Countless times on this campaign the candidates have competed for the mantle of being most like the Great One (not Gretzky). Unfortunately, once the comparisons start being made, you never know where they will lead.

ThinkProgress thinks the comparisons lead straight to the White House. In this short video, they have Reagan and President Obama both talking about eliminating tax loopholes that sometimes allow the wealthy to pay a smaller portion of their income in taxes than the not-quite wealthy.

So, in honor of Reagan’s 101st birthday:

Quoting Reagan from the video:

We’re going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share. In theory, some of those loopholes were understandable, but in practice they sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying ten percent of his salary, and that’s crazy. [...] Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver or less?

Earlier in the campaign, The Colorado Independent published the following video showing Reagan and George H.W. Bush discussing immigration in tones that would have gotten them booed at this year’s debates.

There has been no announcement yet from the Colorado Perry campaign, which is headed by Republican US Rep Mike Coffman (CD6). Coffman embraced Perry early in the race but has seemed to distance himself from the candidate as Perry clearly struggled on the national stage. Coffman faces reelection this year in a district recently remade from a GOP stronghold into a competitive district divided roughly equally among independent, Republican and Democratic voters.

CNN broke the news of the coming Perry announcement but Politico offered a cautionary note, referring to the disarray of the Perry campaign that has made his candidacy unpredictable.

“The discord in Perryworld was evident even as the candidate prepared to drop out.

“Top officials in Texas said they were unaware of his intentions and as late as this morning said they genuinely didn’t know whether he was still running.”

The news will come as a disappointment for a bloc of conservatives led by Erick Erickson at national Tea Party blog RedState, who have embraced Perry as a true conservative while excoriating his staff as incompetent.

Erickson wrote this morning of the inevitable end of the Perry campaign, forecasting coming events.

In a post titled “Hero or Spoiler,” he lamented the turn the primary has taken, where unreliably conservative Romney is marching to the nomination, in part because his opponents have split the anti-Romney Tea Party vote.

Yesterday, I argued that Rick Perry should leave the GOP primary in advance of Saturday’s election and endorse Newt Gingrich, who is the most logical fit in the existing field for a Perry endorsement.

The Perry campaign responded that the race would be decided by voters, not pundits behind a computer.

Fair enough. Rick Perry does not want to be seen as a quitter. But quit he will. I do not want him to quit. I urged him to stay in the race. But sadly his campaign has been unable to get the second look I thought it deserved…

It may suck, but it is reality. And we are forced at times like this to deal with reality. The reality is that Rick Perry will be quitting the race, but he is not quitting the fight, which has always been more important…

It’s not like I relish taking this position. I introduced Rick Perry at the 2011 RedState Gathering as the next President of the United States. He remains the best qualified man to be President. I would be thrilled to have him as my President. But he is polling in last place and there are three days to go. It isn’t going to happen.

But throwing his support to one of the other non-Romney candidates could help that person win.

Rick Perry will quit…. The question is whether he will quit before Saturday’s primary and help someone else win as a hero and king maker, or will he quit next week and see Mitt Romney win with Perry serving as the spoiler, keeping either Gingrich or Santorum from winning.

Perry’s joining the race for the nomination last fall generated great enthusiasm but his repeat gaffes and clear casting about on foreign policy questions conjured a sort of caricature version of George W Bush, the last Texas governor to win the White House and a man whose recently past presidency remains deeply controversial and unpopular among Americans on the right and left.

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Joe Perez, a retired city worker, is the owner of this gathering space, a clapboard nerve center of northern Colorado Obama politics tucked into a cul-de-sac between a maze of wooden fences. The interior is plastered with political signs in English and Spanish. One stretches across the entire back wall: “The road to the presidency goes through Greeley” it announces in big-brush block letters. The volunteers point out the sign and laugh at its ironic grandiosity but they also semi-seriously embrace it.

