Voters are concerned about the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative political groups for unfair treatment, and over half think the White House either knew it was happening or — worse yet — was actually behind the operation.

That’s according to a Fox News poll released Tuesday.

The IRS recently admitted it targeted tea party and other conservative groups for extra scrutiny when the groups sought tax-exempt status.

Most voters think the White House was involved in the IRS scandal in some way:  37 percent think the administration knew it was going on but didn’t initiate the policy, while another 29 percent believe the White House directed the IRS to go after those groups.

About a quarter (24 percent) says the White House had absolutely nothing to do with what the IRS was doing.

Almost all of those who identify with the Tea Party movement think the White House was involved:  58 percent think the administration intentionally had them targeted, and 31 percent believe that while the White House knew about the unfair treatment, it wasn’t behind it.

Confidence in the IRS has dropped significantly.  The poll finds 42 percent of voters have “a great deal” (7 percent) or “some” (35 percent) confidence in the agency.  That’s down from 62 percent who had at least some confidence in the IRS in May 2003 (the last time the Fox News poll asked Americans to rate the IRS).

Seventy-eight percent of voters are concerned that certain groups have been singled out, including 50 percent who are “very” concerned and 28 percent “somewhat” concerned.

Even more — 84 percent — are worried individual Americans could receive the same unfair treatment (61 percent “very” and 23 percent “somewhat” concerned).

The poll asked about three current Obama administration controversies.  A 32-percent plurality says the IRS scandal is the worst, followed by Benghazi (27 percent) and the Justice Department seizing the phone records of reporters (21 percent).

Democrats (26 percent) and independents (28 percent) are more than twice as likely as Republicans (11 percent) to say the Justice Department controversy is the worst.

The IRS scandal tops the list for both Republicans (39 percent) and Democrats (28 percent).  Still, Republicans are more likely to pick it as the most troubling by an 11-point margin.

The Fox News poll is based on landline and cell phone interviews with 1,013 randomly chosen registered voters nationwide and was conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R) from May 18 to May 20.  The full poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

By Dana Blanton / Published May 21, 2013 / FoxNews.com

The White House was in damage control mode Tuesday morning as an escalating series of potential scandals raised questions about whether officials abused their authority — all while threatening to undermine President Obama’s second-term ambitions.

The latest controversy to hit the headlines was the allegation that the Justice Department secretly obtained two months of phone records from Associated Press journalists. The AP went public with the charge Monday, and quickly earned sympathy from lawmakers on both sides who widely agreed that the record grab appeared to be unnecessarily intrusive.

House Speaker John Boehner’s office said “they better have a damned good explanation.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, said he’s “very troubled” by the allegations.

Attorney General Eric Holder is sure to come under heavy questioning on the matter when he appears on Capitol Hill for a hearing Wednesday, and could face questions during an unrelated press conference Tuesday afternoon.

The AP allegations amounted to the second controversy that raised concerns from members of both parties and could not be easily dismissed by the administration as a partisan attack. The other was the acknowledgement Friday by the IRS that it inappropriately singled out Tea Party and other conservative groups for scrutiny.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a Tea Party-aligned lawmaker, said those responsible should be fired.

“Anybody who was aware of, and approved of targeting people for their political beliefs and speech, needs to be fired, never in this position again, and made an example of,” he told Fox News on Tuesday.

Those two controversies came on top of a revived clamor in Washington over the Benghazi terror attack. Three whistle-blowers brought the issue back to the fore with their dramatic testimony last week. Further, newly published email excerpts show that a top State Department official pressed the intelligence community to water down its initial story line on the attack in the days before a top diplomat went on television to explain the attack to the public.

And amid that controversy, FoxNews.com and other news organizations reported that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has been reaching out to private-sector executives seeking donations for nonprofit organizations that help enroll people in ObamaCare.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee has already launched a probe into the solicitations. Republicans on the committee voiced concern that the department could be soliciting donations from firms that are also doing business with HHS.

Together, the scandals threaten to distract from Obama’s second-term agenda. He recently suffered a defeat on gun control, but was hoping to align with influential Capitol Hill Republicans to push for an immigration overhaul in the coming weeks.

Obama, in a press conference on Monday, downplayed the scandals. He called Benghazi a political “sideshow” driven by partisan motives. As for the IRS, he made clear that he found the alleged conduct to be unacceptable and would not tolerate it.

