Bloomberg Endorses Obama, Citing Climate Change

In a surprise announcement, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said Thursday that Hurricane Sandy had reshaped his thinking about the presidential campaign and that as a result, he was endorsing President Obama.

Mr. Bloomberg, a political independent in his third term leading New York City, has been sharply critical of Mr. Obama, a Democrat, and Mitt Romney, the president’s Republican rival, saying that both men had failed to candidly confront the problems afflicting the nation. But he said he had decided over the past several days that Mr. Obama was the better candidate to tackle the global climate change that he believes might have contributed to the violent storm, which took the lives of at least 38 New Yorkers and caused billions of dollars in damage.

“The devastation that Hurricane Sandy brought to New York City and much of the Northeast — in lost lives, lost homes and lost business — brought the stakes of next Tuesday’s presidential election into sharp relief,” Mr. Bloomberg wrote in an editorial for Bloomberg View.

“Our climate is changing,” he wrote. “And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it may be — given the devastation it is wreaking — should be enough to compel all elected leaders to take immediate action.”

Mr. Bloomberg’s endorsement is another indication that Hurricane Sandy has influenced the presidential campaign. The storm and the destruction it left in its wake have dominated news coverage, transfixing the nation and prompting the candidates to halt their campaigning briefly.

The announcement is also the latest in a series of steps Mr. Bloomberg has taken in a bid to assert his influence nationally as his final term as mayor enters its twilight — and after he appears to have abandoned his own hopes of one day becoming president.

Last month, the mayor said that he was creating his own “super PAC” to support candidates from either party, as well as independents, who he believes are devoted to his brand of nonideological problem solving, and he has increasingly used his personal wealth and the bully pulpit of his office in an effort to persuade elected officials to support same-sex marriage, gun control and education reform.

The impact of Mr. Bloomberg’s endorsement is unclear; his city and his state are overwhelmingly Democratic, and although he is a well-known and long-serving public official who frequently appears in the national media, his influence is difficult to measure: an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted in December found 30 percent of Americans had a favorable view of Mr. Bloomberg, 26 percent had an unfavorable view, and many — 44 percent — had no opinion of him one way or the other.

Both the Obama and Romney campaigns had aggressively sought the mayor’s endorsement, in large part because they believed he could influence independent voters around the country. Mr. Bloomberg had recently signaled he would not make an endorsement, telling reporters several weeks ago that he had decided whom he would vote for, but that he was not sure he would share that decision with the public.

John Weaver, a prominent Republican political strategist, said the timing of the mayor’s endorsement was notable.

“His announcement is sandwiched between this horrific calamity and the presidential election,” he noted. “So the timing could not have been more significant for him and his views.”

Steve McMahon, a veteran Democratic strategist, said he believed that now that Mr. Bloomberg had come to terms with not running for the presidency, he was interested in cementing his political legacy.

“Many politicians reach the point in their careers where they have built up considerable political equity and the only question is how they use it to make a difference,” he said. “In endorsing President Obama, the mayor seems to have decided to use some of his equity.”

Even before the hurricane struck, Mr. Bloomberg had been concerned about climate change. He is the chairman of an organization called C40, a network of cities seeking to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

Yet until the storm, climate change had not been much of an issue in the presidential campaign. The topic did not come up during the three presidential debates, and the candidates have not provided detailed legislative or regulatory plans outlining their stances on the issue.

Since the hurricane, a number of elected officials have come forward, chiefly in New York, to say that they have concluded the planet is undergoing climate change, that huge storms are no longer freak occurrences but expectable reality, and that public policy must begin to prepare for the impact.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said Tuesday, “Anyone who says there is not a dramatic change in weather patterns I think is denying reality.” Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said Wednesday, “We’re going to pay a price for the change in climate.” And Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of Manhattan, echoed the consensus of local officials on Thursday, saying simply, “There will be a storm of this magnitude again.” 

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Campaigns Brace to Sue for Votes in Crucial States

CLEVELAND — Thousands of lawyers from both presidential campaigns will enter polling places next Tuesday with one central goal: tracking their opponents and, if need be, initiating legal action. It will be a kind of Spy vs. Spy.