They’ll tell you that Colorado is a pivotal swing state and that it reflects key demographic and economic changes taking place throughout the American west. Although the Northern Colorado Tea Party, for example, is one of the largest Tea Party groups in the country and held repeat candidate forums in the Greeley area during the 2010 election season, its familiar rallying cries– like “We want our country back”– either fail to resonate with or offend the kind of people who are destined to eventually dominate the region. Over the last decades, large numbers of coastal and university-town Americans have come here to work in expanding tech and research industries and, together with the growing mostly still working-class Latino population, are tipping the state’s formerly red-libertarian political profile to a shade of purple that places public good at least on something like par with individual liberty as a top government priority.

In fact, at a glance, the volunteers in Joe’s garage could be northern Colorado Tea Partiers. These aren’t stereotypical fresh-faced Obamatron hipsters; these are politicized older people. Outwardly, the two most glaring differences between these volunteers and local Tea Partiers are that they are an ethnically mixed bunch and that they are intensely organized on election campaign work. They are not discussing the news or politics or the failings of the media– or anything else. They’re on task. It’s nearly a year from Election Day and a holiday week and yet there’s almost no time being wasted in this garage.

Material from the national organization, Obama for America (OFA), spreads out on long foldout tables covered with red-checkered tablecloths. Laptops are open with browsers showing the My Barack Obama or My-BO and Democratic Party VoteBuilder databases. People are typing from the beginning to the end of the meeting. Everyone knows what they’re here to do.

As the meeting progresses, Perez fills out a big white-board calendar set in front of the car door.

A woman named Trish updates a list of thousands of Weld County residents’ names with answers to a host of ground-game questions: Who seemed receptive to the message? Who wants to volunteer? Who changed a phone number? Who needs to register to vote?

Pat Bruner, the meeting facilitator, works off an agenda cheat-sheet provided by the national campaign, ticking off items and adding notes for next week.

Dates are being set for face-to-face coffees with potential volunteers. Follow-up pre-printed OFA postcards are being addressed to be mailed out the week after Thanksgiving. Phone banking time is scheduled to talk to the voters receiving the postcards. There is a Review and Preview meeting set for the middle of December, where the group will look back on progress made and ahead to goals that must be achieved in the first weeks of the new year.

Ten minutes after the meeting starts, the volunteers are all on their phones, looking mainly at this stage to line up more organizers and swell the ranks of the northern Colorado advance teams. Those not typing notes are scribbling away with OFA pens.

The Greeley team has been meeting here to work exclusively on the campaign since August. Nearly all of them worked to elect Obama in 2008 and most have been working to gain public support for Obama’s policy agenda since he was inaugurated. To do that, they have essentially been using the same organizing techniques and as a bonus keeping the campaign’s network of contacts fresh.

Dissipated electricity

Perez’s story of how he recently became involved in Democratic politics is typical of the genre. He moved to Greeley from Denver 30 years ago looking for a smaller, agricultural, more culturally conservative community, something more like western Nebraska where he grew up. Greeley suits him but there were drawbacks.

“It’s so [politically] conservative up here, I felt I couldn’t really speak my convictions,” he said. “I was never political. After Vietnam, I put a McGovern sticker on my car. That was my first political action outside the voting booth. Then I saw Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. He told his story. He said ‘We’re not African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans. We’re all just Americans.’

“Well, I’ve been called a wetback, a beaner, a spic,” Perez said, counting off the names on his fingers. “I’ve been called everything, but never an American. That’s all I ever wanted to be, an American. Obama electrified me about the inclusiveness of the American people.”

That variety of Obama electricity has diminished now that he is also familiar to Americans as the captain of a dysfunctional Washington at a time of crisis. For the 99 percent, the national economy three years after Obama took office is still limping along, throwing up the kind of high unemployment figures it’s easy to imagine would dance like hooded reapers through the dreams of any sitting president. In response, the campaign is looking in part to provide context for voters through messaging that focuses on the alternative realities any of the likely Republican candidates would have brought about.

