The task for any presidential candidate in a debate is to exceed expectations, meaning both the expectations of the media and the public and the expectations carefully calibrated by the competing campaigns. We asked three experts, one journalist and two veteran political operatives, what Obama and McCain will have to do in the upcoming debates in order to be perceived as winners. All of them have firsthand experience prepping presidential candidates for debates.

Mark Fabiani is co-principal of the consulting firm Fabiani-Lehane. A former collegiate champion debater, Fabiani was the deputy campaign manager for communications and strategy on Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, and before that served as special counsel to President Bill Clinton during the 1996 presidential campaign. Jim Fallows is National Correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, a former speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, and a past winner of the American Book Award for nonfiction. He is completing a new book about China, due in early 2009, titled “Postcards From Tomorrow Square.” Russ Schriefer, a founding partner in the Stevens & Schriefer Group, has been a Republican political strategist and media consultant for more than 20 years, helping elect governors, senators and dozens of members of Congress. In addition, Russ has worked at the national level for four presidential campaigns, including the Bush-Cheney campaigns of 2000 and 2004. Salon spoke with Fabiani, Fallows and Schriefer by phone.

Schaller: Gentlemen, welcome to you all and thanks for being here. So let’s get right down to it. With John McCain and Barack Obama going through their final paces, my first question is very straightforward: How much of the debate prep is really about issue briefing and preparing answers for all possible questions, and how much of it is really coaching candidates on intangibles, like their stage presence and delivery, the use of comedy, nonverbals, and just in general dealing with their opponent? Let’s start with Jim Fallows.

Jim Fallows: My personal background here: I was a minor participant in the actual preparation for Jimmy Carter way back in the prehistoric era when he was going against Gerald Ford and I have been observing things since then. I think that preparation on the facts is a necessary but not sufficient part of debate. Three of the four candidates who are going to be in these debates, the ones other than Gov. Palin, have answered questions multiple times and should know enough about what to say on the country of Colombia or what to say about Pakistan or whatever. What tends to matter in debates is all the things other than rote factual knowledge — how you hold up against the opponent, whether you sound witty or defensive or whatever. In Gov. Palin’s case it’s different because that is her area of perceived vulnerability. I bet she is boning up on the facts, while I think the rest of them probably should just be figuring out how they can carry themselves correctly onstage.

Mark Fabiani: The debate prep that I’ve been involved in was during the Gore 2000 presidential campaign. And perhaps we spent too much time on issues and not enough on the intangibles, because people look at these and don’t judge them as Harvard-Yale debates. They look at them and they’re trying to connect with a candidate. And a candidate could have a moment that’s a good moment, such as we’ve seen in some of the primary debates, or they could have a bad moment, where Michael Dukakis mis-answers the question about his wife being raped or George Bush looked at his watch, or in the instance that I was involved in, when Al Gore was sighing into a mike that was supposed to be turned off but wasn’t. And those are the type of things that will tell the tale of these debates, not how much someone knows about Colombia or Pakistan.

Russ Schriefer: I agree with both Jim and Mark. I would also add that I think the most important thing is to decide early on what your debate strategy is going to be. What do you want to accomplish with this debate? Do you need to prove that you know more than your opponent on issues? Do you need to make a central point on messaging? I imagine going into the first debate, particularly since it’s about foreign policy and foreign affairs, that John McCain is going to want to play up his role or how he is perceived as being better as commander in chief than Barack Obama. So I think a lot of time, particularly in this first debate for both these candidates, will be devising overall debate strategy. What do they want to accomplish and what do they see as the headlines coming out of this debates?

Fallows: If I could just follow up on that. As you look back through all the big presidential debates there’s only been one where actual factual knowledge seemed to make a difference in the debate outcome. That’s one, actually, that I was involved in, when Gerald Ford misclassified Poland and that connected to some perception of him. And that’s why the factual knowledge question matters only for Gov. Palin where that’s the perception about her.

Schaller: I was curious about the debate prep, just how it operates. We now know that Greg Craig, who has done this in the past — he’s on old counselor and advisor to Obama — is standing in as McCain in Obama’s debate prep. And former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele is standing in as Obama against McCain. Is this person an important choice? Is this important as a function, as a sparring partner or does it not really matter?

Fabiani: I think it’s important but it’s not all that important when you compare it to some of the other things that candidates have to get ready for. It’s important to re-create the atmosphere of the debate. It’s important to re-create things in real time, to practice, for example, at the time in the evening when the debate is actually going to happen. But far more important than that is avoiding mistakes and trying to figure out the one moment you want to create for yourself and the one bad moment you want to create for the other side.

Fallows: I think Greg Craig is a very wise choice for Obama to have because he is very good at this. I actually have known him and seen him as an orator for a very long time, starting in college, and he knows how to produce the effect which will probably be the most difficult for Obama, mainly, the needling and the dismissiveness that McCain will probably try to use against Obama. So Greg Craig will be good in that way. It sounds silly to say that John McCain needs to find a black person to be Obama’s surrogate, but I think that’s actually wise because every bit of the intangibles in the real debate you want to re-create in debate preparation and it’s a significant fact that since there’s a young black man who is going to be John McCain’s opponent on the real stage, it’s important to have a youngish black man there in the practice.

Schriefer: I think someone who is very good at studying up and understanding and getting into the head of the person they’re playing can actually be very, very helpful. And I know that particularly Judd Greg and Rob Portman, who filled these roles for the Bush campaign in 2000 and 2004, were very good at doing that and really kind of understanding what they were going to do, studying the tapes, and not just talking about the policy positions but, as Jim said, getting their gestures and their sense of who they are.

Schaller: Mark said you have to create a moment for yourself and also a negative moment for your opponent. But these debates are so constraining, they’re so restrictive in terms of the rules, you don’t really get to ask a lot of questions or do follow-ups, it’s all moderated by these moderators. So I’m wondering how — these negative moments that have happened, are these contrived or did they just sort of happen? How can you entice your opponent?

Fabiani: When you go into the debate, you know what people are going to be looking at from you. For Obama, for example, people are going to look and see if he’s all speech and no substance. That’s clearly what the McCain people are going to drive as the negative on him. And with McCain, people are going to be looking to see if he’s old and out of touch or whether he can hang in there in a debate like this, and that’s the image that the Obama people are going to be driving against McCain. And everything that happens is going to be fed into one of those two story lines. Clearly the notion of Gore in 2000 that the Bush people were proposing was that Gore was an exaggerator. That’s how everything was seen during the first debate. In fact, the issue after the debate was whether Gore had exaggerated about visiting the wildfires in Texas. Which, in the scheme of things, seems like a very minor issue, but that was the issue that the Bush campaign created because it fit into a preexisting criticism they had of Gore.

