SOTU Crib Sheet for Sunday, July 8th

This morning, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell predicted the GOP had a 50-50 chance of winning the control of the Senate in November. McConnell blamed Obama administration policies for “slowing the economy down.” President Obama’s Senior Campaign Adviser, Robert Gibbs, told us the president was 100 percent committed to ending the so-called Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Regarding the economy, Gibbs admitted, “we are not growing fast enough and we're not adding enough jobs.” Finally, we talked about the weak jobs numbers with economists Mark Zandi, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, and CNN Sr. Congressional Correspondent Dana Bash.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R) Minority Leader, on his chances of becoming majority leader next year
“50-50. I think it is going to be a very close, competitive election. There are a number of places where we have opportunities for pickups, not many places where we have much chance of losing a seat. I think at the end of the day, we will have a very narrow Senate one way or the other.”

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R) Minority Leader, on the economy
“It is terrible. We have got 41 straight months now of unemployment above 8 percent, 41 straight months. … this is
the most tepid recovery - if it is a recovery - from a deep recession in American history. The economy is just sputtering along and the reason for that, in my judgment, is because of what the administration chose to do: spend, borrow, pass this new ObamaCare law with its penalty tax in it, its mandate tax. All of this is slowing the economy down.”

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R) Minority Leader, asked if he was sorry he voted for Chief Justice John Roberts
“No, I'm not, but I was extremely disappointed. The chief justice, however, did make it clear that the mandate is a tax,
and if I may make an observation about that, Candy, you know, the mandate tax, 77 percent of it will be levied on people making $120,000 and less. And interestingly enough, that produces more tax revenue for the government than the so-called Buffett tax which the president tried to get us to pass to raise taxes on high income people.”

Robert Gibbs, Obama Campaign Senior Adviser, on expiring Bush tax cuts
CANDY: “The president is completely committed to this, he won't allow it to happen?”
GIBBS: “He is 100 percent committed to it.”

Robert Gibbs, Obama Campaign Senior Adviser, on Mitt Romney’s finances
“…nobody knows why he has a corporation in Bermuda, why he failed to disclose that on seven different financial disclosures, why he transferred it to somebody else's purview the day before he became governor of Massachusetts. The one thing he can do, Candy, to clear up whether or not he's done anything illegal, whether he's shielding his income from taxes in Bermuda or Switzerland, is to do what every other presidential candidate has done, and that is release a series of years of their own tax returns.”

Robert Gibbs, Obama Campaign Senior Adviser, on the economy
“We have been, and typically when you come out of the recession, the depths that we were in, that's caused by a financial
crisis, which is what happened, it takes a while to dig out of that hole. We saw on Friday that our economy is growing and we are adding
jobs. …We are not growing fast enough and we're not adding enough jobs.”