But the administration has distanced itself from that controversy, attributing it to the actions of low-level staffers. The White House also distanced itself from the AP phone record grab, referring questions to the Justice Department.

Published May 14, 2013 / FoxNews.com

“…statements in the [group’s] case file criticize how the country is being run.”

— One of the criteria used by IRS investigators to target small-government groups for special scrutiny, according to an agency audit provided to congressional investigators.

Team Obama has always known how to make the most of critics in order to make the least of criticism.

During the 2008 campaign, it was “Stop the Smears,” an Obama effort to single out those who made claims about the candidate’s nativity, faith or personal conduct, rounding up the most slanderous and paranoiac claims, publicizing and then refuting them.

Then when more credible individuals would get near the subject, the campaign could strike back. Recall Hillary Clinton back in March 2008 on CBS strenuously defending then-Sen. Barack Obama against claims that he was a Muslim but then leaving the door open just a bit by saying, “As far as I know.”

Obamaland went on the attack over those five words, and Clinton paid dearly.

And so it went in office. The best example was how much attention was paid to the small number of people focused on the idea that President Obama was born someplace other than Hawaii. They even had coffee mugs made with the president’s birth certificate.

For weeks, as John Boehner or Mitch McConnell went out to talk about tax policy or spending, they would have to face questions about the president’s birth certificate. Before the GOPers could talk about their problems with Keynesian economics, righteous reporters would make Republicans first discuss Kenya.

There was also the effort to elevate Rush Limbaugh as the de facto spokesman for the Republican Party, with the White House press secretary demanding that reporters inquire of Republican office holders whether they agreed with the conservative radio host who had said he hoped Obama would fail because the new president’s agenda was so destructive. The reporters did just that and much squirming was the result.

Or how about the White House encouraging supporters to collect claims made online about what would become Obama’s 2010 health law? As the implementation of the law has shown, there was much reasonable cause for concern with the legislation. But that’s not what the White House was hunting for. Team Obama wanted the grainiest sediment from the bottom of the can of mixed nuts.

Obama favors a similar technique in policy speeches, having built enough straw men over the years for every pumpkin patch in history.

This approach has helped the president keep his personal approval ratings above those of his individual policies and allowed he and his political team to depict critics, even legitimate ones, as racist, xenophobic, kooky and stupid. The president’s credibility and reasonableness have been enhanced and his detractors have been delegitimized – enough so that Obama won what once looked like an improbable second term.

So what happens when that stops working? We’re about to find out.

Obama used the same playbook when defending himself against claims of ineptitude and cover-up concerning a September raid by Islamist militants on a U.S. diplomatic outpost. What might have been a disaster for the president was turned around in a neat bit of political jujitsu with the help of Candy Crowley and a tentative challenger.

The line held for a long time, with the administration able to dismiss critics on the subject as obsessed conspiracy theorists or politically motivated phonies. But the evidence of hiding the facts from the public eventually became so great that Team Obama has had to begin a long, painful backward march.

When an official is found to have scrubbed talking points about the attack expressly to deny Republicans the opportunity to criticize the administration, it becomes clear that Obama was wrong when he said his administration was being forthcoming. It also opens the door to the next round of questioning about whether Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were willfully misinformed or willfully spreading misinformation. Neither is good.

With reporters plenty embarrassed by having been badly burned by Team Obama on the Benghazi attacks, a new scandal comes into view: the deliberate targeting of conservative groups by the IRS.

The agency tried to get out ahead of the scandal by going public just before congressional investigators released their findings. The timing, though, is even worse for the White House.

A government agency going after groups that oppose the president’s agenda and, most disconcertingly, support constitutional principles, would never be a good thing for an administration. But having the admission come at the exact moment the administration’s credibility is badly damaged for misleading the public on another subject is dire.

Just a few months ago, claims of a Benghazi cover up and the government hassling and intimidating the president’s critics were dismissed as kooky. Now both have been revealed to be true, leaving the president’s team unable to use the old jujitsu and retreat to the old-school techniques of compartmentalization (“isolated incident in a single agency”) and insulation (“the president did not order…”).

The best recipes for Lame Duck Soup call for a healthy scoop of scandal. Obama just got himself a double helping.

WASHINGTON –  America’s blacks voted at a higher rate than other minority groups in 2012 and by most measures surpassed the white turnout for the first time, reflecting a deeply polarized presidential election in which blacks strongly supported Barack Obama while many whites stayed home.