Fallows: There’s kind of a reverse version of that too. Which is that in every debate I’ve seen, each side has tried to play the expectation game because they know that’s going to be the first thing out of the commentators’ mouths once the debate is over. How did the person do relative to the expectations? And George Bush very skillfully did that in the last two debates against Gore and Kerry. I think one of President Bush’s associates before the 2004 debates said that Kerry was sort of like the reincarnation of Cicero and there was no way that Bush could hold up. So if Bush could hold his own and not make any mistakes in those debates, he effectively won. Weirdly, both Obama and McCain come into the debates with some perceived weakness. For Obama, being seen as too professorial and too rambling in his answers and not getting to the point and not really having bested Hillary Clinton in the primary debates. For McCain, it’s being seen as at his best in other settings, in the avuncular town hall. I think they each have been subtly trying to play that expectations game so if they do better or can flummox the other, then they win on that standard.

Schriefer: I would just add to that that the interesting thing about the first debate being about foreign policy is that Sen. Obama really has an opportunity to sort of go one-on-one for the first time with Sen. McCain on the issue of commander in chief. And if he is successful and able to portray himself as not only knowing what the issues are but also knowing the importance of the role of the troops and being comfortable talking about troop levels and deployments. I think those will go a long way to helping him at the end of the day.

Fallows: In that sense, if Obama ties in the first debate, he in effect wins because this is the area of McCain’s perceived greatest strength going in.

Schaller: In terms of trying to goad the other candidate, do candidates prepare these little one-liners and jabs or do they try in some way to get the goat of their opponent by maybe going after them with a slight or attacking their credibility? What kind of training or prepping is done on having a prepackaged line for something like that?

Schriefer: I think there’s both. You have prepackaged lines and you have some you kind of think through strategically — if he says this then this is a good retort to that comment. The famous one is from the ’84 debate, with Reagan and age …

Fallows: I won’t make an issue of my opponent’s immaturity …

Schriefer: Yeah, youth and inexperience, which seemed, and legend has it, was totally spontaneous. But I have a feeling that may have been practiced once or twice before. My sense is that you go in with both. Now the interesting thing is that there are some things you can’t practice. And I go back to the 2000 debate between Bush and Gore when Gore started encroaching upon Bush’s space and Bush gave him this sort of look, which was not something that was practiced but wound up being incredibly effective.

Fallows: I would argue too that Obama’s most effective lines during the primaries seemed not to have been practiced. Also, his very, very effective debate performance against Alan Keyes in 2004 where he was quite witty and quick. And, for example, when he told Hillary Clinton, “Well, I’m looking forward to having you advise me also.” That couldn’t have been planned. And John McCain’s most effective quick line in the primaries when he was talking about Woodstock, he said, “I wasn’t there, I was tied up at the time.” That could well have been practiced, but there is always this premium on how these people behave in real time, which is why people watch these debates.

Fabiani: One of the habits McCain needs to avoid is after he does a line like that, whether it’s the Woodstock line or in one of the earlier debates he talked about following [bin Laden] to the gates of hell, he tends to smile afterwards, which sort of lets you in on the joke. That, yeah, I knew I was going to say this.

Schaller: Given the restricted debate format, the moderators have an inordinate amount of power. They aren’t just timekeeping and refereeing and making sure that the proper turn is taken. So Jim Lehrer, Tom Brokaw, Bob Schieffer, who are the presidential moderators, and then Gwen Ifill, who is the moderator for the lone vice-presidential debate — do the candidates and the campaigns prep for the moderators or is that irrelevant?

Fabiani: The moderator can have a huge impact sometimes. Sometimes they’re neutral, but Bernard Shaw in 1988 asked Michael Dukakis, the very first question, “What would you do if your wife was raped, what would your feeling be about the death penalty?” That ended the Dukakis campaign for all intents and purposes right then and there with one question. And so you always have to evaluate when you get a question like that, which moderator is more likely to ask it, what kinds of things are they likely to ask, so you do your research on the moderators to figure out where they might have been coming from during past debates, how they’ve handled these issues before, because a question like that, if you mishandle it, could be absolutely devastating.

Schriefer: I totally agree. In fact, we would go so far as finding people to play the moderator, and ask them to study the moderator, their habits, their gestures, their line of questioning, to make sure that if it’s a moderator who’s known for going off script that you tend to go off script and make sure that your candidate is prepared for any curve balls that not only your opponent may be throwing at you, but sometimes the moderator might throw at you.

Schaller: Let me rephrase this question for Jim. You’ve watched so many of these debates; is there a model of a good moderator in your mind, given the rules, and is there somebody who really violated the trust of the moderator role?

Fallows: I think there’s a reason that Jim Lehrer keeps getting this job year after year. Which is what you want in a general election debate moderator is somebody who makes the debate not about himself or herself. Aside from the Michael Dukakis question, there are really few trick questions that the candidates can face because they’ve heard so many things. They want somebody who will set up these debates to be able to engage each other as much as possible. The moderators will be paradoxically more important this time because both Obama and McCain in this debate are going to have more time for repartee and coming back at each other, so the moderator will have more discretion about when they’ve gone too far or not. One point here, the time when that mattered most historically was in the 1984 debate when Ronald Reagan was beginning to meander at the end of one of the debates against Mondale and Edwin Newman saved him by cutting off one of his meandering answers and getting back on course. I think you basically wouldn’t want the cable news moderators who did the primary debates to do the general election debates because they largely made [the primary debates] shows about themselves.

Schaller: I was wondering too, in terms of the debate format, forgetting the moderators, is this whole idea of this thing with the podium style versus the town hall where you sort of come out from behind the podium. Obviously, the most famous moment here is Clinton in 1992. It was a perfect setup for him; it showed how he was conversant literally with voters on a very regular-guy basis. Obama and McCain are two candidates who are generally regarded as not necessarily the best debaters, but are very good in informal settings. I’m wondering if either candidate has an advantage in the more informal-style debate?

Fallows: I think an advantage for McCain in the town hall style is what we saw with Pastor Rick Warren. And essentially that was town halls generally equate to no follow-up or less follow-up than you have in a more structured debate. So a candidate can get by with more of a slogan than is possible when your opponent is going to have a 30-second rebuttal or the questioner is going to say, “Oh, what do you mean by that?” So I think that has been a plus for McCain. I think Obama has been playing possum in a shrewd way, in the last month or two, in sort of saying, I’m not really that good at these debates. And I think he has been hardened and toughened by them over the last year, probably in a way McCain hasn’t. So he may show some deceptive strength that he’s downplaying now.

Schriefer: Conventional wisdom will be that the more relaxed format will benefit Sen. McCain. I get the sense that if I were in the Obama camp, I would be practicing in a way that makes him comfortable [with the format]. It’s sort of like in this first debate where the expectations are on McCain to do better. If Obama at least ties, it’ll be seen as a win for him.

Fabiani: And there’s another format here that’s going to make a difference for the first time ever and that’s how many people will be watching these debates in high definition and how the two candidates will look compared to one another. How much vigor one candidate will have versus another. And these debates, it’s not like running a marathon, but they are physically grueling. You have got to concentrate every single split second you’re up there and we’ve seen candidates who have kind of lost it. George Bush Sr. looked at his watch and that was effectively the end of his campaign.