Perez says one of the main hurdles he’s coming up against in talking to voters is disillusionment, where citizens who cast their first-ever ballot did so for Obama last election and have come to believe it didn’t make any difference. Washington is still Washington: the games go on as usual there while the vast majority of Americans continue to suffer coast to coast.

For these dispirited voters, Perez delivers a list of examples of Republican actions taken over the past three years that he believes demonstrates a cynical obstructionist approach to government. He leads with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s statement from January 2009 in which he held that the “single most important thing [Republicans] want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Perez mentions the debt and budget standoffs this year that saw Republicans bringing the nation to the “brink of disaster” by refusing to consider raising taxes even on millionaires when debt default loomed and Standard and Poor’s delivered an historic downgrading of the nation’s credit rating. Same thing, says Perez, when you look at what just happened with the congressional super committee, which was formed out of desperation to negotiate a compromise budget but failed to do so.

“There’s a vision of an America that guards the living wage, the opportunity of education, that looks after the well-being of its citizens,” Perez said. “That’s Obama’s vision. I share that vision and I think most Americans share that vision, but there’s just a lack of cooperation to get things done.

“The other side doesn’t seem to care about what they call the ‘bottom feeders,’ [people] who should all just take a shower and get a job. The American people want to work, they want to keep their homes. Unemployment benefits put food on the table but they don’t pay rent. People want jobs. These are our family members and friends. They’re Americans.”

As Jim Rutenberg, writing on the campaign message for the New York Times last weekend, put it: “If 2008 was about ‘Yes We Can’ and limitless possibility, 2012 will be to some degree about why we couldn’t (‘Republican intransigence’), and why we shouldn’t, at least when it comes to anything the Republican nominee proposes (‘His party got us here in the first place’).”

Message and mechanics

For now, however, the message seems less important than the mechanics, and on that score the campaign is notching major successes.

By mid-October, the donor-ticker at the Obama for America website rolled past seven digits. More than a million people have given to the campaign, a rate of giving that outpaces the record set by the first Obama presidential campaign. In the third quarter, the re-election effort raked in $42 million and received 257,000 first-time donations. The average amount donated was $55.

By mid-November, the campaign celebrated its millionth one-on-one conversation with voters, a mark of the old-school approach to election politics taken by the Obama team that prioritizes the ground game and an achievement that buoys campaign staffers despite the lousy economy and shifting poll numbers.

“Our opponents… simply lack the broad base of grassroots support that we have,” campaign manager Jim Messina said at the time. “They don’t believe in it. They don’t have any interest in the kind of politics that bring everyday people together to make real change in this country.”

According to a November campaign memo, the national team also confirmed it had signed on its thousandth volunteer neighborhood team leader. The author of the memo announced successes around the country that included a “day of action” in Colorado that drew 537 volunteers who worked from 58 “staging locations” to arrange more than 100 one-on-one meetings with Obama supporters and independent voters.

Obama for America presently has two offices open in Colorado, one in Denver and one in Fort Collins, and is hiring staff to cover the entire state. Two priorities that have taken shape in the state, according to the Greeley volunteers and campaign officials, is to protect voting rights and to reach out to women. Neither priority comes as a surprise.

Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler has made national news for seeking the authority to purge the state’s election rolls of voters he believes may be illegally registered non-citizens or illegal immigrants and for acting to prevent county clerks from mailing ballots to “inactive voters” or legally registered voters who failed to vote in the 2010 election. He has met stiff resistance in these efforts but Democratic sources routinely refer to him as the state’s Katherine Harris, the controversial Republican Florida secretary of state in 2000 who declared that George Bush had defeated Al Gore and who halted recount efforts despite the fact that a margin of only roughly 500 votes separated the candidates and that widespread allegations of irregularities plagued the ballot casting and counting processes.

