Pataki was the keynote speaker at the Scott County Republican Party’s Ronald Reagan Dinner Tuesday night, where he attacked Democratic positions on foreign policy, health care reform and the economic stimulus plan.

But in an interview shortly before his address his focus was on fiscal matters and keeping a party struggling with its identity together.

Pataki said too much attention was being given to a congressional race in northern New York, where a Democrat won a seat this month held by Republicans for decades. The Democrat beat a Conservative Party candidate endorsed by high-profile Republicans, including Pataki, who said the GOP candidate was too liberal. She quit the race before Election Day.

That kind of rancor can be avoided, Pataki said, by keeping the focus on pocketbook issues.

“Those are issues that are at the forefront of people’s minds and on which Republicans are united,” he said.

Pataki’s message is similar to that of Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who told a GOP fundraiser Saturday that internal debate is healthy but ultimately Republicans must support Republicans in order to regain political majorities. Pawlenty also endorsed the Conservative Party candidate in the New York House race.

Pataki also made it clear to the AP that it is too early to tell if he will run for president in 2012, a rumor that picked up steam when he announced he would be speaking in Iowa.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Michael Steele, RNC chairman

Most of Steele’s event at the National Press club consisted of scorching attacks on President Obama’s agenda for health care reform, and on the early drafts of health care legislation that have been scored by the Congressional Budget Office at around $1 trillion.

Much of the speech had been telegraphed two weeks earlier in a poll conducted for the RNC and a corresponding memo from Alex Castellanos, a Republican media consultant who worked for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, which argued that Republicans could kill Democratic plans for health care reform by dragging out the debate. “If we slow this sausage-making process down,” Castellanos wrote, “we can defeat it.” The “key message” for Republicans would be “We’ve got to ‘SLOW DOWN the OBAMA EXPERIMENT WITH OUR HEALTH’.”

In his Monday speech, Steele used the word “experiment” or some version of it no fewer than 30 times. In a new television ad airing in North Dakota, Nevada, and Arkansas — all states with at least one Democratic senator on the ballot in 2010–the RNC casts health care reform, again, as a “risky experiment.”

Steele’s performance was less a kick-off, more an amplification of a year-long conservative campaign that is entering its final months without much remaining subtlety. Republicans are in the precarious position of arguing for a “pause button,” as Steele put it, in the ongoing negotiations over health care, while Democrats are aware that any pause or slow-down would effectively kill reform in the 111th Congress.

There are Republican alternatives that have no chance of passage; the Patients’ Choice Act sponsored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), for example, has six co-sponsors. Republicans are testing brand-new health care messaging against Democrats in swing states, while those same Democrats are aware that a failure to pass health care reform would drain their political capital and worsen their chances of re-election in 2010.

“If it doesn’t happen this year it’s not going to happen,” said one House GOP aide. “If too many members have concerns about this in an off-year, even their ranks are only going to grow in an election year.”

It’s been difficult for Republicans to avoid the occasional blunt remark that reveals that fact. High-minded “working groups” on health care reform have given way to an alliance with Rick Scott, the former private hospital CEO who launched Conservatives for Patients’ Rights in March. Scott’s checkered experience in health care — he resigned from Columbia/HCA in 1997 after a $1.7 billion fraud settlement — did not immediately win him many public alliances with the GOP. But by the time Scott appeared at the launch of Sen. Jim DeMint’s (R-S.C.) launch of his own health care plan in June, some Republicans were echoing the message in his TV ads, that Congress needed to slow down the pace of health care reform.

After that event, in a brief conversation with The Washington Independent, Scott remarked that “the debate really changed” since he’d launched his group, and that a slow-down of reform would be the end of Democratic plans for health care. “If they don’t get it done by October,” said Scott, “it’s not going to get done.”

The directness of Scott’s campaign backfired a little last week when he co-hosted a conference call with DeMint. On the call, DeMint argued that a Republican victory on health care would “break” Obama and steer political momentum away from Democrats. In a Monday night interview with the News Hour on PBS, the president credited DeMint with saying what Republicans were really thinking. “There is a certain portion of the Republican Party that views this like they saw ’93, ’94, the last time there was a major health-reform effort,” said the president. “They explicitly went after the Clintons, said we’re not going to get this done … it was a pure political play, a show of strength by the Republicans that helped them regain the House.”