Schaller: I’ve seen McCain up close and I find that he looks younger and crisper on TV than he actually does in person. Of course, we all know about the scars on the face and his inability to raise his arm, so are you suggesting that in high-definition TV, the age factor will literally be in higher relief?

Fabiani: I think there’s no question it will be in higher relief and it’ll be interesting to see how that plays itself out. It’s never happened before and when you just have the two guys standing right next to each other it’s going to be a pretty stark contrast. Now the question is how can McCain combat that? That’s what people are going to be looking for in these debates. Can he really hang in there for the whole 90 minutes and show himself to be vigorous and with it on all these different issues? That’s what people are going to be looking to see. And maybe he’ll do a great job of it.

Fallows: There are some parallels we can link to this in obviously the pre-hi-def TV age. One, of course, would be John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, where retrospectively most people assert that the simple difference in physical bearing between the two of them, one a movie star, one the much more experienced but 5 o’clock shadow guy, had an effect. Another, of course, would be President Clinton in his two debates, both in ’92 against the elder George Bush and in ’96 against Bob Dole. There was something about the young, vigorous man filling the screen. So I think figuring out how to deal with that is probably part of the McCain camp’s debate prep — or it should be.

Schaller: There’s only one vice-presidential debate. Sarah Palin, Joe Biden with Gwen Ifill of PBS moderating. What’s the conventional wisdom? Does it ultimately not matter if there’s a huge gap between the candidates? What can we look for from this debate?

Fallows: Generally, they don’t matter. And if you look back on different ones over time you can say that Joe Lieberman, who was running with Al Gore, essentially laid down and played dead for Dick Cheney in the 2000 vice-presidential debate — at least, in my opinion.

I think this one has an obvious plotline. This one probably will matter more than most and has an obvious plotline on each side. For Sarah Palin, the plotline is don’t make a mistake. I’m sure she is now preparing as well as she can to avoid moments like the Charlie Gibson interview moment where she seemed not to know what the question was about. [She needs to] talk about things like she really knows them as opposed to having just read them in the last month or two. For Joe Biden, the corresponding challenge is to not seem like a bully. To come across, given the dynamics of a very appealing young female candidate and an older experienced white male candidate, and establish the point about his experience without crossing the Rick Lazio line, where Rick Lazio seemed like a bully against Hillary Clinton. So each of them has so clear a path, it’s like a football Super Bowl game where there’s a great passing team against a great ground game team. You know what each of them has to do and we’ll see which one can do it better.

Fabiani: Everything that people say about that debate, before that debate, during that debate, after that debate, will have something to do with those two story lines. You just have to recognize that going in and be prepared to capitalize on something that somebody does on one of those story lines that’s a mistake. If you can do that, that also drives the post-debate coverage. Because remember, a lot of people watch these debates, but a lot of people don’t. And what they hear about them afterward makes a difference to the people who don’t watch. How you’re able to drive your story line afterward is almost as important as the debate itself.

Schriefer: I think it’s whether [Sarah Palin] makes a big mistake. I think the voters who will be voting for McCain-Palin or considering voting for McCain-Palin will actually be much more forgiving of her making a small mistake. I do not envy the position that Biden is in because I think his tendency will be to run over her and talk over her. It’s sort of what he does, what he wants to do, and I think the chances of her over-performing at the end of the debate, particularly among the voters whom the McCain-Palin team are trying to get, some of those swing voters, there’s a very strong possibility that she could actually come out of that debate even better than she is today.

Schaller: I was looking at the data taken from polls at the beginning of the debate season and at the end of the debate season, tabulated by Steven Wayne on his book on presidential elections. John Kerry says he beat the president in three debates in 2004. We could argue about that, but he did very well — and yet basically his poll numbers were the same at the end of the debate period as before. Bill Clinton’s poll numbers were about the same or even a little lower in 1992. I’m wondering, do we put too much emphasis on this? Is this like the people who are liberals read liberal magazines and conservatives go to conservative blogs? Do people hear what they want to hear out of these debates and it doesn’t really move the presidential election numbers that much?

Fallows: I’m sure that is so in this sense. Number one, presidential elections when they’re close are overdetermined. Any number of a thousand things had they gone differently could have made a difference. Think of the 2000 election. Any of us could spend the next five hours saying, well, if this had been different or that had been different the result would have been different in 2000. Therefore this is something we’re all capable of judging just on our own as laypeople and saying that’s the difference. But I would argue also, that even if it doesn’t show up in the numbers, it is one of the important emotional events because, again, it’s the only time we see these people head-to-head and we either are confirmed in what we think about them or we’re repelled in what we think about them or we’re cast into doubt. You know, the first George Bush, he was going past the time and he looked at his watch. When is this going to be over? Ronald Reagan had a kind of easy charm that he showed against Jimmy Carter. Bob Dole in his ’76 incarnation had a kind of nastiness, et cetera. I would argue that’s the effect — they solidify or crystallize something that was latently there in the voters’ mind.

Fabiani: The other thing that they do is basically consume the campaign from this point forward until the last couple of weeks. And that was to Gore’s detriment in 2000. At this point in the 2000 campaign, we were doing very well. We were ahead in the polls, we had had a great September, we went into the first debate and we were very hopeful about that. But from the first debate on, the campaign gets consumed by the debates. You’re either preparing for a debate, debating or dealing with the follow-up of the debate which leads directly into preparing for the next debate. And so, it just consumes everything from here on out and that’s why they’re so important.

Schriefer: I was interested to see how the two camps seem to be preparing for this debate. Sen. Obama has basically sequestered himself in Florida for the next couple of days to practice and to get ready, whereas McCain seems to be taking big chunks out of the day but continuing a campaign schedule. I don’t know if one is going to be better than the other, and they’re probably more stylistic for each, but you’re absolutely right, in having been involved in these, at several levels, they are just a big time suck for both campaigns.

Fabiani: In 2000, we actually viewed the debate prep as a campaign event in and of itself. We spent a lot of time in Florida prior to the debates because we thought, as it turned out correctly, that that was the key state. We still kick ourselves, though; we were trying to find a place to hold debate prep in New Hampshire because we thought that New Hampshire would be a key state and we thought that doing one of the debate preps in New Hampshire would really help us there and we just couldn’t find a place that was large enough to host all the press. And so we couldn’t go there. Had we gone there and had three or four days of debate prep up in New Hampshire, we probably would have won that state and Gore would have been president. So it’s all part of the campaign. You can make your debate prep part of the campaign and McCain’s really trying to do that by continuing with his schedule while doing his debate prep, while Obama seems to be, as you said, somewhat sequestered.

Schaller: A pair of concluding questions — advice for the candidates. We’ll do Obama first. I would ask each of you to go through and give advice if you were to be giving advice to the candidates. Dos and don’ts for Obama.