 The lawyers will note how poll workers behave, where voters are directed, if intimidation appears to be occurring, whether lines are long. And they will report up a chain of command where decisions over court action will be made at headquarters in Chicago and Boston.

This will go on in every battleground state — including Wisconsin, Virginia, Florida, even Pennsylvania — but it will be most focused in Ohio and especially in Greater Cleveland, which is heavily Democratic and where many people believe history teaches a simple lesson: the more votes cast here, the likelier President Obama is to win.

As the persuasion effort winds down, campaigns are focused on getting their supporters to vote and getting those votes counted.

The result has been a mass mobilization of lawyers. The Democrats will have 600 lawyers in action here in Cuyahoga County and 2,500 across the state, their organizers say. They have been holding training sessions, grouping legal volunteers into workers and supervisors. The Republicans have much smaller teams — about 70 in this county — and will rely more on surrogates, including nonlawyer poll workers. Each side says the other cannot be trusted and, given the likelihood of a tight presidential race, the risks of litigation here — and delayed results — are high.

“If it’s close, you will see both sides running to court,” said Jeff Hastings, a Republican and chairman of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections.

The Democrats say they fear acts of sabotage. “How tough would it be for them to send people to the wrong precincts and tie up poll workers to slow things down?” asked Stuart Garson, chairman of the Democratic Party of Cuyahoga County. “If we see someone getting in someone’s face, our lawyers will be there.”

Robert S. Frost, the chairman of the county Republican Party, said his legal volunteers would be at precincts where Republican poll workers were thinly represented in past elections and where there had been allegations of impropriety. He said the Democrats had built up such a huge legal team because their strategy was to create enough confusion so the race would have to move to court. “It’s pretty cynical,” he said. “That’s why we need to have people on the ground: to keep an eye on the other side.”

The Democrats feel the same way. “In each battleground state, we are recruiting thousands of attorney volunteers to help recruit, train, educate and observe at polling locations,” the Obama campaign said in a statement. “We’ve retained or opened pipelines to the nation’s top experts on voting systems, registration databases, ballot design, student voting, and provisional ballots.”

Party organizers say the recruitment is similar in number to those of the past two presidential elections, a result of the Florida stalemate, recount and Supreme Court decision in 2000 that gave the election to George W. Bush. But it began earlier and appears to be more widely spread this time. Some of the recruits are brought in from out of state, but most are local and will see any recount or challenge through what could be weeks of litigation on a range of issues.

This week, Robert F. Bauer, the chief counsel to the Obama campaign, sent a letter to the Wisconsin attorney general complaining about misinformation he said the Mitt Romney campaign was giving its poll observers during training there. According to the letter, the observers were being given incomplete information on voter identification requirements and assistance available for handicapped voters. They were also being urged to sign into polling stations as “concerned citizens,” which Mr. Bauer said was a misrepresentation and a possible legal offense.

In Pennsylvania, confusion remains over voter ID requirements that could lead to courtroom battles. Because of a new law passed earlier this year, poll workers there are instructed to ask voters for official photo IDs, but a judge ruled that voters who do not have them may vote in a normal way anyway. Ellen Kaplan of the nonpartisan citizen group Committee of Seventy said that she had warned state officials that their advertisements emphasized IDs in a misleading way and that court action might follow. “For this election, we have many, many lawyer volunteers,” she added.

Elsewhere, there are questions about absentee ballots and the rules on vote recounts as well as whether state or federal court is the right venue for each question. In Wisconsin, Romney officials are asking for an extension of the deadline for absentee ballots because some went out late to military personnel overseas.

A coalition of liberal nonpartisan groups led by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law will be operating in 22 states offering voters help and a hotline.       

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Jobs Report Offers Little Change in Dynamic Between Obama and Romney

WASHINGTON — The jobs report on Friday had held the potential to inject an unpredictable, last-minute jolt into the race for the White House.

