Biden names names; says GOP ‘dead wrong’ on auto bailout
MSNBC // Carrie Dann
TOLEDO, Ohio — In the White House’s most aggressive singling out of its Republican rivals to date, Vice President Joe Biden slammed Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum by name during his first public campaign event of the 2012 cycle. Addressing more than 500 union members and supporters at United Auto Workers Local 12 here, Biden touted the administration’s backing of the auto industry bailout, saying that the GOP presidential candidates were “dead wrong” in their opposition to the measure.

Senator Kerry defends Obama against GOP critics
Boston Globe // Glen Johnson
Had things gone according to plan, had the proverbial half-football stadium’s worth of extra voters turned out for him in Ohio in 2004, Senator John Kerry could be in the final year of his presidency.Yet the reality is that he did not win one term, let alone two. And he has instead spent the past seven-plus years in the US Senate, focusing his attention on his duties as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and – more recently – as the senior member from Massachusetts.This past week, though, Kerry showed that the presidential gene has not receded, as he launched a broad-based defense of the Obama administration. It only underscored the belief that he is a leading candidate for secretary of state should fellow Democrat Barack Obama win a second term in November.On Monday, Kerry delivered a sharply partisan speech to the nonpartisan New England Council, castigating congressional Republicans for blocking even the most mundane accomplishment as part of an effort to prevent Obama’s reelection.

Pennsylvania Becomes First State In 2012 To Enact Voter ID Law
Think Progress // Scott Keyes
With a stroke of a pen, hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians were potentially disenfranchised last night. Gov. Tom Corbett (R) signedinto law HB 934, which requires all Pennsylvanians to show a certain form of photo ID in order to be allowed to vote, after the Republican-controlled state legislature approved the bill this week. It will have a disastrous impact on the 700,000Pennsylvanians who currently lack photo ID, half of whom are senior citizens. With the new voter ID law in place, they would not be permitted to cast a vote in the November general election. (In 2008, a watershed Democratic year, Barack Obama only won the state by 600,000 votes.)

Obamacare critic leaves us holding her hospital bills
Tampa Bay Times // Wendell Potter
If I were trying to persuade the Supreme Court later this month that Obamacare should not be declared unconstitutional, I would tell the story of the Florida Panhandle woman who was the original named plaintiff in the lawsuit filed by the National Federation of Independent Business, one of the fiercest critics of the health care reform law. • The NFIB thought it had found the perfect person when one of its members, Mary Brown, a 56-year-old owner of an automobile repair shop in Panama City, volunteered to lend her name to the lawsuit.

President Recapturing Groups Won by G.O.P. in 2010
New York Times // Dalia Sussman
While President Obamais locked in a tight race for re-election, the latest New York Times/CBS News poll found him faring well against the top Republican candidates among some important groups that abandoned Congressional Democrats in 2010.   Among all registered voters, Mr. Obama had a three-point edge over Mitt Romneyand a four-point advantage over Rick Santorum, differences that are within the poll’s margin of sampling error.   Independents are the quintessential swing voters, and election results often hinge on them. In 2008, a majority of them supported Mr. Obama, according to exit polls, helping to fuel his victory. But in 2010, they helped hand Republicans control of the House of Representatives, supporting them over Democratic candidates by 19 points.

Voters blame president for gas prices, experts say not so fast
Washington Post // Steven Mufson
How much does the president have to do with the price of gasoline? A lot, say American voters. According to oil experts and economists, not so much — at least in the short term.  Today’s oil prices are the product of years and decades of exploration, automobile design and ingrained consumer habits combined with political events in places such as Sudan and Libya, anxiety about possible conflict with Iran, and the energy aftershocks of last year’s earthquake in Japan.   “This notion that a politician can wave a magic wand and impact the 90-million-barrel-a-day global oil market is preposterous,” said Paul Bledsoe, strategic adviser to the Bipartisan Policy Center and a former Clinton administration official.

A TNR Symposium on Obama’s Second Term: Why Defending His First-Term Achievements Should Be Enough
The New Republic // Jonathan Cohn
Yes, we know we’re tempting fate. But we figure there’s a 50 percent chance Obama will get reelected, and in any case he needs an agenda to campaign on. So we’ve asked a number of TNR contributors to explain what they think Obama should focus on for the next four years—if he wins in November. Click here to read the collected contributions.  The strangest thing happened outside my house two hours ago. I killed a mosquito. In Michigan. In early March. If I had any doubts about what President Obama’s top priority should be in his second term, that moment erased them.  Scientists say this is the fourth warmest winter on record. By itself, that fact (like the insect I just crushed) tells us nothing about climate change, given that temperatures inevitably bounce around from year to year. But this winter’s weather is part of a much broader, more gradual warming trend that virtually every scientist not on the payroll of a coal or energy company has observed. (See the graph at the end of this article.)

With donors tough to find, Romney faces dilemma
Boston Globe // Brian Mooney
There are still no plans for Mitt Romney to dip into his personal fortune, as he did four years ago, to bankroll his candidacy, several campaign advisers said this week, even as the battle for the Republican presidential nomination looks increasingly like it will be a long and expensive fight.  Romney leads the GOP field by far in fund-raising, taking in about $75 million through the end of last month, and he is expected to have collected about $2 million at a series of four events in New York City and Connecticut during a fund-raising blitz Wednesday and Thursday. But his campaign continues to spend heavily in key states in its effort to halt the rise of Rick Santorum, whose once woeful fund-raising approached that of Romney’s last month. Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul did not respond to a Globe inquiry about whether tapping the candidate’s personal wealth is an option, other than to say in an e-mail that the campaign had its “second best fund-raising month to date in February.’’

Romney’s Donors Say the Darnest Things
New York Magazine // Eliza Shapiro
Mitt and Ann Romney have said their fair share of silly things about money recently. Mitt’s assurance that he had friends who own NASCAR teams didn’t help his populist cred, and Ann’s comment that she didn’t consider herself wealthy landed with a thud on the Internets last week. Now, Ken Griffin, founder and CEO of Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel and a Romney supporter has told the Chicago Tribune that the super-rich have an “insufficient influence” on politics.  Griffin has given $150,000 to the Romney-supporting super PAC Restore our Future. He describes himself as a “Reagan Republican” who is also a fan of new Chicago mayor and former Obama chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, who recently gave Griffin a tour of his new office. And why don’t the rich have enough influence on politics? “Those who have enjoyed the benefits of our system more than ever now owe a duty to protect the system that has created the greatest nation on this planet,” says Griffin. Griffin gave to Obama in 2008 but has been at the forefront of a very public disappointmentwith the president by a certain slice of the really rich.