Fabiani: It’s not rocket science. He needs to connect with people. He needs to not give long answers. He needs to not seem professorial. He needs to seem like he understands the problems people have and he’s talking directly to them about how he’s going to solve those problems in specific terms.

Schriefer: I think it’s being warm and presidential and not being cold and arrogant.

Fallows: Yes, “relaxed” would be my term. There was one time when he was superbly relaxed and at ease and that was against Alan Keyes. If somehow he could see Alan Keyes, imagine himself in that setting again, which is impossible, but sort of train himself to be as relaxed and charming as he was then, that would be my tip.

Schaller: How about John McCain?

Schriefer: I’m just going to talk about it for the first debate, which is a foreign policy debate. I think his No. 1 role is to remind folks that he is the person they believe is best able to be commander in chief. And the more that he can do that and play that card, the better he’ll do in the debate.

Fabiani: Absolutely right. He has a chance in this first debate because it’s a foreign policy debate to convince people that they should trust him instead of his opponent. He’s got to do that in a way that makes him seem vigorous and seem able to handle things and do it in a way that’s engaging to people. It’s going to be a tough job, but I think it’s a break for him that this is a foreign policy debate and he should do well there.

Fallows: In addition to those points, which I agree with, as a temperamental matter, debates are a cool medium as opposed to a hot medium. It’s a personal audience, not like a speech in a huge stadium. McCain, while remaining cool and comfortable and friendly seeming, can find ways to stick little harpoons and cool jabs at Obama because Obama has not always responded well to those in past debates. So I think McCain wants to seem affable and himself and stick some barbs to Obama and see what he can produce.

Schaller: It should be another fascinating debating season. I want to thank Mark Fabiani, Jim Fallows and Russ Schriefer for joining us.

“If you look at attitudes today and where they are headed, it’s clear to me that supporting equal rights, including the rights to civil marriage, is a net positive for winning elections, as well as the right thing to do,” Mehlman said in an interview. “By contrast, opposing equal rights is a net negative that gets problematic to more voters each year.”

Few political figures in contemporary politics embody America’s transformation on same-sex marriage as much as Mehlman. After years of whisper campaigns about his sexual orientation, as well as personal criticism for managing Bush’s reelection, Mehlman announced in 2010 that he is gay; since then, despite taking flak from both right and left, he has fought on behalf of equality.

When I asked Mehlman, a partner at a New York private equity firm, to handicap gay marriage as a state and national political-electoral issue today, he said: “Most polls now show that a majority of Americans support gay marriage. What you see in Maryland and Washington, and states like New York earlier, is a reflection of politicians representing their constituents.”

As for his role in the 2004 Bush campaign and its exploitation of marital politics, Mehlman is  candid — and remorseful.

“At a personal level, I wish I had spoken out against the effort,” he says. “As I’ve been involved in the fight for marriage equality, one of the things I’ve learned is how many people were harmed by the campaigns in which I was involved. I apologize to them and tell them I am sorry. While there have been recent victories, this could still be a long struggle in which there will be setbacks, and I’ll do my part to be helpful.”

Mehlman’s personal story reflects a national trend.

“The nation has transformed since 2004,” agrees E.J. Graff, a resident scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center and author of “What Is Marriage For?”

“Marriage equality advocates have so much more support now than in 2004 that running anti-gay referendums, like the Republicans did in 2004, would now have the reverse effect of bringing out more Democrats and straight supporters of gay rights,” she said. Graff, also a contributing editor at the American Prospect, laments that the battle to undo many of those 2004 referendums barring recognition of same-sex marriage “will not be any fun.” But she firmly believes “Americans aren’t shocked anymore at the idea that two women or two men want to marry.” After the initial backlash, rapid changes in public opinion mean that same-sex marriage “is just not as much of an issue today.”

It’s incredible progress in just eight short years. Actually, let’s make that 16 years.

In case self-congratulatory liberals have forgotten, in an effort to appeal to religious conservatives during his 1996 reelection bid, Democrat Bill Clinton ran radio ads touting his support for the Defense of Marriage Act. Surely few liberals have forgotten that, in an effort to appeal to religious conservatives during his own 2004 reelection bid, Republican George W. Bush supported a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and state referendums that would do the same.

It’s unclear whether Clinton’s support of DOMA helped or hurt him in 1996. As for 2004, subsequent analyses of the election results that year revealed two things: that turnout in the 11 states with ballot measures banning same-sex marriage was no higher than in the 39 without them. Contrary to one political myth, the presence of these referendums likely had no effect on the outcome of the Bush-Kerry presidential contest. But this we do know: Clinton advisor Dick Morris and Bush guru Karl Rove obviously believed their bosses’ anti-gay postures met the Hippocratic electoral standard — that is, their positions would do no harm to either president’s reelection chances.

This year, how much attention marital politics attracts during the general election may largely hinge upon whom the Republicans nominate. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, for example, says that although he personally opposes same-sex marriage, from a federalist standpoint he approves of the way politicians are using public ballot measures to give voters, rather than courts, the power to decide the issue in each state. Ron Paul’s view is similar to Gingrich’s.

Rick Santorum, meanwhile, remains firmly opposed, and is practiced in the dark art of depicting anything other than heterosexual, monogamous marriage as an immoral affront to divine design. As for beleaguered front-runner Mitt Romney, his position is just as flip-floppy as it is on so many other issues: He was for same-sex marriage as Massachusetts governor (issuing at least 189 special licenses to gay couples) before he was against it.

But Mehlman is encouraged by changes within his party, especially the support among younger Republicans for marital equality and related positions. In 2011, Mehlman personally lobbied 13 New York state Republican legislators to help pass the state’s same-sex marriage law, and did the same with 10 Republican U.S. senators during the congressional battle to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Although he is still a loyal Republican — he recently contributed to a fundraiser for House Speaker John Boehner, a gay marriage opponent — a month ago Mehlman published an Op-Ed in the conservative Manchester Union-Leader in which he explained to conservatives and Republicans why supporting same-sex marriage venerates their beliefs not only in individual and economic freedoms, but personal responsibility and family values.

Freedom to Marry founder and president Evan Wolfson says that, although he realizes Americans will have important economic concerns on their minds during this presidential election, he expects that “from time to time” marriage equality will surface as an issue throughout the year. “All of the Republican nominees have, to varying degrees, pandered to their party’s base — a base that’s out of touch with many Republicans,” Wolfson told me. He cited a July 2011 national polling memo co-authored by Obama pollster Joel Benenson and former Bush pollster Jan van Lohuizen that confirms the dramatic, recent shift toward public acceptance, if not approval, for same-sex marriage.

As for the 2012 Democratic nominee, President Obama’s record on same-sex marriage is “evolving” but still mixed. He and his White House are already feeling pressure from marriage equality advocates, the Democratic Party and even his own campaign leadership to endorse marital equality as part of the Democrats’ 2012 national party platform. “We have strongly urged the president to complete his journey — his evolution, as he puts it — on the freedom to marry,” says Wolfson, “because it’s not just the right thing to do, but the right thing to do politically.”