In 2010, by almost all accounts, women decided the Colorado U.S. Senate race that pitted Democrat Michael Bennet against Republican Ken Buck. Perez said the Greeley Obama volunteers worked on that race intensely, a race Buck seemed poised to run away with. In the end, however, he turned off women in droves with his strong stand against abortion and his mishandling as Weld County District Attorney of a rape case in which he appeared to blame the victim, arguing that the assault charges weren’t worth pursuing and doing so in crude language that betrayed a retrograde view of sex crimes and gender relations in general.

The Greeley volunteer meeting facilitator on Monday, Pat Bruner, a multi-ethnic mainly German-Japanese mom– “a typical Heinz 57 American,” as she puts it– grew up in Fort Collins and worked for the Obama campaign in 2008. She said she has a big family and feels the need to work to put in place a government that embraces the future, that isn’t mired in the battles of the past. She said many of the voters she is meeting with share similar concerns.

“We spend a lot of time just sitting down with people, talking. They’re worried but they’re also very open and positive about the message. We [volunteers] just keep our eye down the road. We know what part we play in the bigger picture. It’s person to person, phone call after phone call. It’s not glamorous. It’s hard work.”

[Image: Obama presides in Joe Perez's garage in Greeley.]

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Newt Gingrich

Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich leveled particularly harsh criticism at Obama, saying he’s personally hurt the economy by attacking job creators.

“This country has been maniacally anti-jobs,” Gingrich said. “Obama is a left-wing radical who believes in class warfare and then he’s surprised that everybody who he’s attacking doesn’t create jobs.”

Gingrich then asked, “what did he think was going to happen?”

“You can’t go around the country and blame everybody who creates jobs and then say now gee, why didn’t you go out and take risk with your capital and spend the next five years of your lives creating jobs so I can attack you even more?” Gingrich said.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry offered a similar evaluation, saying people have lost confidence in the federal government and are not willing to risk capital to invest in potential job-creating ventures.

“Let’s quit penalizing Americans for making money, quit fighting this fight that we’re fighting on divisions between those that have money and those that don’t,” he said. “I want everybody to have more money.”

Rick Santorum

And Former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) also stuck the country’s economic woes on Obama, saying repealing federal health care reform legislation he championed would be a major step toward recovery.

“I think one of the biggest things we can do is repeal Obamacare,” he said. “That is a job crusher that is creating all sorts of uncertainty.”

Santorum called for eliminating the corporate income tax and allowing for tax-free repatriation of corporate profits being held overseas – estimated at more than $1 trillion – if the money is used to invest in job creation.

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) also called for no taxes on repatriated profits, but said companies should be able to use them however they want.

Bachmann said the biggest problem businesses have right now is uncertainty. She wants a moratorium on regulations, and to see health care reform repealed.

“That’s the biggest problem business has right now,” Bachmann said. “They have no idea what’s going to come out of Washington, D.C. when they wake up in the morning. And that’s why we need to have an immediate moratorium on regulations. It’s killing us.”

Ron Paul

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) said he’d like to see no taxes on repatriated profits and a 15 percent corporate tax rate.

“I want it very low because in many ways, they think…if you lower corporate taxes only the executive is going to benefit,” Paul said. “But the consumer benefits too. Corporate taxes are a form of a sales tax, and if they’re competitive they have to pass this on.”

But Organizing for America, a project of the Democratic National Committee, says the Republican candidates have it wrong. The group claims Obama has worked hard to get rid of undue regulations, and the regulations that have been put in place are meant to protect taxpayers and close loopholes.

A recent review from Bloomberg found Obama has put in place fewer regulations than former President George W. Bush had at this point in his tenure.

National frontrunners Herman Cain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney did not attend the forum, held in Pella.

Paul said he does not want to remove all 11 million undocumented immigrants, but insisted “we must have secure borders and we must not reward people for breaking the law.”

“I don’t think people should come here and esaily become citizens who can vote and receive social benefits,” Paul said, but he added there must be a program to allow “people who want to work to come.”

