrats

WASHINGTON (AP) — Embarrassed by how the last presidential election exposed their yesteryear technology, Republicans are turning to a younger generation of tech-savvy social media experts and software designers to improve communications with voters, predict their behavior and track opponents more vigorously.

After watching President Barack Obama win re-election with help from a technology operation unprecedented in its sophistication, GOP officials concede an urgent need for catch up.

"I think everybody realized that the party is really far behind at the moment and they're doing everything within their realistic sphere of influence to catch up," said Bret Jacobson, a partner with Red Edge, a Virginia-based digital advocacy firm that represents the Republican Governors Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Heritage Foundation.

Democrats began using related technology years ago, giving Obama a significant advantage last fall in customizing personalized fundraising and get-out-the-vote appeals to prospective supporters. With the blessing of party leaders, a new crop of Republican-backed outside groups is developing tools to do the same in 2014 and 2016.

Alex Skatell, former digital director for the GOP's gubernatorial and Senate campaign operations, leads one new group that has been quietly testing a system that would allow Republicans to share details about millions of voters — their personal interests, group affiliations and even where they went to school.

With no primary opponent last year, Obama's re-election team used the extra time to build a large campaign operation melding a grass-roots army of 2.2 million volunteers with groundbreaking technology to target voters. They tapped about 17 million email subscribers to raise nearly $700 million online.

Data-driven analytics enabled the campaign to run daily simulations to handicap battleground states, analyze demographic trends and test alternatives for reaching voters online.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, in contrast, had only a few months after a lengthy primary fight to try to match Obama's tech advantage. He couldn't make up the difference. Romney's technology operation was overwhelmed by the intense flow of data and temporarily crashed on Election Day.

A 100-page report on how to rebound from the 2012 election, released last week by Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus, includes several technology recommendations.

"The president's campaign significantly changed the makeup of the national electorate and identified, persuaded and turned out low-propensity voters by unleashing a barrage of human and technological resources previously unseen in a presidential contest," the report said. "Marrying grass-roots politics with technology and analytics, they successfully contacted, persuaded and turned out their margin of victory. There are many lessons to be learned from their efforts, particularly with respect to voter contact."

Skatell, 26, is leading one new effort by Republican allies to fill the void. His team of designers, software developers and veteran Republican strategists is now testing what he calls an "almost an eHarmony for matching volunteers with persuadable voters" that would let campaigns across the country share details in real time on voter preferences, harnessing social media like Facebook and Twitter.

Other groups are working to improve the GOP's data and digital performance.

The major Republican ally, American Crossroads, which spent a combined $175 million on the last election with its sister organization, hosted private meetings last month focused on data and technology. Drawing from technology experts in Silicon Valley, the organization helped craft a series of recommendations expected to be rolled out later this year.

"A good action plan that fixes our deficiencies and identifies new opportunities can help us regain our advantage within a cycle or two," said Crossroads spokesman Jonathan Collegio.

A prominent group of Republican aides has also formed America Rising, a company that will have a companion "super" political action committee that can raise unlimited contributions without having to disclose its donors. Its purpose is to counter Democratic opposition research groups, which generated negative coverage of Romney and GOP candidates last year.

America Rising will provide video tracking, opposition research and rapid response for campaign committees, super PACs and individual candidates' campaigns but does not plan to get involved in GOP primaries. It will be led by Matt Rhoades, who served as Romney's campaign manager, and Joe Pounder, the research director for the Republican National Committee. Running its super PAC will be Tim Miller, a former RNC aide and spokesman for former GOP presidential candidate Jon Huntsman.

Romney and several Republican candidates were monitored closely by camera-toting Democratic aides during the campaign, a gap that Miller said American Rising hopes to fill on behalf of Republicans.

Brad Woodhouse, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, said his party has "a several years' lead on data and analytics infrastructure and we're not standing still."

Of the GOP effort, Woodhouse said, "We don't see them closing the gap anytime soon."

___

Peoples reported from Boston.

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Two Democrats ask Fed, OCC for meeting on foreclosure settlement

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two Democratic lawmakers on Monday stepped up their scrutiny of how regulators handled a botched review of past home mortgage foreclosures, requesting a meeting with regulatory officials as they seek further information about the reviews.

The Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency reached settlements worth about $9.3 billion with 13 banks earlier this year to end case-by-case reviews of whether they had wrongly seized homes.

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who sits on the banking committee, and Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, who is the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, asked regulators for more information in January about the reviews after the settlements were announced.

The lawmakers said the public needed to know more about the process in order to trust it.

Unsatisfied with the response they received from the Fed and the OCC on Friday, the pair on Monday demanded further information and a personal briefing on the status of their requests.

"Criminal activity should not be shielded by regulators as if it constitutes proprietary information or trade secrets," the lawmakers wrote. "We continue to believe transparency is critical around the operations of the review and settlement processes."

The settlements proved controversial because they ended reviews that had already cost the banks some $2 billion but had not yet resulted in any relief to consumers. Banks including Bank of America Corp, JPMorgan Chase & Co and Wells Fargo were part of the reviews.

The agencies to date have provided little information about what those reviews produced and how the consultants who performed the reviews were monitored. Cummings and Warren had sought that information.

The $2 billion in fees amounts to nearly $20,000 per file, a "staggering amount," Warren and Cummings said.

"It is nearly five times the average payout that will go to homeowners as part of the settlement," they wrote.

Under the settlement, borrowers who were foreclosed on in 2009 and 2010 will receive between a few hundred dollars and $125,000, depending on the issues they dealt with.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry said in their letter on Friday that the Fed and the OCC plan to make additional information public, such as the findings of reviews and the costs associated with them.

The agencies are in the process of analyzing some of that data for upcoming reports on the implementation of the settlement agreements, Bernanke and Curry said.

They also said that Fed and OCC staff could provide a briefing for the lawmakers' staffs to discuss the settlements.

Warren and Cummings said on Monday that they wanted to attend the briefing, and they asked to hold the meeting on April 9 after lawmakers return from the Easter recess.

(Reporting By Emily Stephenson and Aruna Viswanatha)

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