Progress toward nationalizing same-sex marriage is hardly linear. For every step forward there is often a half-step backward. The passage of California’s Proposition 8 in 2008 was a crushing blow to the movement, and although the Court of Appeals’ 9th Circuit recently invalidated Proposition 8’s same-sex marriage ban and a new poll this week reveals a significant jump in approval for same-sex marriage in the state, the popular vote defeat in an otherwise liberal state that Obama won comfortably still stings. There are also reports this week about a serious effort to revoke the same-sex marriage law in New Hampshire, where Republicans regained control of the Legislature in 2010.

But as the 2012 general election approaches — and despite Santorum’s earnest attempts to reinvigorate culture war politics — the reality is that same-sex marriage fear-mongering and other forms of electoral gay-baiting no longer work as wedge issues the way they used do. DADT is dead, and thanks to a court ruling this week penned by a Bush-appointed federal judge, DOMA is on the ropes, too. If not already, soon enough same-sex marriage will act as a wedge issue that works against conservatives, Republicans and opponents of marital equality.

On Thursday morning, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush joined the conversation with a Washington Post Op-Ed in which he suggested four ways the GOP can lure back Latino voters, including a recommendation that the party cast immigration as “an economic issue, not just a border security issue.” That afternoon Michelle Obama raised the stakes in the electoral fight for Latino votes with a “Let’s Move” national fitness agenda stop at Tampa’s Goya food processing plant, where the first lady touted the USDA’s new “Mi Plato” program, lamented the shortage of supermarkets in Latino neighborhoods, and applauded the National Hispanic Medical Association, the National Council of La Raza, and the League of United Latin American Citizens for their community nutrition efforts.

So there was ample  anticipation heading into last night’s debate co-sponsored by the Hispanic Leadership Network in Jacksonville just four days before the crucial Florida primary. And once onstage at the University of North Florida, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich did not disappoint. The two top contenders went after each other with obvious, mutual disdain on immigration, the subject of the opening question and nearly the full first half-hour of the debate.

Romney began with a thoughtful answer to an audience member’s question by delineating the three classes of immigrants as he sees them: those already here, those being brought here under illegal and often abusive circumstances by so-called coyotes, and those waiting to come here legally. CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer stirred the pot by asking Gingrich to defend calling Romney the “most anti-immigrant” candidate in the field, and Gingrich obliged. Romney objected to Gingrich’s overblown rhetoric, cited Marco Rubio and his Mexican-born father in his own defense, stressed a belief in legal immigration, and mocked Gingrich for his “highly charged epithets.”

A chastised Gingrich retreated to his impassioned arguments against the “unrealistic” deportation of families, and grandmothers in particular, who have lived in the country for many years — a position that earned him plaudits during a November national security debate in Washington. But then Romney, in one of his best debate moments of the entire campaign, drew cheers by deftly retorting that “our problem is not 11 million grandmothers.” For Romney, who has struggled to demonstrate whether he is capable of being tough in person (his television ads are another matter), immigration gave him the chance to prove he, too, can display Gingrichian outrage and he did just that. To paraphrase Emily Dickinson, the South Carolina-wounded Romney leapt highest.

As for immigration, the GOP’s electoral dilemma persists: The candidates must appease xenophobes within their base during the primaries, but to win in November the Republican nominee will need to be reasonably competitive with Latino voters in swing states including Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico. As a hedge, Republicans tend to emphasize the legal aspects of immigration: strengthening border security, prosecuting crimes committed by illegal immigrants and cracking down on employers who employ undocumented workers. This is how Santorum and especially Romney try to remain anti-immigration without sounding anti-immigrant.

Jeb Bush’s Op-Ed reflects the party’s strategy for trying to carefully lure back Latinos by emphasizing the economic aspects of immigration reform while downplaying talk of deportation and amnesty. “There is no doubt that immigration is an important issue to the Hispanic community and one that must be discussed because it is clear that our immigration system is broken,” Bettina Inclan, director of Hispanic outreach for the Republican National Committee, wrote to me by email. “However, poll after poll has shown that the top issues for Hispanics when making a decision in the voting booth are jobs and the economy.”

Meanwhile, Democrats are enjoying this fight. Immigration remains a great wedge issue for them. In his interview with Univision, the nation’s largest Spanish-speaking network, Obama specifically criticized the Republicans in Congress and “two presidential candidates” for, respectively, obstructing legislative passage and promising to veto the DREAM Act. Obama said he continues to seek a solution to comprehensive immigration reform, but “if we can’t do the whole package, at minimum let’s get the DREAM Act done.”

Romney is the first veto-pledging candidate. Facing criticism since 2008 for his social issue moderation, Romney gambled that a hard line on immigration might pacify wary conservatives. In a September speech to the National Republican Hispanic Assembly in Tampa, Romney promised to build a “high-tech fence,” crack down on employers who hire illegal immigrants, and eliminate the government “incentives” like in-state tuition. That last part was a thinly veiled attack on Rick Perry, who was already taking heat for his support for tuition benefits at Texas universities for the children of illegal immigrants. Not-so-thinly veiled was the devastatingly effective anti-immigrant ad Romney ran against the Texan.

“Romney’s words might not hurt him in Florida,” where Cubans are less supportive of immigration reform, Univision columnist Jordan Fabian predicted this week, adding that “reform that includes a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants consistently ranks as a top issue for the broader Latino community.”

The second DREAM Act opponent is Rick Santorum, who has staked out the firmest immigration stance among the remaining contenders. “You know we want to be fair,” Santorum said last Sunday, adding that “the law is the law and we have to have a country that is respecting of all the law and if we don’t then we don’t have much of a country anymore.” The clear outlier in the GOP field is Gingrich, who supports applying the provisions of the DREAM Act to illegal immigrants who serve honorably in the U.S. military. (Despite the nearly 30 minutes in Jacksonville spent on immigration, the DREAM Act was not mentioned.)

While Republicans dodge the issue by reverting to legal arguments, Democrats consistently opt to frame immigration in highly personal terms. The Democratic National Committee lined up local politicians yesterday afternoon to fire preemptive shots at Romney. “I think we all understand how personal immigration issues can be to so many of our families. Even those of us who are documented may have a friend or a grandmother who is not,” said state Rep. Darren Soto, of Orlando, during a Thursday press call. “So when Romney says something like they should ‘self-deport,’ it’s personal.”

Last night’s debate was certainly personal for Romney, who needs to win Florida. For the first time in this campaign, the former Massachusetts governor faces the very real prospect of fumbling the nomination, no less to a man with the flaws and baggage of Newt Gingrich. Coming off the roughest fortnight of his campaign, Romney was prepared: on the talking points, sure, but also in his determination to beat back Gingrich, even if meant feigning a little anti-immigration outrage to do so.

He helped himself in the short-term, with a long-term cost to be determined.