Paul said there should an assimilation program, but borders remain important and that citizenship for U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants should not automatic.

Asked if the tea party is an anti-immigrant party Paul said, “I can’t tell you a thing about it because it is sort of all over the place.”

Diario Las Americas, a Miami-based Spanish-language news outlet, wrote late last week that George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism and Ronald Reagan’s “pragmatism” in immigration have been “buried by the new Republican militancy,” due to tea party pressure. The outlet says Republicans are “risking a defeat in 2012″ over the issue.

Las Americas also said that Republican presidential debates have become a competition for who is the strongest or the weakest candidate on illegal immigration. Immigration enforcement activists have said GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry’s distant second-place in the recent Florida straw poll was due to his “weak” statements on immigration.

According to Las Americas, the Republican presidential candidate will need “at least 40 percent of the Hispanic vote to win the general elections.”

GOP Sen. Marco Rubio, who has steadily become a central figure in today’s Republican Party, spoke in August at the Ronald Reagan Library. His message: Americans want the nation to be free and prosperous, but also compassionate.

New York Daily News columnist Albor Ruiz wrote Sunday that “Rubio supports mandatory E-Verify, has adopted the vacuous GOP mantra ‘border security first,’ and despite past support for a Florida in-state tuition bill, now opposes the federal DREAM Act.”

“But no matter how far right he goes, Rubio will never be American enough for some crazies in the birthers movement,” Ruiz wrote.

He added:

The GOP’s Great Latino Hope could turn out not to be such a good idea after all.

A poll conducted by Latino Decisions on the eve of last November’s election found 78% of Cuban-Americans would vote for Rubio, but only 40% of non-Cuban Latinos would do the same. And this was during his moderate phase.

Once again, Republican candidates are clamoring to be more like Ronald Reagan. There may be no higher compliment on the right than to be considered Reaganesque.

Of course, once you drill down, Reagan’s actual positions on taxes, spending and immigration may well fit in better in the Democratic Party than in the current GOP.

A stunning case in point comes to us from Outside The Beltway which has dug up video footage of a 1980 debate between Reagan and George Bush, which given the context of today’s debate, you really have to see to believe.

Reagan calls for an open border with Mexico and Bush says illegal immigrants need to be treated the same as citizens and shouldn’t be considered lawbreakers.

In Wednesday’s debate, only also-ran Jon Huntsman even came close to Reagan or Bush’s nuanced approach to immigration. From The Huffington Post:

Although many attempted to focus narrowly on border security, presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman took a different tack, almost praising then-President Ronald Reagan for signing a mass amnesty for undocumented immigrants in 1986.

Huntsman said Reagan had recognized “a human issue, and I hope that all of us as we deal with this immigration issue will always see it as an issue that revolves around real human beings.”

He said he believes undocumented immigrants should be “punished in some fashion,” but believes legal immigration must be reformed to prevent people from coming into the country without documents.

“Let’s not lose sight of the fact that our legal immigration system is broken,” Huntsman said. “If we want to do something about attracting brain power to this country … we need to focus as much on legal immigration as possible.”

As Rick Perry and the other GOP candidates move to the right on immigration and other issues, they may leave President Obama as the one with the best claim on the Reagan mystique.

Prominent Christian pastors in the United States who have dedicated themselves to serving the poor and most vulnerable citizens don’t believe in trickle-down economics and they don’t believe the problem of poverty should be left for churches to address. More than 4,000 of those pastors signed an open letter to that effect addressed to President Obama and the members of Congress, urging them as they hammer out a federal budget not to make poor and hungry Americans bear the burden of reducing the nation’s deficit. More than 95 pastors and clergy members in Colorado signed the letter, which appeared in Politico Wednesday.

“How narrow and limited and disappointing the budget debate has become in this town,” said Jim Wallis, president of Washington D.C.-based Sojourners, a national Christian nonprofit dedicated to social justice, in a conference call with reporters. “It’s about who’s up and who’s down, what the latest polling says about how a decision this way or that way might affect electoral fortunes in the next election. But there’s nothing about people, real people. Who is going to really suffer and pay the price for bad decisions made in this capital city?