 Instead, somewhat stronger job growth than expected and a slight uptick in the unemployment rate seemed to offer little change in the dynamic between President Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, as they enter the final weekend of an election already shaped by the changing contours of the nation’s economy.

Economists had predicted the addition of about 125,000 jobs and said the unemployment rate, which had dropped to 7.8 percent in September, might rise slightly.

The report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics beat those expectations for job growth, showing the addition of 171,000 jobs in October. And the unemployment rate, which ticked up to 7.9 percent, remained below 8 percent.

Mr. Obama is likely to cite the report as further evidence that the nation’s economy is continuing to recover slowly under his policies. The president argues that nearly three years of expansion in employer’s payrolls has added almost five million jobs since the economic collapse in 2008 and 2009.

That the unemployment rate remains below 8 percent allows Mr. Obama and his supporters to argue that the economic improvement over the past several months is not a fluke and that the country is headed in the right direction.

The White House said the jobs report showed the “biggest monthly gain in eight months.” In a statement, Alan B. Krueger, the chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, said it provided “further evidence that the U.S. economy is continuing to heal from the wounds inflicted by the worst downturn since the Great Depression.”

But the data did not provide the kind of unambiguous boost for the president that he received last month, when the unemployment rate dropped unexpectedly from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent.

For Mr. Romney, the numbers offer little new ammunition. For months, he has hammered the president for presiding over an economy with unemployment over 8 percent. With Friday’s report, the rate remains below that level for the second month in a row.

On the campaign trail in recent weeks, Mr. Romney has argued that the country’s modest jobs growth is inadequate in the face of an economy that continues to struggle.

In a statement Friday morning, Mr. Romney said the jobs report was evidence of the need to change the nation’s economic policies.

“Today’s increase in the unemployment rate is a sad reminder that the economy is at a virtual standstill,” Mr. Romney said. “The jobless rate is higher than it was when President Obama took office, and there are still 23 million Americans struggling for work. On Tuesday, America will make a choice between stagnation and prosperity.”

In fact, there are about 12 million people unemployed in the country. Mr. Romney often says that there are 23 million people who are out of work, have stopped looking for work or are in part-time jobs when they want full-time work.

For economists, the new report is just one piece of evidence about how the economy is doing. But among voters, the unemployment rate remains one of the most recognized barometers of economic progress or retrenchment.

The jobs reports, usually released on the first Friday of every month, have become a regular feature of the 2012 presidential campaign. Political strategists in Boston and Chicago — where the two campaigns have their headquarters — nervously anticipated the impact of the report each month.

But none was anticipated more than the one on Friday. Coming just days before the end of the election, the report was viewed by some as a potential bombshell that might have helped sway undecided or uncertain voters in a race that polls suggest could be exceptionally close.

Still, the trajectory of the economic arguments by the candidates has been set for months, with even last month’s unexpected improvement doing little to change the political dynamic in the race.

There is now little time for new television ads or rewritten stump speeches. And in many of the most important swing states, millions of people have already voted, diminishing any potential impact of Friday jobs report, the final one of the campaign.        

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Modest Growth in Jobs Seen in Final Report Before Election

In the last assessment of the job market before the presidential election, the Labor Department announced Friday that the nation’s employers added 171,000 positions in October, and more jobs than initially estimated in both August and September.

The unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 7.9 percent in October, from 7.8 percent in September, as more workers joined the labor force and so officially became counted as unemployed.

The report showed persistent but modest improvement in the American economy, and broad-based gains in just about every industry except the government. It was based on surveys conducted too early in the month to capture work disruptions across the East Coast caused by Hurricane Sandy.

“Generally, the report shows that things are better than we’d expected and certainly better than we’d thought a few months ago,” said Paul Dales, senior United States economist for Capital Economics. “But we’re still not making enough progress to bring that unemployment rate down significantly and rapidly.”

The latest figures are probably good news for President Obama. They officially recorded a net gain in jobs under his presidency, and they allayed widespread suspicion that September’s large drop in the unemployment rate — below 8 percent for the first time since the month he took office — might have been a one-month statistical fluke.

