Republicans are livid about a comment that President Obama made -- unaware that it was being captured by an open microphone -- to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Referring to protracted discussions over the placement of a U.S. missile defense system in Europe, Obama said: "On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this can be solved.  But it's important for [incoming President Vladimir Putin] to give me space. This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility."  Sounding like a spy, Medvedev responded: "I will transmit this information to Vladimir."

Were Obama's comments proof that he was "pulling his punches with the American people" and obscuring his plans for the missile defense system? That’s what Mitt Romney suggested.  John R. Bolton, whom conservatives would like to see as Romney’s secretary of State, called the remarks a "fire bell in the night" and a harbinger of capitulations  to come  if Obama is reelected.  Karl Rove contributed a piece to the Fox News site headlined  "Why Obama's Open Mic Slip Could Seriously Hurt his Re-Election Hopes."

The overheard Obama remarks were certainly a gaffe, but that was because they were overheard. The president should have been more discreet and wary of electronic amplification. But the comments themselves are defensible, even obvious.

The Russians don't need Obama to tell them that it's bad timing for him to accelerate negotiations that would bring exactly the sort of outcry from hard-liners that greeted his "private" comments. It's likely he or his emissaries have pointed to the election as a reason for patience on other fronts. It would be no surprise, for example, if the administration has been telling Palestinians it will be more likely to press Israel to stop West Bank  settlements after the U.S. election.

Obama insists that he isn't  trying to "hide the ball" from the American people about his plans for missile defense and said he would continue to work with the Russians on the issue later this year. He can now expect to be asked, by Romney or a debate panelist, if he would be willing to share details of the missile defense system with the Russians to assuage their fears that it might undermine their nuclear deterrent.

It's a fair question, and Obama should answer it, but he committed no sin in reminding the Russians that all sorts of issues, domestic and foreign, move to the back burner during an election campaign.

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Candidates go PG-13 on the press

--Michael McGough

Photo: President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev after their meeting in Seoul. Credit: Jewwl Samad / AFP/Getty Images

It may become part of the decathlon known as the Republican road to the White House -– to get down and potty-mouth about the news media.

Former Sen. Rick Santorum's base is probably cheering him to the rafters after he took a vulgar swipe at a New York Times reporter's question Sunday following a Santorum speech in Wisconsin to the effect that Mitt Romney's Massachusetts healthcare law made him "the worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama."

After Santorum's remarks, New York Times reporter Jeff Zeleny zeroed in on that remark, asking Santorum to elaborate:  "You said that Mitt Romney is the worst Republican in the country. Is that true?"

Santorum asked, "What speech did you listen to?"

Zeleny asked again, and Santorum, jabbing a finger toward Zeleny, said "stop lying" and "quit distorting my words. If I see it, it's bullshit. C'mon, man, what are you doing?"

The next day, and evidently in a more cheerful frame of mind, he used the incident as a kind of campaign medal, telling the Fox News Channel, "If you haven't cursed out a New York Times reporter during the course of a campaign, you're not really a real Republican, is the way I look at it." And he told CNN that he was making the case that Romney could not criticize President Obama’s healthcare law because Romney "wrote the blueprint" for it. "And to then say, you know, spin this as Rick Santorum said he's the worst Republican in the country." 

Candidates can never go wrong slamming the news media. Santorum may have been referring to an incident during the 2000 presidential campaign when then-Gov. George W. Bush, talking to his running mate Dick Cheney at a Labor Day event, was picked up by an open mike when he indicated the press corps and said, "There’s Adam Clymer, major-league asshole from the New York Times." Cheney evidently agreed and said, "Oh yeah, big-time."

Bush said he didn't realize the mikes would pick up his voice, but he did not apologize.

(Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry made a vulgar comment about a Secret Service agent during the presidential campaign, but he made it on the record to a reporter, after the agent on Kerry's detail accidentally knocked him down on a ski slope in Idaho. "I don't fall down. The son of a bitch" -- the agent -- ran into him, Kerry told the reporter. Different circumstance from Obama's gaffe to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, caught on an open mike in South Korea on Monday: "This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.")

Maybe one of the most renowned press attacks was President Nixon's, heard on White House tapes siccing the IRS on L.A. Times Publisher Otis Chandler.

On Oct. 7, 1971, more than a year before election day, Nixon ordered the attorney general to check on whether Chandler's gardener was a "wetback," and mentioned that he had ordered an Internal Revenue Service investigation of the Chandler family. "I want this whole goddam bunch gone after.... Every one of those sons of bitches," Nixon said.

He also told the attorney general, John Mitchell, to have the Immigration and Naturalization Service raid The Times looking for illegal immigrants.

A day earlier, The Times had reported on 36 illegal immigrants taken into custody during an immigration raid at a tortilla factory owned by Romana Banuelos, whom the White House had just nominated for the position of U.S. Treasurer (she would become the highest-placed Mexican American in government).

The president told Mitchell that "as a Californian, I know. Everybody in California hires them. There's no law against it, because they are there, because -- for menial things and so forth. Otis Chandler -- I want him checked with regard to his gardener. I understand he's a wetback. Is that clear?"

The Times had decades earlier steadfastly supported and encouraged Nixon; in the midst of Nixon's 1952 ''slush fund'' scandal, The Times' headline had been "Sen. Nixon's Defiance of Smear Hailed."

And George McGovern, the Democrat running against Nixon in 1972, didn't say it to a reporter but to a heckler. McGovern leaned forward and whispered in the man's ear, "Listen, you son of a bitch, why don't you kiss my ass?"

Like Santorum, McGovern too made some political capital out of the incident.

By the next day, McGovern supporters were showing up at rallies with buttons reading "KMA." 

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COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS: Presidential Election 2012

-- Patt Morrison

Photo: Rick Santorum speaks on March 25 at South Hills Country Club during a public rally near Racine, Wis. Credit: Gregory Shaver/Journal Times, AP Photo

Rick Santorum stopped by the Supreme Court on Monday to argue -- again -- that he's better suited to run against President Obama in November than Mitt Romney. That's because of Romney's role in Massachusetts' healthcare reform law, which Santorum says makes the former governor too similar to Obama on that key issue.

Romney's criticisms of "Obamacare" and his pledge to repeal the federal law have rung hollow, at least to my ears. And if voters want nothing more than to chuck healthcare reform into the garbage can, then Santorum's position might be appealing.

But it's axiomatic that voters are reluctant to replace something with nothing, and to date Santorum hasn't offered much when it comes to improving the healthcare system beyond the standard Republican boilerplate. That's not going to satisfy voters who are alarmed by the rapid increase in insurance premiums and the jaw-dropping bills they receive when they run into seemingly minor health problems.

Santorum's website offers a six-point plan for replacing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, proposing to give consumers more control over their healthcare dollars, encourage more competition among insurers and providers, and provide more flexibility to states in their Medicaid programs. There's value in all of the steps he lays out, and many economists agree that healthcare inflation is excessive in part because so much of the industry is shielded from market forces.

Nevertheless, Santorum's plan is built on the faulty premise that healthcare products and services are much like those in any other market. They aren't, and the differences make those products and services resistant to the sort of discipline that competition brings to other fields.

For starters, the care that's really costly tends to be the kind that's urgently needed. It's hard to shop around for an emergency room after you've been hit by a car or when you're having a stroke. Even when someone does have time to consider where to obtain treatment, the huge information gap between doctors and their patients makes it tough for the latter to push back when they're told they need an expensive treatment or drug. And unlike insurers or corporate buyers, individual consumers have little leverage to negotiate for better prices from physician groups and hospital chains.