As the White House’s list of SOTU talking points confirms, the not-so-secret theme for both the speech and companion trip is building a durable economy that rewards middle-class workers. The president will no doubt emphasize and empathize with the economic pain that residents of each state feel. According to “economic distress measures” published by the Kaiser Foundation’s statehealthfigures.org website, all five rank among the 18 states with the worst monthly employment losses between November 2010 and November 2011. Four of the five states rank among the top 11 nationally in mortgage foreclosure rates, and although the economy in the fifth, Iowa, is better than most, last year it ranked seventh nationally in food stamp dependency growth.

The Republican National Committee began criticizing the trip before Obama even left town, with Republican National Committee spokesman Ryan Mahoney issuing identical statements that merely substitute the name of each state’s residents. “Iowans [ditto Arizonans, Nevadans] need a president focused on their jobs, not a campaigner-in-chief solely focused on his own reelection,” said Mahoney. “Barack Obama should be more focused on getting Arizona’s economy back on track and putting the millions of unemployed Americans back to work, instead of constantly campaigning.”

A closer look at the five states on Obama’s itinerary shows what he hopes to achieve.

Iowa: Obama starts his re-election campaign today in the state that gave birth to his 2008 presidential victory with his first stop since July 2008 to Cedar Rapids, where he will visit Conveyor Engineering & Manufacturing, a 35-year-old company that makes “screw-type” farm conveyors. The theme of the stop will be manufacturing revival.

One of just two states (New Mexico) to flip from blue to red and back to blue again between 2000 and 2008, Iowa could again be a swing state despite Obama’s somewhat comfortable, 9.5-point victory there four years ago. Unlike the subsequent four stops on the trip, however, Iowa is different in two major ways. First, its non-white population is very small. And although political scientist Michael Lewis-Beck identified Iowa as the state most representative of the overall U.S. economy during the 2008 cycle, the second is that rising farm prices and the state’s relatively small number of foreclosures sheltered it from the economic crisis unlike the others. It’s current, 5.6 unemployment rate is among the lowest in the nation.

That said, because he cannot rely on a base of minority voters, among the five states Iowa is where Obama most needs to make his case to working-class white Americans that he has been and will continue to be the best steward of the nation’s slow, but steady recovery. According to a late November poll, he led the entire Republican field, but his margin over Romney was a mere seven points.

 Arizona: To complement to the traditional manufacturing stop in Iowa, the president stops in Chandler, a sprawling suburb southeast of Phoenix, for a tech-economy event at Intel’s Ocotillo Campus. Chandler’s Maricopa County is ground zero for the mortgage crisis. Although foreclosure rates there peaked in late 2009, foreclosure continues to be a problem; the county has a special hotline and webpage for residents facing foreclosure.

Arizona gained two electors from the 2010 Census, ranks fourth nationally in Latino population share and, along Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, represents the Democrats’ missing, fourth jewel in burgeoning Southwest. Obama lost Arizona in 2008 by about the same, 9-point margin he won Iowa, but in 2012 the GOP will not benefit from having native son John McCain atop the ballot. A late November statewide poll showed Obama with a 41 percent approval/54 percent disapproval split, but another poll two weeks ago showed him beating all Republicans challengers except Romney.

Immigration issues cut both ways for Obama, helping him among Latinos while hurting him among Minutemen-sympathizing voters who applauded Gov. Jan Brewer’s 2010 immigration law and subsequent lawsuit against the Obama Administration. As is so often Obama’s wont, in the SOTU he aimed for the voters in between, calling for a comprehensive reform bill while also making a veiled reference to his administration’s record levels of deportation. But at Intel, expect Obama to dodge the subject altogether in favor of sticking closely to his jobs-and-growth script.

Nevada: On Thursday, the president heads to southern Las Vegas to reiterate his blue collar—or in this case, brown collar—renaissance message with a stop at a UPS freight facility near McCarran Airport. It will be his second stop at a UPS facility in less than a year. Nevadans are really hurting: With foreclosures up and gambling-based tourism losses only recently rebounding, the state’s 12.6 unemployment rate is one of the country’s highest.

In 2008 Obama captured Nevada handily, by more than 12 points, after Bush twice won it. Obama led the Republican field in a pre-Christmas statewide poll, but only by single digits over Romney and Ron Paul. The Silver State gained one elector from the 2010 Census reapportionment. Like the stops in Arizona and Colorado sandwiched around it, Nevada has a significant Latino population. Like Obama’s final stop in Michigan, the union vote is essential for Obama to hold the state.

Colorado: Later on Thursday, Obama moves to Denver, site of his 2008 Democratic National Convention. He will address troops at Buckley Air Force Base, and his message will likely to shift to defense and security issues, as the president reiterates his SOTU.

Although Colorado experiences its own spate of foreclosures, the problem was less severe than it was nationally or in states like Arizona. But, similar to its other, fast-growing Southwest cohorts, Colorado features at least 100,000 age-eligible yet unregistered Latino voters. Like the Tucson-Phoenix corridor, the Boulder-Denver corridor is one of the pivotal, new-growth “ideopolises” identified by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira in their book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority.”

“We were also encouraged to hear the President talk so much about clean energy, as Colorado is leading the nation when it comes to renewable energy research and development,” Democrat Gov. John Hickenlooper said of the president’s Tuesday night speech. “Many of the new jobs the President talked for this industry will be created in Colorado – and we are ready.”

Obama cruised to victory in Colorado in 2008, and according to an early December statewide poll he led all Republicans challengers, if only by two points over Romney. Along with states like Montana, New Hampshire and Ohio, Colorado was one of the great stories of Democratic resurgence in the middle of last decade. The party has since lost back some of those gains in other states, and Hickenlooper’s 2010 gubernatorial victory was a notable exception. Obama needs Colorado—a state which derives its name from a bastardization of the Spanish “color rojo,” for its famed red rocks—to remain true blue this November.

Michigan: It’s not yet clear whether Michigan will be in play in 2012, even if Romney heads the GOP ticket. But a late November 2011 statewide poll did have Romney ahead of Obama by five points. Obama won it in a 16.5-point landslide four years ago. If Gingrich is the nominee, the White House can probably worry less about Michigan.

The details of the president’s Michigan event have not yet been released. Given his SOTU remarks touting the government’s role in saving General Motors and Chrysler from ruin, the location and theme is likely to be auto industry-related, even though the president recently completed such a Michigan victory lap in late-October. Still, it’s never bad politics for any Democrat to find an excuse to press the flesh with the folks who press bumpers.

For the past three months, political eyes have been focused squarely on the Republican White House contenders. But after his State of the Union speech, the commander-in-chief shifts himself into campaigner-in-chief mode, whether or not the GOP has settled on a candidate yet. There’s no point in Obama wasting a valuable head start on the general election he didn’t enjoy four years ago.