In a statement, Alan B. Krueger, the chairman of Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said Friday’s report provided “further evidence that the U.S. economy is continuing to heal from the wounds inflicted by the worst downturn since the Great Depression.”

Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, said in a statement that the jobs report is evidence of the need to change the nation’s economic policies.

“Today’s increase in the unemployment rate is a sad reminder that the economy is at a virtual standstill,” he said.

The numbers arrived somewhat late in the game to have a huge impact on the election next Tuesday, particularly given the ongoing focus on Hurricane Sandy.

Economists were hopeful that once the election was over and Congress addressed the major fiscal tightening scheduled for the end of this year, job growth could speed up further.

“If we can do this kind of job growth with all the uncertainty out there, imagine if we were to clear up those tax issues and hold back the majority of tax increases that are pending at the end of the year,” said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics. “We could do much better in 2013, maybe as well as we appeared to be doing earlier this year.”

Job gains in previous months were revised to show bigger gains. September’s increase of 114,000 new jobs was revised to 148,000, and August’s 142,000 was revised to 192,000, the government said.

In October, the biggest job gains were in professional and business services, health care and retail trade, the Labor Department said. Government payrolls dipped slightly. State and local governments have been shedding jobs most months over the last three years.

One of the lowlights of the report was in hourly wages, which remained flat in October after showing barely any growth in the previous several months.

“Perhaps the decline in real wages is a factor here in being able to employ more people,” Mr. Ryding said. “It’s something to keep in mind when we think about creating jobs and whether we’re maybe creating the wrong sort of jobs.”

A report from the National Employment Law Project, a liberal research and advocacy organization that focuses on labor issues, found that while the majority of jobs lost in the downturn were middle-wage jobs, the majority of the jobs created since then have been lower-wage ones.

There have now been 25 straight months of jobs gains in the United States, but the increases have been barely large enough to absorb people entering the work force. A queue of about 12 million unemployed people remain waiting for work, about two out of five of whom have been out of a job for more than six months.

That is in addition to more than eight million people who are working part-time but really want full-time jobs.

“I’m not just competing against all the other people who are out of work,” said Griff Coxey, 57, of Cascade, Wis., who was laid off in May from his controller job at a small business. “I’m also competing against all those people who are actually working but are underemployed.”

Like two million other idle workers, Mr. Coxey is scheduled to lose his unemployment benefits the last week of the year, when the federal extensions abruptly expire. He said he still has some savings to fall back on, but many workers do not.

Labor advocates and economists are hopeful that Congress will renew the benefits as part of their discussions of the “fiscal cliff” during their postelection session. So far, though, the issue has received little attention, and analysts worry that ending extended benefits could disrupt what modest forward momentum the economy currently has.

“Federal unemployment benefits are one of the most effective stimuli we have,” said Christine L. Owens, the executive director of the National Employment Law Project.

“The recovery is still fragile,” she said, “and to pull that amount of income and expenditure out of the economy — particularly at a time when people thinking about the holiday season — will have a significant impact on not just those individuals and their families but the economy as a whole.”

Friday’s jobs report is unlikely to affect policy from the Federal Reserve, which has pledged open-ended stimulus until the job market improves “substantially.”

“This was not a perfect report by any means,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist for Mesirow Financial. “We would like to see double these kind of gains in jobs. Our benchmark on improvement is still pretty low.”    

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Romney Campaign Approaches Pennsylvania With a New Urgency

 In a striking last-minute shift, the Romney campaign has decided to invest its most precious resource — the candidate’s time — in a serious play to win Pennsylvania.

Mr. Romney’s appearance here on Sunday could be a crafty political move to seriously undercut President Obama, or it could be a sign of desperation. Either way, his visit represents the biggest jolt yet in a state that was until recently largely ignored in the race for the White House.

Over the last several days, with polls showing Mr. Obama’s edge in the state narrowing, Republicans have sprung into action and forced the Democrats to spend resources here that could have gone toward more competitive battleground states.