Consider, for example, Santorum's call for strengthening health savings accounts that are tied to high-deductible insurance plans. In theory, these plans can help reduce the demand for less-vital healthcare services, easing the pressure on prices. In practice, however, big deductibles can give providers an opportunity to soak individual consumers. Witness my colleague Steve Lopez's column Monday about a family being hit with a $5,000 bill for their 11-year-old daughter's stomach ache. There's also the risk that penny-pinching consumers will put off treating ailments until they become full-blown crises.

Another issue is whether competition encourages insurers and providers to reduce costs through more efficient and effective care, or whether it simply encourages regulatory arbitrage. Like many Republicans, Santorum wants to let people buy health policies from insurers based in other states. As Santorum admits, though, the sole purpose is to let people avoid the coverage mandates that certain states (such as California) impose -- for example, a requirement that all policies include coverage for pregnancy. Such a change would make insurance less expensive for some, especially the young and healthy. But it would also make it more expensive for others because the risks they face wouldn't be spread across as many policyholders.

The current insurance system is already warped to favor the young and the healthy. By denying coverage or imposing repeated double-digit rate increases, insurers push older customers and those with preexisting conditions onto rival carriers or into costly state insurance plans for "high risk" consumers. Santorum's plan offers no solutions to that problem, however; instead, it counts on competition to somehow make healthcare and insurance policies more affordable to those who need those products the most.

Well, there is one other thing that Santorum adds to the mix. He calls for "meaningful" medical liability reform to "increase access" and reduce the cost of defensive medicine. There's fairly broad support for some type of medical tort reform, and "Obamacare" encourages states to experiment with it. But it's worth noting that two of the states that have already enacted significant medical liability limits -- California and Texas -- have seen their healthcare costs rise faster than most other states.

The Affordable Care Act leaves much to be desired, particularly in the area of slowing the growth of healthcare costs. But it would be a mistake to toss the law out and count on market forces to yield a better result. Doing so wouldn't address some of the most problematic incentives in the current system, which encourages healthcare providers to look at illness as a profit center and insurers to look at the sick as someone else's problem.

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--Jon Healey

Credit: Brendan Smialowski / AFP/Getty Images

Much criticism has been heaped on a top campaign aide to Mitt Romney for saying that the campaign could "hit a reset button" for the general election, shaking up and restarting "like an Etch-A-Sketch." Eric Fehrnstrom's comments on CNN let rivals renew their accusations that Romney is pretending to be a conservative simply to win the GOP nomination, at which point he reverts to being a Massachusetts moderate.

What struck me about the comment was how Fehrnstrom seems to be living in an alternate universe, one without cable news channels and the Internet. There may be a reset button in that environment, but there sure isn't one in this world.

Romney tried to put a wildly different spin on Fehrnstrom's remarks Wednesday afternoon, saying his aide was simply talking about organizational matters. The "policies and positions" of the campaign won't change, Romney said, but "the nature of the campaign itself, in terms of staff, funding, the states we would go to, will be different than today.”

COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS: Presidential Election 2012

The real meaning of Fehrnstrom's comments seems to lie somewhere in between. Fehrnstrom was responding to a question on whether Romney had moved too far to the right in the primary to win in the general election. His answer clearly addresses more than just where Romney would stump for votes as the nominee; it advances the view that the general-election campaign starts from scratch.

That's just not possible. Romney, like all of his opponents in the race, will never be a blank slate again. All of their public utterances on the campaign trail have been preserved somewhere on tape or online. Much of President Obama's campaign in the fall will be reminding voters of the things that his opponent, whether it be Romney or someone else, has said in his efforts to win over GOP members who have the least in common with the voters who can tip the election -- independents, centrists and the growing population of Latino Americans.

Not that the president's campaign will confine its search to things his Republican opponent said in the current primaries. If Romney is the nominee, we can expect an extended tour through his years at Bain Capital, as well as revisiting the (ahem) dissonance between positions Romney took as Massachusetts governor and the ones he's espousing today.

