• Races to Watch: Indiana Senate

    One of Roll Call‘s races to watch is the Indiana Senate contest.

    Richard Mourdock
    Photo by CQ Roll Call
    Indiana Treasurer Richard Mourdock, shown here in a July 4th parade, is in hot water after his controversial comments about rape and a woman's right to choose.

    Sen. Dick Lugar lost a primary to state Treasurer Richard Mourdock, who faces Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly. Mourdock found himself in hot water this week over his controversial debate comments about pregnancy resulting from rape.

    Roll Call‘s Shira Toeplitz reports:

    By now, state Treasurer Richard Mourdock should know when to hold his tongue.

    But the Republican Senate nominee, who’s been in Indiana politics for more than two decades, has a habit of speaking freely, frequently.

    Many Hoosiers agree with his ideology, but Mourdock’s errors are political. As a result, less than two weeks before Election Day, Mourdock’s greatest hurdle to winning a Senate seat is himself.

    “Richard doesn’t really believe in a filter,” said one Hoosier Republican and Mourdock ally, who declined to criticize the nominee on the record. “He is who he is and refuses to compromise for expediency.”

    On Tuesday evening, Mourdock described pregnancy that results from rape as “something that God intended to happen” in response to an open-ended question on abortion. He delivered a tearful apology the next day to those who misunderstood his comments, which he described as not “articulate.”

    The comments sent the Indiana race into turmoil two weeks before Election Day, just as Mourdock regained his footing against Rep. Joe Donnelly (D) following a rocky September for Republicans nationwide.

    Read the full story on RollCall.com.

    All Campaigns, All the Time: Roll Call's At The Races Blog

    For up-to-the minute campaign news in competitive races across the country, visit the Roll Call’s At The Races Blog.

    Our award-winning politics follows both the House and Senate races in anticipation of the election this November.

    CQ Roll Call Daily Briefing: Blue Booklet Value

    THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama’s amped-up itinerary — rallies in three battleground states over 13 hours — illustrates just how frenetic the final fortnight of this way-too-close-to-call presidential race is going to be.

    “You can take a videotape of things I said 10 or 12 years ago and I’m the same guy,” the president said a few minutes ago at his first stop, at the Mississippi Valley Fairgrounds in Davenport, where he posted one of his best showings when he carried Iowa last time. (The state is now a dead heat.) His second event is at 5 (D.C. time) in a park in downtown Denver, where he needs a big turnout (and a 3-to-1 margin like the one he had in 2008) if he’s going to carry Colorado’s 9 electoral votes. (It’s also a dead heat.) Obama’s next stop is Los Angeles, where he’ll stay just long enough to tape his third appearance as president on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.” After the third stump speech of the day — in a park well after dark in downtown Las Vegas — Air Force One will take off on a red-eye to Tampa. (Biden’s in Ohio for a third straight day, with a rally within the hour at the high school in up-for-grabs Marion, an aging industrial town.)

    THE CHALLENGERS: The GOP ticket is shadowing its rivals in three of the same four battlegrounds. Although the state’s 6 EVs seem to be slipping from his can-get list, Romney is flying back to Nevada for his second rally in 20 hours — at 2:45 (D.C. time) in the 7,000-seat arena in Reno. Five hours later he’s due at an airport rally in Cedar Rapids, part of an effort to keep Iowa’s 6 EVs in play by holding down Democratic margins there. Then it’s off to another airport rally — in time for the late local news in Ohio’s biggest municipal battleground, Cincinnati. (Like the other ticket’s running mate, Ryan is spending all day in Ohio — with a mid-afternoon rally at Cleveland State.)

    THE HOUSE AND SENATE: Neither is in session; the lame duck begins in 20 days.
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    Final Debate Showdown Features Foreign Policy, Jobs and the Economy

    In their final debate last night, President Barack Obama and GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney exchanged barbs on foreign policy, though both repeatedly referenced jobs and the economy, which are considered top issues to voters.

    Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call File Photo
    President Barack Obama, pictured here at the Democratic National Convention, faced off against GOP nominee Mitt Romney in a sharp final debate Monday night in Boca Raton, Fla.

    CQ Roll Call’s Steven T. Dennis and Emily Cadei report:

    Obama struck an aggressive tone from the start, repeatedly ripping into the GOP nominee as unreliable and reckless, while Romney sought to move to the center, putting forward a moderate image of someone who would use military force as a last resort.

    Obama attacked Romney repeatedly for wanting to leave troops in Iraq, on Romney’s plan for $2 trillion in additional spending on defense over the next decade and for flipping his position on a host of foreign policy issues.

    “I think Gov. Romney maybe hasn’t spent enough time looking at how our military works,” Obama said about Romney’s complaint that there will be fewer ships in the Navy than in 1916.

    “Well, governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them,” Obama said. “We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so the question is not a game of Battleship, where we’re counting ships. It’s what are our capabilities.”

    Read the full story on RollCall.com.

    Final Debate Preview: Foreign Policy

    Tonight’s final debate between President Barack Obama and GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney will focus on foreign policy.

    Mitt Romney
    Photo by CQ Roll Call
    Tonight's debate is the final between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Roll Call reports that beneath the rhetoric, Romney’s policy prescriptions for Middle East hot spots don’t differ that much from what Obama is already doing.

    Roll Call’s Steven T. Dennis and CQ’s Jonathan Broder report:

    Obama, who has seen his once-sizable lead in national polls vanish, will try to press what has been an advantage on foreign affairs to make the case that Romney’s inexperience on foreign policy risks more war, more blood and more treasure.

    Romney must appear tough, but not reckless, as he squares what has been more bellicose rhetoric, particularly during the Republican primary season, with a public that has soured on foreign military engagements. And both candidates will try to pick their spots to pivot back to the issue on most voters’ minds: the economy.

    Both Obama and Romney are expected to tie their foreign policy positions to concerns about the economy.

    “After a decade of war, both in Afghanistan and Iraq, the most important thing we have to do now is… bring American troops home and battle for America’s future economically,” said Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff, previewing the president’s message on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. He said that while the debate would be about foreign policy, “the most important thing we can do as a country on our foreign policy is strengthen our economy here at home.”

    The president’s advisers argue that if Romney had been in charge, the United States might still be at war in Iraq, would have no end date in sight in Afghanistan and would not have made defeating Osama bin Laden the top priority.

    Indeed, gearing up for the debate, Obama’s campaign charged Sunday that Romney had a “commitment to endless war.”

    They have tied the cost of the wars — and Romney’s plan to spend $2 trillion more than Obama on defense in the next decade — back to the economy, by saying that would make the deficit worse or sap investments in rebuilding at home.

    Read the entire story on RollCall.com here.

    Daily Briefing: Job Seekers

    THE WHITE HOUSE: Obama is on his fifth trip this year to New Hampshire, which under one plausible scenario would decide the election with its four electoral votes. (Both candidates would have 267 if Obama carries Ohio, Iowa and Nevada and Romney takes Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia and Wisconsin.) The president has arrived in Manchester and will speak soon at a park in the center of town.

    Then he’s off to New York to tape his sixth appearance on “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart and share a stage with Romney for the second time this week. They’ll both don white tie and tails and head to the Waldorf for back-to-back speeches — with an emphasis on jokes, not attacks — at the Al Smith Foundation dinner, the nation’s premier annual Roman Catholic charity event. It will be the seventh time since 1960 that both presidential nominees appear together at the event, and many conservative Catholics are none too pleased that Cardinal Timothy Dolan invited the abortion-rights-supporting president.

    Biden finishes up a Western trip with a speech at the Culinary Academy of Las Vegas at 2 p.m. Eastern. Nevada (6 EVs) is an early-voting state. The vice president returns to Washington later today.
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