Aghast at the debate, Wallis was moved to ask pastors around the country to weigh in on the budget and raise their own related priorities absent in the news.

“We thought, let’s go to pastors, particularly because some in this town believe churches should do all this, that government has no role and that pastors could just take care of the problem [of poverty]. Anyone who knows about poverty or knows or lives alongside poor people, knows that’s not an answer.

“Jesus once said ‘come and see.’ Well, I’d like members of Congress to come and see and meet the people who are going to be impacted by their decisions. But they don’t do that. They don’t come and see. They don’t go and look. They don’t find out.”

How would Jesus attack the deficit?

So far the budget wrangling in Washington now tied to raising the national debt ceiling has been massively tilted toward cutting entitlement spending rather than on raising revenue, which means it has been tilted toward shrinking programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Headstart and the WIC food program for impoverished women and children.

That approach to the budget spearheaded by Wisconsin Catholic Republican Paul Ryan has irked some Christian groups, which have launched a campaign against the Ryan budget plan and confronted its author in public as fellow Christians. Ryan has defended the plan as a long-term fiscal and cultural solution. He says reducing government spending is necessary medicine that, in effect, will reform what he sees as a failed approach to public policy. He says austerity is the only way to “save” essential programs like Medicare by ensuring future prosperity.

Unlike the pastors who signed Wallis’s open letter yesterday, Catholic Church leaders endorsed delivered a mixed message on the Ryan approach. In May, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops sent the congressman a letter commending his “continued attention” to Catholic social justice “in the current delicate budget considerations in Congress” but he fell short of an endorsement, pointing to concerns about the poor, as some Catholic writers were quick to point out (here and here). The bishops also joined the Circle of Protection, where members pledge to work to safeguard programs that serve Americans in need, many of which Ryan has placed in his cross-hairs.

Congressional Republicans, urged on by the anti-government Tea Party, so far remain intransigent. They stress entitlement programs as the only viable target and have said repeatedly that they will accept no tax raises during the recession, even though Obama has said no proposed increases would go into effect before 2013, including eliminating the Bush tax breaks for the highest earning Americans.

“I would want more revenues, and fewer cuts to programs for middle class families,” Obama said in a press conference Monday, giving a rough outline of the budget discussions. “But that’s the point. I’m willing to move in [the Republican] direction to get something done. And that’s what compromise entails.”

Progressive Democrats and economists on the left have been horrified by the president’s proposed compromise and the lopsided nature of the debate. They say a jobless recession is no time to attack debt and exactly the time to spend to generate jobs and government revenue. They point out that revenue has been withering for nearly a decade as government leaders from both parties have OK’d slashed taxes and rudderless wars on two continents—and until last year did so while watching the deficit soar like a colorful holiday balloon. Obama, wrestling with the recession since before he took office, has set taxes for Americans even lower than they were under Republican George W. Bush. And Wall Street, bailed out of the financial catastrophe, has returned to reveling in record profits. It’s not so much time for austerity and telling the poor to just “suck it up and cope,” they say, it’s time for everyone to contribute.

Yet, as Wallis pointed out on the call, lobbyists for the private jet industry have reportedly mobilized in the wake of Obama’s targeting for repeal tax breaks for billionaire plane owners.

“There is absolutely no desire on the part of any House Republicans I know to raise tax rates and tax revenues,” Colorado 5th District Republican Rep. Doug Lamborn wrote in a letter to supporters Wednesday. “I do not believe the president’s repeated references to relatively minor issues like corporate jet owners and hedge fund managers are helpful. This may appeal to class envy among some, but the dollar amounts involved will make almost no difference. Entitlements need to be looked at and should be part of the negotiations. That’s where the dollars are,” he said.