Obama has the distinct advantage of not having to fend off rivals on his left to win the Democratic nomination. Like the eventual Republican nominee, his campaign in the fall will have to balance the need to play to his base -- that is, to motivate members of his own party -- with the imperative to attract swing voters. But that's an especially tricky task for Romney, given how unenthusiastic GOP conservatives have been about his candidacy. For them, any move Romney makes to the middle may be seen less as electoral pragmatism and more as a show of true colors.

What Fehrnstrom should have said to CNN was that Romney hasn't moved too far to the right; he's had to focus too much on himself and his rivals and not enough on Obama. His campaign has tried repeatedly to shift into general-election mode, with Romney ignoring his GOP opponents and confining his remarks to the incumbent's record.

If Romney can keep voters focused on Obama and the country's struggles over the last few years, he won't have to try to sell independents on the positions he's taken over the past few months. That's a big "if," and it depends to a large extent on the economy losing steam. But then, with a European financial meltdown still a possibility, along with $5-a-gallon gasoline, the recovery could sputter again, just as it did last spring after an earthquake and tsunami crippled Japan.  Maybe that's the reset button Fehrnstrom had in mind.

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--Jon Healey

Credit: Associated Press / The Ohio Art Co./Ellen Dallager

Besides fortifying his boss' flip-flop credentials, Mitt Romney aide Eric Fehrnstrom took me and lots of baby boomers on a nostalgia trip Wednesday when he likened the Romney campaign to an Etch-A-Sketch. As my colleague Morgan Little describes in more detail, Fehrnstrom suggested Romney could tack to the center in a general election because the campaign was like the red-bordered screen with the two white knobs.  "You can kind of shake it up," he said, "and we start all over again."

As a child, I developed two un-marketable skills: writing backward (also known as mirror writing) and drawing better on the Etch-A-Sketch than I could with pen and paper, which was pretty good. Somewhere in the clutter in my apartment is an Etch-A-Sketch a relative presented me a few years ago to see if I still had it. I did a not-bad self-portrait and signed my name. (I'm not in the league of Sketchers who can reproduce artistic masterworks.)

Etch-A-Sketches still exist. (They even have their own website.) But a lot of kids, if offered the choice, would probably choose an iPad. The Etch-A-Sketch, after all, has exactly one app.

It's too bad. The Etch-A-Sketch tested and taught manual dexterity and forced the Sketcher to mine his own imagination for images.

I also liked what will now be called the Romney feature: Destroying your work and starting over is a good habit for a writer, if not a politician.

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--Michael McGough

Photo: Matt Ortega's Etch-A-Sketch Romney site is one of the many responses to a Mitt Romney aide's comments comparing the candidate's transition into the general election to the children's toy. Credit: Matt Ortega / www.etchasketchromney.com

The Republican presidential primaries continue Tuesday in Illinois, the land of Lincoln and of President Obama -- although, it should be noted, neither was born there. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney hopes that Illinois will give him the kind of head-snapping victory that will make his long-rumored inevitability more distinctly inevitable. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, meanwhile, hopes to confound the pundits yet again, although his past successes have raised expectations significantly.

What’s really different this time is that Illinois feels like the kind of one-on-one, mano-a-mano battle between Romney and Santorum that the latter has coveted for months. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich have kept a low profile in Illinois. Nevertheless, polls show that Gingrich and Paul continue to attract roughly the same amount of support from likely voters in the state that they do nationally – about 13% and 8%, respectively.

If Romney manages to grab more than 50% of the vote, that would be a sign that he may finally be wrapping up the nomination. On the other hand, if Santorum wins, that would be yet more evidence that conservatives are rallying around him rather than resigning themselves to a Romney candidacy. No matter what the result, don’t expect Gingrich or Paul to drop out, at least not tonight.

The Times’ Doyle McManus, Michael McGough, David Horsey and I will be following the returns and sharing our thoughts 140 characters at a time. Read our tweets below and interact with us here and on Twitter.