All of this puts Republicans in the acrobatic position of throwing up roadblocks to kill health care reform this year while, in the states, attempting to convince vulnerable Democrats that successful health care reform would be a political boondoggle that could end their control of Congress. In conversations with The Washington Independent, Republican strategists in the states targeted by the RNC’s new ads had some difficulty squaring the circle. “We all saw what happened the last time there was a major push by a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress to mandate government-run health care,” said Robert Uithoven, a Republican strategist in Nevada. While Uithoven acknowledged that the Democrats of 1994 stumbled by failing to pass any health care reform, he argued that success this year could be a problem, too. “Harry Reid succeeding on this would be disastrous for the country. The more people learn about the cost, the more dangerous it is for Reid to succeed in this effort.”

Bill Vickery, an Arkansas Republican strategist who plans to work for his party’s nominee against Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), claimed that it would be “politically disastrous” for the senator to support a health care bill with a public plan. “If she votes for it and it passes you say, once again, she sided with the ultra-liberal president, she’s a toady for the administration. If she votes against it, maybe it’s a non-starter politically. And if she votes for it and the bill fails anyway, you make a more nuanced version of that first argument.”

Those arguments run up against the plans of other vulnerable Democrats, who are already running on health care reform. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who has taken the lead on health care legislation in the absence of the ailing Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), is on the air with ads that feature Kennedy praising Dodd for his work on “the cause of my life.” Former Rep. Rob Simmons (R-Conn.), who is running against Dodd, has an opening if reform falters.

“Dodd believes that whatever legislation he rams through Congress will accrue to his benefit,” said Jim Barnett, Simmons’ campaign manager. “The problem is that voters are judging him on honesty, and nobody trusts him, so he’s staking a lot on the idea he that he’s getting things done in the Senate. If the effort fails or if it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, it will be painful for him.”

David Weigel covers Republicans and the conservative movement for the Washington Independent, a Center for Independent Media site.

The message?

Forget our skin color and accents and look at the long list of strong Hawkeye State economic indicators associated with the Latino community.

Latin purchasing power in Iowa was $1.6 billion in 2004 and is projected to increase to $2.7 billion by 2009, according to the Iowa Division of Latino Affairs.

Several dozens business, political and media leaders attended the first-ever Iowa Latino Business Capitol Reception to discuss the opportunities these figures represent.

Armando Villareal, a fifth-generation Texan who is now administrator of the Iowa Division of Latino Affairs, said his community’s presentation in the Capitol is meant to showcase the economic muscle and entrepreneurial spirit of Hispanics. Doing so in a building where debate has raged in recent months about immigration is vital, Villareal told Iowa Independent.

“There’s never been a time in America where the majority population is so dependent on the minority population,” Villareal said.

According to his office, the Latino population in Iowa is expected to jump by 335,000 in the year 2030, the largest generational ethnic demographic change since statehood, Villareal said during an interview under the Capitol dome and just steps away from a memorial to Iowa’s fallen in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

At the moment, an estimated 114,700 Latinos are in Iowa, a 28-percent increase since 2000, the New York Times reports. In some small towns, nearly a third of the citizens are Hispanic, although about half the Hispanic population is concentrated in five Iowa cities, including Des Moines, the Times adds.

“Who’s going to be paying the bills in the future?” Villareal asked. “It’s almost incumbent on Iowa to start saying, `Latinos, you are the ones who can pull the wagon.’”

He says the focus on heated immigration debates misses bigger points and takes the attention from problems that plague the full nation.

“You can’t blame a Latino making $8 for the mortgage crisis,”  Villareal said.

Organizers of the event displayed information about the growing number of Hispanic-owned businesses in an effort to show the community is about far more than quick labor for Iowa’s depleted rural areas.

“It reflects well on our state and capital city,” Gov. Chet Culver told Iowa Independent in an interview about the event. He also spoke to the gathering in the Capitol.

He said the small-business impact of the Latin community in Des Moines has been “real.”

“You’ve got great businesses that are cropping up,” Culver said.

According to the Iowa Division of Latino Affairs, in 2002 there were 363 Latino businesses with nearly 3,000 paid employees and annual payroll of $55 million. Villareal said new numbers on that are expected to be dramatically higher.

Culver, a former teacher, said he taught English as a second language at Hoover High School in Des Moines and knows firsthand the role of Hispanics in Iowa’s economy.

“I’ve seen some amazing families and incredible kids,” Culver said.

(Editor’s Note: Villareal photo and group shot from Douglas Burns and Culver photo courtesy of Carroll Daily Times Herald’s Jeff Storjohann.)