Just weeks ago, Lamborn unreservedly celebrated his vote for this year’s nearly $700 billion military budget.

‘If god does judge the nation’

Denver Reverend Nadia Bolz-Weber, pastor at House for All Sinners and Saints, signed the open letter to Obama and Congress. She added in a press release that she had been a recipient years ago of the WIC food program threatened by the budget negotiations.

“As a member of the clergy and a mother of two children with strong minds and bodies– minds and bodies which benefited for three years from WIC– I stand with all Christians in America who believe the cries of the poor and the cries of the children are not only the very voice of Christ, but are indeed the sound of our future waiting for response.”

She told reporters that the poor can’t afford lobbyists but that programs like WIC, which for example sees to basic nutritional needs of pregnant women and new mothers and their infants, should be seen as making an essential “investment in the minds and bodies of our children.”

“People who say they are pro-life,” she added, “should know WIC has saved more than 200,000 babies from dying at birth.

“If god does judge the nation,” she said, referencing the rhetoric surrounding Texas Governor Rick Perry’s Christian-right prayer fest scheduled for next month, “then it’s not on how we protect the wealth of the top percent [of earners].”

Rich Nathan, Senior Pastor of the Vineyard Church of Columbus in Ohio, conceded to reporters that there was an argument raging among Christians in America over government fiscal policy.

“There is an argument but to be quite honest I’m aware of no local pastor in central Ohio who says ‘I am opposed to government spending for the poor’ or ‘I am supportive of government cuts to programs for the poor because I am a follower of Jesus.’ I’ve never heard that statement in central Ohio, ever…

“On the other hand, I’m aware of many many pastors who would say ‘Out of my followship of Jesus, I cannot in good conscience support program cuts for the poor.’”

Wallis added that the stark choice between either attacking the deficit or attacking poverty is a false choice that has only recently gained widespread traction.

“There’s been bipartisan agreement in the past to [protect] the most vulnerable… We have [in the past] reduced the deficit and poverty simultaneously. Everything should be on the table,” he said.

Wallis said he initially sought to draw 1000 pastor and clergy signatures but that the letter drew escalating interest.

At least 350 Catholic clergy members signed on to the letter, although that number includes only one from Colorado: Fort Collins resident Bill McClellan, a deacon at Colorado State University church John XXIII.

That the letter drew a signature of support from a deacon who openly professes dedication to social justice but not from a single priest in the state is perhaps unsurprising, given that the archdioceses here is run by outspoken political conservative bishop Charles Chaput.

–
Note: Thanks to Kristin Ford for clarification on the position taken by U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

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It appears the evolution of Gov. Rick Perry’s prayer event began even earlier than recently reported in Time, and is part of a wider strategy by influential conservative Christian figures to unseat President Barack Obama in 2012.

After Sarah Posner of Religion Dispatches wrote that Perry’s rally seemed reminiscent of televangelist James Robison’s efforts to mobilize conservative Christians to support Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George W. Bush in 2000, the author of what Posner described as one of the most “under noticed” religion stories of the campaign season helped strengthen the connection.

In a two-part series, Ethics Daily contributing editor Brian Kaylor reveals closed-door meetings called last month by Robison in the Fort Worth suburb of Euless, bringing together about 80 pastors and conservative Christian leaders.

With the aim of plotting to oust Obama, the leaders met not just on the phone call recounted in TIME, but in person on June 20-21, after earlier rounds of secretive gatherings September 2010 in Dallas. Robison also held two conference calls in March with 35 right-wing Christian leaders.

Many of the leaders Ethics Daily reported attended those closed-door meetings are also sponsors of Perry’s prayer rally planned in August. (Today, Robison included a list of those who attended on his blog.)

They include event leadership figures Don Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association, the controversial host organization of Perry’s prayer rally; influential conservative activist David Lane, who serves as the event’s national finance chairman; Jim Garlow, in charge of the rally’s “national church mobilization” efforts; former Republican U.S. Rep. Bob McEwen, the government “mobilization” leader; and program endorsers Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and Jacob Aranza, a minister who, Ethics Daily said, “helped popularize the theory that rock ’n’ roll music included backmasked messages promoting drug use and sex,” in the 80s.