Had people voted last November at the same rates they did in 2004, when black turnout was below its current historic levels, Republican Mitt Romney would have won narrowly, according to an analysis conducted for The Associated Press.

Census data and exit polling show that whites and blacks will remain the two largest racial groups of eligible voters for the next decade. Last year’s heavy black turnout came despite concerns about the effect of new voter-identification laws on minority voting, outweighed by the desire to re-elect the first black president.

William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, analyzed the 2012 elections for the AP using census data on eligible voters and turnout, along with November’s exit polling. He estimated total votes for Obama and Romney under a scenario where 2012 turnout rates for all racial groups matched those in 2004. Overall, 2012 voter turnout was roughly 58 percent, down from 62 percent in 2008 and 60 percent in 2004.

The analysis also used population projections to estimate the shares of eligible voters by race group through 2030. The numbers are supplemented with material from the Pew Research Center and George Mason University associate professor Michael McDonald, a leader in the field of voter turnout who separately reviewed aggregate turnout levels across states, as well as AP interviews with the Census Bureau and other experts. The bureau is scheduled to release data on voter turnout in May.

Overall, the findings represent a tipping point for blacks, who for much of America’s history were disenfranchised and then effectively barred from voting until passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

But the numbers also offer a cautionary note to both Democrats and Republicans after Obama won in November with a historically low percentage of white supporters. While Latinos are now the biggest driver of U.S. population growth, they still trail whites and blacks in turnout and electoral share, because many of the Hispanics in the country are children or noncitizens.

In recent weeks, Republican leaders have urged a “year-round effort” to engage black and other minority voters, describing a grim future if their party does not expand its core support beyond white males.

The 2012 data suggest Romney was a particularly weak GOP candidate, unable to motivate white voters let alone attract significant black or Latino support. Obama’s personal appeal and the slowly improving economy helped overcome doubts and spur record levels of minority voters in a way that may not be easily replicated for Democrats soon.

Romney would have erased Obama’s nearly 5 million-vote victory margin and narrowly won the popular vote if voters had turned out as they did in 2004, according to Frey’s analysis. Then, white turnout was slightly higher and black voting lower.

More significantly, the battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida and Colorado would have tipped in favor of Romney, handing him the presidency if the outcome of other states remained the same.

“The 2012 turnout is a milestone for blacks and a huge potential turning point,” said Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University who has written extensively on black politicians.

“What it suggests is that there is an `Obama effect’ where people were motivated to support Barack Obama. But it also means that black turnout may not always be higher, if future races aren’t as salient.”

Whit Ayres, a GOP consultant who is advising GOP Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a possible 2016 presidential contender, says the last election reaffirmed that the Republican Party needs “a new message, a new messenger and a new tone.” Change within the party need not be “lock, stock and barrel,” Ayres said, but policy shifts such as GOP support for broad immigration legislation will be important to woo minority voters over the longer term.

“It remains to be seen how successful Democrats are if you don’t have Barack Obama at the top of the ticket,” he added.

In Ohio, a battleground state where the share of eligible black voters is more than triple that of other minorities, 27-year-old Lauren Howie of Cleveland didn’t start out thrilled with Obama in 2012. She felt he didn’t deliver on promises to help students reduce college debt, promote women’s rights and address climate change, she said. But she became determined to support Obama as she compared him with Romney.

“I got the feeling Mitt Romney couldn’t care less about me and my fellow African-Americans,” said Howie, an administrative assistant at Case Western Reserve University’s medical school who is paying off college debt.

Howie said she saw some Romney comments as insensitive to the needs of the poor. “A white Mormon swimming in money with offshore accounts buying up companies and laying off their employees just doesn’t quite fit my idea of a president,” she said. “Bottom line, Romney was not someone I was willing to trust with my future.”

The numbers show how population growth will translate into changes in who votes over the coming decade:

–The gap between non-Hispanic white and non-Hispanic black turnout in 2008 was the smallest on record, with voter turnout at 66.1 percent and 65.2 percent, respectively; turnout for Latinos and non-Hispanic Asians trailed at 50 percent and 47 percent. Rough calculations suggest that in 2012, 2 million to 5 million fewer whites voted compared with 2008, even though the pool of eligible white voters had increased.

–Unlike other minority groups, the rise in voting for the slow-growing black population is due to higher turnout. While blacks make up 12 percent of the share of eligible voters, they represented 13 percent of total 2012 votes cast, according to exit polling. That was a repeat of 2008, when blacks “outperformed” their eligible voter share for the first time on record.