--Jon Healey

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Photo: A Voter enters the fire station polling place on Tuesday in Magnolia, Illinois. Credit: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images

What is it about politics that makes some people lose all perspective?

Today's two examples come from near -- and far.

In the United States, we have Exhibit A, also known as Newt Gingrich.  

Exhibit B comes from Afghanistan: one Hamid Karzai.

Gingrich wants to be president, but he has no shot.  Karzai is a president, but if he's not careful, he will be shot.

Of course, one doesn't enter politics without a healthy -- some might say overinflated -- ego. The best politicians are, by nature, risk-takers. Where others hold back, they charge ahead.  It takes them to great heights sometimes but also brings great falls: see Clinton, Bill, and Nixon, Richard. 

(Thursday brought another reminder:  Former Illinois Gov. Rod Rod Blagojevich left Chicago for Colorado, where he'll be serving a sentence on corruption charges in federal prison.)

And ego certainly applies to Gingrich. Times staff writer Paul West on Thursday summed up Gingrich's motivation for staying in the GOP presidential race:

At 68, the former House speaker is making what figures to be his last fling at elective politics.  But it is his sense of himself as an epic figure that may well be what's keeping him going.

Gingrich hopes for a brokered convention, something that hasn't happened for decades but that appeals to the historian in him.  It may be a figment of his imagination, but it's a harmless fantasy -- unless you're Mitt Romney and hoping to wrap up the nomination.

Karzai, on the other hand, is playing a much more dangerous game.  On Thursday, Times staff writer Laura King reported from Kabul that the Afghan president "had demanded a quicker end to the Western combat mission and a pullback of NATO troops from rural areas."

Karzai's office said he told visiting Defense Secretary Leon Panetta that by year's end, U.S. troops should be garrisoned only in large bases, abandoning outposts in rural districts like Panjwayi, the scene of Sunday's shooting deaths. 

"Afghanistan's security forces have the capability to provide security in the villages of Afghanistan," said a statement from Karzai's office.

Which makes one wonder what country Karzai thinks he's living in. Especially because the Taliban announced Thursday that not only was it suspending talks with the United States on the war but that it would be "pointless" to engage in any talks with the Karzai government.

Karzai's response?

The president also called for a significant acceleration of the handover of security responsibilities to Afghan forces, saying NATO should wind down its combat role in 2013 instead of 2014. "Our demand is to speed up this process, and authority should be given to Afghans," the presidential palace's statement said.

Perhaps Karzai could take a lesson from Gingrich and read up on his history.  Here's a name he might want to check out: Najibullah.

After the Soviet Union withdrew its forces from Afghanistan, Najibullah was president.  Forced from office during the ensuing civil war, Najibullah took refuge in the U.N. compound in Kabul for four years.  But in 1996, the Taliban seized power. 

A Times' story from Friday Sept. 27, 1996, records his fate:

The bloated, beaten body of the man who also once headed the hated Afghan Communists' security service was strung up from a lamppost outside the presidential palace, reports said.

The Times' Doyle McManus wrote Thursday that given recent events, President Obama needs a Plan C for getting out of Afghanistan.  So Karzai may get his wish for a sped-up withdrawal.  

But if that's the case, Karzai's name just might end up listed next to Najibullah's in the history books of the 21st century.

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Big government won't build you a snore room, that's for sure

-- Paul Whitefield

Photo: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, left, meets with Afghan President Hamid Karza in Kabul on Thursday. Credit: Mohammad Ismail / EPA

 

Last week was Super Tuesday. This week: Deep South Tuesday.

Tuesday’s Republican primaries in Alabama and Mississippi could be a turning point in the GOP’s long battle to anoint a presidential nominee – or, depending on the results, no turning point at all.

Let’s begin with a confession of ignorance: There hasn’t been much polling in the two states, and what polling there has been hasn’t produced clear forecasts. Surveys have shown Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum closely bunched; any of the three could win.