Conservative super PACs dusted off old advertisements that had not been shown in weeks and shipped them to local television stations from Scranton to Pittsburgh. They ordered millions of dollars in airtime.

And overnight the race here became the most expensive test yet of whether Republicans and their armies of cash-flush outside groups could unsettle the race at the last minute.

The super PACs helped create an opening that paved the way for the Romney campaign to start making its move. The campaign has already invested $1 million in television advertising across the state, and on Thursday it bolstered that effort even further with a new round of commercials that will ensure a heavy and continuous presence through Election Day.

This came as the Republican National Committee made one of its largest commitments of the race so far, dropping $2.5 million into the state.

Forced to respond, the Obama campaign has put more than $1.5 million into an ad campaign here and is planning even more. Democrats are saying that the race is much closer than they would have guessed just a week ago.

“It’s a little tighter than I would have expected,” said Jef Pollock, a pollster for Priorities U.S.A. Action, a Democratic super PAC. “But the question is whether this is just the natural tightening that’s going to happen.”

Pennsylvania has voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in every election for the last 20 years. Independent pollsters have called it the Republicans’ white whale. Indeed, polls show Mr. Obama ahead, albeit by a shrinking margin. And his senior political strategist, David Axelrod, even joked this week that he would shave off his mustache of 40 years if they lose here.

But there is a tangible sense — seen in Romney yard signs on the expansive lawns of homes in the well-heeled suburbs, and heard in the excited voices of Republican mothers who make phone calls to voters in their spare time — that the race is tilting toward Mr. Romney.

If ever there were a place where a last-ditch torrent of money could move the needle, this is it. For the last couple of months, there has been a void of presidential ads in Pennsylvania. So when Republican strategists looked for places where their money could go the furthest, they set their sights here, reasoning that a dollar spent in Erie or Altoona would have a greater impact than in a place like Las Vegas or Cleveland, where political commercials have clogged the airwaves.

Republicans believe that even if they cannot stop the president from winning the state — and rob him of its crucial 20 electoral votes — they can cut into his margins with certain key demographics. Mr. Obama carried the state by 10 points in 2008, a victory in large part because of strong support in Philadelphia and its surrounding suburbs, some of which he carried by 20 points.

But those counties, which are full of upper-middle-class women and Jewish voters, are precisely the places where Republicans believe their efforts are paying off most.

“The biggest drop-off for the president has been in these more suburban, upper-class areas,” said Jim Lee, the president of Susquehanna Polling and Research, a Republican firm. “The women there tend to be very moderate, pro-choice, pro-gun control, pro-gay rights. And they don’t fear a Romney presidency like they would maybe a Rick Santorum presidency. I don’t think Obama has been able to convince them that Romney is a radical.”

Liberal groups like Planned Parenthood said that some of the Republicans’ recent messaging is helping the Republican close the gap with women. Among recent ads is one in which a woman directly refutes Obama ads that portray Mr. Romney as extreme on reproductive health issues.

To counteract this push, Planned Parenthood is leaving leaflets that resemble a pink wallet at the doorsteps of homes across the state. In it, women read that “Electing Mitt Romney could cost you $407,000,” a plea to the pocketbook issues that both sides believe are motivating women this year.

But as Democratic groups and the Obama campaign press their case, the Republicans have a formidable operation of their own. For months now, a locally based group called Let Freedom Ring says it has spent more than $2 million on an online ad campaign that has been viewed 30 million times. It targets women who visit the Web sites of HGTV, Vogue and People with ads that run before online videos.

In one, a young woman asks her friend about Mitt Romney. “I don’t know. He’s not as cool. And he’s a Republican,” she responds before deciding that yes, she will go with “Mr. Dependable” over “Mr. Cool.”

Americans for Prosperity, the conservative advocacy group financed with the help of the Koch brothers, has a chapter here that says it has made more than 200,000 phone calls in October. Many of the callers, they say, are mothers who volunteer from home.

“This is perfect for women,” said Jennifer Sefano, the group’s director in Pennsylvania. “You don’t have to pay for a baby sitter. You don’t even have to leave the house.”        

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