–Latinos now make up 17 percent of the population but 11 percent of eligible voters, due to a younger median age and lower rates of citizenship and voter registration. Because of lower turnout, they represented just 10 percent of total 2012 votes cast. Despite their fast growth, Latinos aren’t projected to surpass the share of eligible black voters until 2024, when each group will be roughly 13 percent. By then, 1 in 3 eligible voters will be nonwhite.

–In 2026, the total Latino share of voters could jump to as high as 16 percent, if nearly 11 million immigrants here illegally become eligible for U.S. citizenship. Under a proposed bill in the Senate, those immigrants would have a 13-year path to citizenship. The share of eligible white voters could shrink to less than 64 percent in that scenario. An estimated 80 percent of immigrants here illegally, or 8.8 million, are Latino, although not all will meet the additional requirements to become citizens.

“The 2008 election was the first year when the minority vote was important to electing a U.S. president. By 2024, their vote will be essential to victory,” Frey said. “Democrats will be looking at a landslide going into 2028 if the new Hispanic voters continue to favor Democrats.”

Even with demographics seeming to favor Democrats in the long term, it’s unclear whether Obama’s coalition will hold if blacks or younger voters become less motivated to vote or decide to switch parties.

Minority turnout tends to drop in midterm congressional elections, contributing to larger GOP victories as happened in 2010, when House control flipped to Republicans.

The economy and policy matter. Exit polling shows that even with Obama’s re-election, voter support for a government that does more to solve problems declined from 51 percent in 2008 to 43 percent last year, bolstering the view among Republicans that their core principles of reducing government are sound.

The party’s “Growth and Opportunity Project” report released last month by national leaders suggests that Latinos and Asians could become more receptive to GOP policies once comprehensive immigration legislation is passed.

Whether the economy continues its slow recovery also will shape voter opinion, including among blacks, who have the highest rate of unemployment.

Since the election, optimism among nonwhites about the direction of the country and the economy has waned, although support for Obama has held steady. In an October AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of nonwhites said the nation was heading in the right direction; that’s dropped to 52 percent in a new AP-GfK poll. Among non-Hispanic whites, however, the numbers are about the same as in October, at 28 percent.

Democrats in Congress merit far lower approval ratings among nonwhites than does the president, with 49 percent approving of congressional Democrats and 74 percent approving of Obama.

William Galston, a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, says that in previous elections where an enduring majority of voters came to support one party, the president winning re-election — William McKinley in 1900, Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936 and Ronald Reagan in 1984 — attracted a larger turnout over his original election and also received a higher vote total and a higher share of the popular vote. None of those occurred for Obama in 2012.

Only once in the last 60 years has a political party been successful in holding the presidency more than eight years — Republicans from 1980-1992.

“This doesn’t prove that Obama’s presidency won’t turn out to be the harbinger of a new political order,” Galston says. “But it does warrant some analytical caution.”

Early polling suggests that Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton could come close in 2016 to generating the level of support among nonwhites as Obama did in November, when he won 80 percent of their vote. In a Fox News poll in February, 75 percent of nonwhites said they thought Clinton would make a good president, outpacing the 58 percent who said that about Vice President Joe Biden.

Benjamin Todd Jealous, president of the NAACP, predicts closely fought elections in the near term and worries that GOP-controlled state legislatures will step up efforts to pass voter ID and other restrictions to deter blacks and other minorities from voting. In 2012, African-Americans were able to turn out in large numbers only after a very determined get-out-the-vote effort by the Obama campaign and black groups, he said.

Jealous says the 2014 midterm election will be the real bellwether for black turnout. “Black turnout set records this year despite record attempts to suppress the black vote,” he said.

 

President Obama found himself weathering bipartisan broadsides Wednesday as he sent Congress his 2014 budget proposal, which in its effort to please both sides of the aisle has ended up angering both.

The budget arrived on Capitol Hill Wednesday morning, delivered 65 days after the legal deadline. The $3.77 trillion spending plan, which is over 2,000 pages, tries to curb deficits by further raising taxes on top earners and reining in the growth of Social Security.

But Republicans argue they already consented to increased taxes as part of the fiscal crisis deal and have expressed little interest in negotiating another hike. And liberal Democrats — particularly powerful advocacy groups — have launched a series of campaigns to oppose the changes to Social Security.