If Romney wins in one or both states, that would be an upset and a big boost for his campaign because it would dispel the argument that he can’t attract much support in the conservative South.

If Gingrich wins in one or both states, he’ll have a good argument for staying in the race -- something he has promised to do in any case. But if Gingrich loses both Alabama and Mississippi, he’ll face more pressure from party elders and the media to get out.

And if Santorum wins both states, he’ll cement his growing status as the main conservative alternative to Romney.

On the other hand, if the Deep South primaries end up in a three-way tie, we’ll just have to march on to the next contests – in Missouri (March 17), Puerto Rico (March 18), Illinois (March 20) and Louisiana (March 24) – in search of more clarity there.

My colleagues David Horsey, Michael McGough and I will offer more comments and analysis once the returns start coming in at 5 p.m. PDT. Read our tweets below and interact with us here and on Twitter.

--Doyle McManus

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Poll: What does Newt Gingrich need to do to stay in the race?

Photo: Natalie Collins cast her vote in the Republican presidential primary at a polling station in Gulfport, Mississippi on March 13. Credit: Dan Anderson / EPA

I've already expressed my hope that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich stay in the GOP presidential race to the (presumably bitter) end. And Gingrich has said repeatedly that he has no plans to drop out before the Republican convention in August.

But of course he would say that. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy to suggest to voters that you're poised to drop out -- it discourages your supporters from making the trip to the voting booth. And besides, he's still polling pretty well in Alabama and Mississippi, which are holding primaries Tuesday night (Hawaii Republicans are holding a caucus).

But Gingrich's standing hasn't seemed to improve nationally in weeks, and at least some conservatives who are his target audience seem to be making peace with the idea of (shudder!) Mitt Romney as their nominee. Others are rallying behind rival Rick Santorum, who's more socially conservative than Gingrich but less of a Big Ideas Guy (which may be a good thing in their book).

So the conventional wisdom bubbling up before Tuesday's primaries is that this is a make-or-break evening for Gingrich. If he can't beat Romney in the conservative Deep South, which is effectively his home turf, he'll be forced to admit that there's no point in going on.

That's the theory, at least. Even if he doesn't win, Gingrich may cling to the hope that Romney won't get a majority of the delegates before the convention, setting the stage for an anything-goes scenario in which the best debater in the group has a fighting chance to win.

But what do you think? Is there a threshold Gingrich needs to pass Tuesday night? Take our scandalously unscientific poll, leave a comment or both!

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-- Jon Healey

Credit: David Goldman / Associated Press

Not surprisingly, the Obama Justice Department is opposing a Texas law requiring voters to show photo ID, claiming that it disproportionately disenfranchises  Latino voters. It's the latest example of a familiar trope: Democrats oppose voter ID, calling it unnecessary and discriminatory; Republicans support it, arguing that impersonation at the polls is a real, if hard to quantify, problem.  Not so coincidentally, racial minorities tend to favor Democratic candidates.

Neither of the warring narratives is totally satisfactory. It's plausible that members of economically disadvantaged minority groups are less likely to have, say, a driver's license. But I felt my eyebrows elevating at the Justice Department's estimate that between 175,000 and 304,000 registered Latino Texas voters lack driver's licenses or other state-issued IDs. Really? On the other hand, Republicans' fears of fraud at polling places seem forced. They have a point, though, when they say that it's anomalous that you need a photo ID to board a plane but not to vote.

It's crazy that 175,000 (or 304,000?) Texans of whatever background don't have  government-issued photo IDs and might have difficulty buying a plane or train ticket.  They need to get IDs, and the government should help -- regardless of what happens on Election Day. Like it or not, in 21st century America your face is your fortune.

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-- Michael McGough

Photo: U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder has been an outspoken critic of the Texas law. Credit: Jacquelyn Martin / AP Photo