Before he left for the five-state swing, Obama’s White House released an eight-page companion document  for the speech entitled, “Blueprint for An America Built to Last.” With 48 combined electoral votes to be cast this November by this quintet of states, as President Obama begins his quest to amass at least 270 electors to win a second term the “blue” part of blueprint takes on special meaning.

And yet, the big numbers the president has thus far posted on the fundraising scoreboard have raised some brows of worry. After all, his 2011 totals are dwarfed by the monthly sums Obama raised during 2008. During his January 2008 primary breakout month he raised $32 million, and his post-convention August 2008 haul was more than $66 million.

As Politico’s Glenn Thrush reported last week, the economic situation, coupled with the belief among donors that Obama will be flush with cash, has made fundraising tougher this cycle than expected. “The fourth-quarter take brought the Obama-DNC total 2011 haul to $250 million — impressive on its face,” writes Thrush. “But operatives in Obama’s orbit concede that number could be higher and blame the problem, in part, on GOP talking heads who repeatedly assert that the president ultimately will collect a billion dollars.”

If not a billion, will Obama at least exceed his $745 million haul from the 2008 cycle? “So far, by the end of 2011 Obama raised about the same amount as he did by the end of 2007, although this time he’s also raised money for the party. The big question is whether he can kick it up to a higher level this year as he did in 2008,” says Michael Malbin, executive director of the Campaign Finance Institute. “I think it’s perfectly obvious that Obama will have plenty of money whether he sets the record or not. Last time the money flowed to him after it became clear he was the alternative to the front-runner, whereas this time everyone knows he’ll be the nominee.”

So fret not for the president. Although the financial sector is more strapped for cash than four years ago and the economic recovery nationally has been slow, Malbin believes the economic environment will not provide a significant fundraising drag on either party or its respective nominees.

Malbin believes the far bigger campaign finance question is whether Romney or whoever the Republicans nominate can keep up once the race simplifies into a two-person contest. Although he suspects the GOP nominee will be unable to match Obama’s campaign war chest, he thinks the GOP nominee will have “a fairly easy time” raising a competitive sum and thus will not be crippled financially the way John McCain was in 2008.

Meanwhile, the $1 billion goal creates something of a dilemma for Obama’s reelection campaign. On one hand, Republicans have raised expectations that Obama will reach the historic threshold, so failing to do so might be criticized; on the other hand, should Obama and the DNC raise that much, Republicans can warn forebodingly that the president is trying to buy reelection. Mitt Romney may believe income inequality should only be spoken about in “quiet rooms,” but you can bet if he’s the nominee his campaign will be shouting from the rooftops about the Obillionaire candidacy. Obama and the Democrats may be wise to keep their net total in the high nine figures, leaving the task of breaking the billion-dollar ceiling for a future presidential aspirant.

That said, does Obama even need to raise a billion in 2012? Given how much he had to raise and spend to fend off a Hillary Clinton primary challenge he doesn’t face this cycle, probably not.

Obama spent $92 million in 2007, plus another $100 million during the first quarter of 2008 when the primary battle with Clinton was still fully underway. So even if every dollar spent after April 1, 2008, is counted as a general election expense — a conservative estimate, given that Clinton didn’t drop out until after the North Carolina and Indiana primaries in early May — that means at least $192 million of the $730 million the Obama campaign spent was used to win the primary, leaving a little more than a half-billion for the general election contest. (The campaign spent all but $15 million of the $745 million raised.) If in 2011-12 Obama raises and spends $1 billion he will effectively have twice the amount to fend off the GOP’s nominee this cycle as he did four years ago to defeat McCain.

The more important target for Obama campaign finance director Rufus Gifford — who in 2008 raked in more than $80 million as chairman of Obama’s Southern California finance team — may be total donors. (Gifford and the Obama 2012 finance team did not respond to requests for comment.) In 2007-08, the Obama campaign received more than 6.5 million online donations from more than 3 million unique donors. This past October the campaign announced that it had already reached 1 million unique donors, and Team Obama is particularly proud of the fact that the average donation is less than $60 and that 98 percent of all donations are in amounts of $250 or less. Bodies often matter as much as dollars, says Malbin, because donor totals are an imperfect yet useful proxy for how many volunteers and activists a campaign can mobilize in the field in swing states.

But what about the independent expenditures of traditional PACs and the dreaded, Citizens United-era super PACs and their hidden donors? Won’t they mitigate Obama’s fundraising advantages? Perhaps, but not likely.

Campaign finance expert Sheila Krumholz of the Center for Responsive Politics thinks the major impact of super PACs may have already come and gone during the Republican primary, by “breathing life into campaigns that didn’t have a big war chest to depend on,” like those of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. Restore Our Future, the Super PAC supporting Romney, also ran devastatingly effective negative ads against Gingrich in Iowa, which, combined with Ron Paul’s television assault on the former speaker, deflated Gingrich’s post-Thanksgiving bubble. Krumholz predicts that super PACs “will become less important than their more secretive nonprofit counterparts once we identify the Republican nominee and move through conventions and into the fall.”

Although the Karl Rove-led Super PAC American Crossroads and its affiliate Crossroads GPS 501(c)4 hope to raise and spend approximately $240 million, the bigger threat to Obama during the upcoming general election for Obama may be the independent expenditures of traditional PACs. But Obama supporters, including the unions, should be able to raise counterbalancing sums for independent expenditures — and, of course, Obama may have a cool billion in candidate and party monies to spend, should he even need it.

The scary talk about big-money electoral politics emanating from TV pundits and citizen groups is not unwarranted. Citizens United, a very unpopular ruling, is clearly bad for the republic. And liberals and Democrats have ample reason to worry about the prospect of Karl Rove dispensing a quarter-billion dollars in a single election cycle. But Howard Dean’s 2004 breaking-the-campaign-finance-glass-ceiling candidacy, coupled with Obama’s breaking-the-bank 2008 presidential run in which roughly one in every 20 Americans who voted for him also donated to his campaign, offer reassuring evidence of the democratization of national, or at least presidential, campaign finance. (PAC and party monies remain highly influential in congressional races.) 

Whatever Democratic theorists or talking heads may say about the state of American campaign finance, this much is indisputable: Should the African-American community organizer with the humble beginnings lose reelection this November, it won’t be because he was outraised and outspent.

Correction: An early version of this article described American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS as a “traditional PACs.” American Crossroad is not.

A tip for McCain, front-runner Mitt Romney and other Republicans: drop the “the” in front of references to Hispanics. Use of the definite article sounds a bit too much like the cringe-worthy “that one” line McCain dropped on Barack Obama during their October 2008 presidential debate in Nashville, and smacks of the sort of “these/those people” phrases that only turn away the groups described. This week, Romney smartly released his first Spanish-language campaign ad, a positive sign. But language is only a small part of the GOP’s problems with minorities, and Latino voters in particular.