The president’s proposal being unveiled Wednesday includes an additional $1.8 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade, bringing total deficit savings to $4.3 trillion, based on the administration’s calculations. It projects that the deficit for the 2014 budget year, which begins Oct. 1, would fall to $744 billion. That would be the lowest gap between spending and revenue since 2008.

The president’s plan tracks an offer he made to House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, during December’s budget negotiations, which Boehner ended up walking away from because of his opposition to higher taxes on the wealthy.

The Obama budget proposal will join competing budget outlines already approved by the Republican-controlled House and the Democratic-run Senate.

The most sweeping proposal in Obama’s budget is a switch in the way the government calculates the annual cost-of-living adjustments for the millions of recipients of Social Security and other government benefit programs. The current method of measuring increases in the consumer price index would be modified to track a process known as chained CPI.

The new method takes into account changes that occur when people substitute goods rising in price with less expensive products. It results in slightly lower annual reading for inflation.

The switch in the inflation formula would cut spending on government benefit programs by $130 billion over 10 years, although the administration said it planned to protect the most vulnerable, including the very elderly. The change would also raise about $100 billion in higher taxes because the current CPI formula is used to adjust tax brackets each year. A lower inflation measure would mean more money taxed at higher rates.

In the tax area, Obama would raise an additional $580 billion by restricting deductions for the top 2 percent of family incomes. The budget would also implement the “Buffett Rule” requiring that households with incomes of more than $1 million pay at least 30 percent of their income in taxes. Charitable giving would be excluded.

Obama’s plan is not all about budget cuts. It also includes an additional $50 billion to fund infrastructure investments, including $40 billion in a “Fix It First” effort to provide immediate investments to repair highways, bridges, transit systems and airports nationwide.

Obama’s budget would also provide $1 billion to launch a network of 15 manufacturing innovation institutes across the country, and it earmarks funding to support high-speed rail projects.

The president also is proposing establishment of program to offer preschool to all 4-year-olds from low- and moderate-income families, with the money to support the effort coming from increased taxes on tobacco products.

The administration said its proposals to increase spending would not increase the deficit but rather are paid for either by increasing taxes or making deeper cuts to other programs.

Among the proposed cuts, the administration wants to trim defense spending by an additional $100 billion and domestic programs by an extra $100 billion over the next decade.

The budget proposes cutting $400 billion from Medicare and other health care programs over a decade. The cuts would come in a variety of ways, including negotiating better prescription drug prices and asking wealthy seniors to pay more.

It would obtain an additional $200 billion in savings by scaling back farm subsidies and trimming federal retiree programs.

Congress and the administration have already secured $2.5 trillion in deficit reduction over the next 10 years through budget reductions and with the end-of-year tax increase on the rich. Obama’s plan would bring that total to $4.3 trillion over 10 years.

It is unlikely that Congress will get down to serious budget negotiations until this summer, when the government once again will be confronted with the need to raise the government’s borrowing limit or face the prospect of a first-ever default on U.S. debt.

As part of the administration’s effort to win over Republicans, Obama will have a private dinner at the White House with about a dozen GOP senators Wednesday night. The budget is expected to be a primary topic, along with proposed legislation dealing with gun control and immigration.

Early indications are that the budget negotiations will be intense. Republicans have been adamant in their rejection of higher taxes, arguing that the $600 billion increase on top earners that was part of the late December agreement to prevent the government from going over the “fiscal cliff” were all the new revenue they will tolerate.

The administration maintains that Obama’s proposal is balanced with the proper mix of spending cuts and tax increases.

Obama has presided over four straight years of annual deficits totaling more than $1 trillion, reflecting in part the lost revenue during a deep recession and the government’s efforts to get the economy going again and stabilize the financial system.

The Obama budget’s $1.8 trillion in new deficit cuts would take the place of the automatic $1.2 trillion in reductions required by a 2011 budget deal. That provision triggered $85 billion in automatic cuts for the current budget year, and those reductions, known as a “sequester,” would not be affected by Obama’s new budget.

The budget plan already passed by the GOP-controlled House would cut deficits by a total $4.6 trillion over 10 years on top of the $1.2 trillion called for in the 2011 deal. The budget outline approved by the Democratic-controlled Senate tracks more closely to the Obama proposal, although it does not include changes to the cost-of-living formula for Social Security.

Published April 10, 2013 / FoxNews.com  / The Associated Press contributed to this report.