Robison had been pushing for a governor to take up his prayer call, Posner writes, arguing that “we need our governors, our state leaders, our national leaders, really come together in real serious prayer because we need answers from above.” And as revealed to Kaylor, Ohio Governor John Kasich urged Robison to pick Perry because he was “the governor that had been in leadership long enough that [he] could call a prayer meeting.”

The authors lay out Robison’s pro-life, pro-Israel, pro-smaller government record, opposed to same-sex marriage and in favor of defending the fight against “Radical Islam.” Though Robison said the meetings are “intended to be spiritual, not political” he admitted to “political implications” of the gathering, “including issues involving political elections.”

“This is not a political gathering; it is a gathering for a spiritual awakening that will affect every area of life and culture,” Robison told Ethics Daily. “We’re not trying to organize some power base. We’re trying to release the power that affects every other base of influence and power.”

Kalyor traces the political subtext apparent on Robison’s TV ministry show, “Life Today”:

“I believe we’ve got about a 12- to 18-month, 24-month period at the most, really less than that, where we’re going to literally have to turn the ship of state away from the hidden dangers, like hidden underwater iceberg edges and the visible, to turn away and head to a safe course, safe harbor with a captain and crew in place over all that will make necessary course corrections to keep us in a secure safe place,” said Robison to Jay Richards, who attended both meetings and played a major role in the conference calls.

“The guy is dead. That is good,” Bush told a CNBC moderator before a crowd of nearly 200, according to ABC news. “Osama’s death is a great victory in the war on terror. He was held up as a leader.”

Bush has declined interviews with the media and he turned down the president’s invitation to join him at Ground Zero with other political leaders in the wake of the news.

At the Wednesday appearance, hwever, he spoke freely. He said the intelligence services deserve the credit for the success of the mission because they built “a mosaic of information, piece by piece.”

He also talked about the the soldiers who conducted the raid.

“I met SEAL Team Six in Afghanistan. They are awesome, skilled, talented and brave. I said, ‘I hope you have everything you need. One guy said, ‘We need your permission to go into Pakistan and kick ass.’”

Bush reasserted his belief that the U.S. must to continue to promote ideas about democracy and freedom around the world to combat terrorism. He made that point, according to an ABC blogger at the event, in the sort of clanging well-meaning manner he made familiar to Americans and people all over the world during his presidency. In talking about the desire for freedom, he described “people who don’t look like us,” by which he presumably meant non-white non-Christians, and he talked about the “relatives of Condoleezza Rice,” by which he presumably meant black American slaves.

“The long-term solution is to promote a better ideology, which is freedom. Freedom is universal,” he told the hedge funders. “People who do not look like us want freedom just as much. The relatives of [former Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice over 100 years ago wanted freedom. It is only when you do not have hope in a society that you join a suicide bomber team.”

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She told blogger Ruben Navarette, Jr., who writes at pajamasmedia.com, that demonizing Latinos is not the way to go if Republicans want to lead on the issue.

“My view is that the immigration discussion, the rhetoric the Republican Party uses, is not helpful; it’s not helpful in a state with the Latino population we have,” Whitman said during a brief interview following a speech at a George W. Bush Institute conference on the economy. “We as a party are going to have to make some changes, how we think about immigration, and how we talk about immigration.”

Somos Republican founder DeeDee Garcia Blase applauded Whitman’s attempt to tone down the rhetoric, but said anti-immigrant stances from Latino Republican groups such as the Latino National Republican Coalition and the Republican National Hispanic Assembly also send the wrong message.

“Embracing these laws are not the true pulse and sentiment of our overall Latino community,” Garcia Blase said. “The GOP must stop going to Latino Republican tokens who will tell them what they want to hear.”