Democrats dominate among non-white groups, winning among African-Americans and Asian Americans as well as Latinos. In 2008 Obama carried 67 percent of the Latino vote, and even won the Cuban-American subset previously loyal to Republicans. For GOP presidential candidates, the party’s struggle to attract Latino voters is particularly troubling for two reasons. First, the Latino vote is significant and growing quickly, and will in the near future surpass African-Americans as the nation’s largest ethnic minority voting bloc. (Latinos already outnumber blacks as a share of the population.) Second, unlike in the South where white Republican performance rates can counterbalance African-Americans’ overwhelming support for Democrats, the Latino vote outside Florida and Texas tends to be concentrated in Southwestern states where the offsetting effects of white Republicans are often insufficient.

George W. Bush set the party’s standard for successful outreach and performance among Latinos. In 2004, exit polls indicated that a remarkable 44 percent of Latinos had voted for Bush. Minority voting experts believe this figure is inaccurately high, but there is general agreement that Bush came close if not breached the critical 40 percent national threshold. And there’s no doubt his Latino support in 2004 helped him win four key Southwestern states — Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico — that either Bill Clinton or Al Gore had previously carried. By 2008, however, Obama swung all but McCain’s home state of Arizona back into the Democratic column, and did so rather comfortably, winning Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico by at least 9 percentage points.

What explains the Republicans’ swift reversal? Although other issues have contributed to the GOP’s struggles with Latino voters, the party’s strident opposition to immigration reform has poisoned the electoral well. From California’s Proposition 187 referendum in the 1990s to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer’s signing of the most anti-immigrant law in the country in 2010; from the antics of crusading Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio to the state-level attempts to secure borders to denying benefits to immigrants or their children, conservative groups and their Republican allies are leading the anti-immigrant charge.

“The GOP’s reputation among Latinos is as bad as it has ever been, driven primarily by statements and state legislation on immigration,” Gary Segura, a Stanford political scientist, co-investigator on the National Latino Survey, and president of Latino Decisions polling firm, told me. “Though President Obama’s early inaction on immigration reform and his record deportations significantly undercut his support within the community, there is not a single Republican presidential candidate willing or able to exploit that weakness; they are all too busy tacking to the right to please their base.”

Only 17 percent of Latinos say that the Republican Party is doing a “good job,” according to a Latino Decisions poll taken last month. Forty-six percent agreed that the GOP “doesn’t care too much” and another 27 percent described the party as “hostile” to Latino interests. With a combined 73 percent of Latinos expressing generally or strongly negative attitudes to the party, the Republican nominee is almost guaranteed to win a minority of Latino votes in 2012.

The GOP needn’t carry the Latino vote to win presidential elections, so what matters are the splits nationally and in key states. Segura estimates that if Romney or any other Republican nominee fails to get 40 percent to 42 percent of the Latino vote nationwide, Obama will likely hold Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico, and possibly win Arizona without McCain at the top of the ticket. “Absent a significantly refocusing event — and not even [Florida Sen. Marco] Rubio as the vice-presidential choice is likely to meet that standard — I cannot envision a way for Romney or any of his rivals to do better than Sen. McCain did four years ago among this rapidly growing segment of the electorate.”

In fact, there’s a very real possibility that, despite Latino frustrations with the Obama administration, Romney may do worse this year than did his newfound ally McCain four years ago.

“The current dynamic among Latinos is mild disappointment with Obama but outright fear of the GOP,” wrote Simon Rosenberg, president of NDN, a center-left think tank known for its analysis of Latino politics, to me by email. “Obama’s numbers have held, and Romney’s are far below McCain’s from 2008. And given Romney’s firm embrace of the anti-immigrant wing of the GOP, it is very hard to see how he makes up lost ground in 2012.”

Purple Strategies political consulting firm partner Rob Collins disagrees. One of the co-creators of the Hispanic Leadership Network, Collins cites three reasons why Romney or whoever wins the GOP nomination has a strong chance to outperform McCain with Latino voters.

“First and most important, Obama’s weak polling transcends all ethnic distinctions,” Collins told me, echoing recent evidence that Obama’s support among Latinos is slipping, partly in response to the president’s record-setting deportation of illegal immigrants.

Second, says Collins, conservative groups like American Crossroads and the HLN, along with the Republican Party, have invested significant resources on outreach and messaging to the Latino community. Collins argues that Republican politicians and strategists, who he admits not long ago suffered from viewing the Latino vote monolithically — failing, for example, to distinguish among Mexican Americans, Cubans, Salvadorans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans and other subgroups — now better understand the “nuances and differences” among these varied political sub-elements within the community.

Finally, Collins believes electoral success itself breeds success. “The Republican bench of Hispanic elected officials is deeper than ever,” he notes, citing the recent elections of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, plus Govs. Brian Sandoval of Nevada, Susana Martinez of New Mexico and Louis Fortuno of Puerto Rico.

Collins does not deny the GOP’s problems on immigration policy, but contends that there is a significant and growing gap between the “reality” and “ideology” of anti-immigration reform. Although most conservatives undoubtedly favor taking strong action to secure America’s borders, most are less fervent about rounding up and deporting every illegal immigrant.

This tension between strident rhetoric and reasonable action was evident in the mixed response to Newt Gingrich’s call for a reasonable deportation and amnesty policy — comments that drew praise from the likes of Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer, but scorn from Republican hard-liners like Michele Bachmann. Collins predicts that Harry Reid and Senate Democrats will make a major immigration reform push at some point this summer or fall, not in order to actually pass legislation but to demonize the Republican ticket and split the party in the months before the general election.

As Republicans try to simultaneously please both the xenophobic elements within the conservative base and the Latino voters it needs to compete nationally, they may be tempted to seek a quick-fix solution, notably the selection of a Latino vice-presidential running mate. Symbolic shortcuts to demographic parity don’t necessarily work, of course, and may create as many problems as they solve. (Think of all the female independents and disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters driven immediately and irreversibly to Obama’s candidacy after McCain in 2008 picked Sarah Palin as his running mate.)

But the choice of a young, smart, talented, swing-state rising star like Rubio — subject of a Ken Auletta feature piece in this week’s New Yorker — may not be a panacea for the GOP. Indeed, selecting him may only bring the party’s internal conflicts into fuller, public view. “Rubio’s ability to reach into the non-Cuban Hispanic vote is unproven,” says Rosenberg. “He does not do well with non-Cubans in Florida, and he has taken stances — no on Comprehensive Immigration Reform, the Dream Act, the appointments of [Supreme Court justice] Sonya Sotomayor and [Ambassador] Mari Carmen Aponte, and yes on English-only language — which in some ways put him to the right of Romney and arguably against the interests of those who must migrate to the United States in a traditional path, something Cubans do not have to do.”

John McCain is right: The GOP has a problem with “the” Hispanics. In general elections and especially during primaries, Republican candidates increasingly depend upon support and money from older, whiter voters who hold more reactionary views than younger Americans do toward minorities and immigrants. The intraparty conflicts that result could diminish over time, as the party replaces older voters with younger ones, and attitudes toward minorities soften, but only if the GOP doesn’t box itself into an electoral corner from which it cannot escape.