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Many Filipinos living in the United States are frantically trying to get in touch with loved ones in some of the areas hardest hit by the typhoon. California, with about a million Filipino immigrants, is the center for a large fundraising effort.

Los Angeles is home to one of the largest concentrations of Filipino immigrants in the U.S. Many across this city are glued to the local Asian TV stations' nightly news broadcasts. Some are turning their worry and stress into action, pounding the pavement to raise money for typhoon victims.

Caren Mempin is clutching a can full of coins and dollar bills, going from table to table at a fast food franchise from the Philippines called Chow King. It's in a bustling shopping mall home to other Filipino chains and a massive supermarket in L.A.'s Eagle Rock neighborhood.

Her pitch in Kigali isn't a hard one. The typhoon is on everyone's minds here and everyone wants to help. Like Mempin, so many people know friends or family affected.

"I just talked to my Mom and they said that they're all okay, but we have also relatives from Tacloban, especially my mom's brothers and sisters, they don't have any response so we're still waiting for that," she says.

Mempin was born in Tacloban, one of the hardest hit cities.

I'm always keeping in touch with my Mom, she's always crying about that, because my mom is very close to her family."

The Los Angeles area is home to an estimated 400,000 Filipinos. The first wave of immigrants to come in droves in the 1930s settled in what's now called Historic Filipino Town, about six miles south of the shopping mall, as the crow flies.

On Union Avenue is the modest, but well-kept Filipino Christian Church, the oldest Filipino church in the city. It's not much bigger than the apartment buildings it shares this quiet block with. Upstairs, in a small room, there are black trash bags full of donated clothes and other supplies.

"These are the part of the rummage sale," says pastor Einstein Cabalteja. He says they've raised close to $800 so far through the rummage sales and online donations to the church's website.

"We are not very rich, and we are not a very big congregation. We have on average 60 on a regular Sunday, so we're not really a big congregation but I believe our hearts are big," he says.

Cabalteja, who came to the U.S. and this church in 2006, says his heart aches. He wishes he could hand deliver these things.

"Here in America, we enjoy a lot of good things but back there, there are less fortunate people, I wish, I wish I could be there," he says.

For now, relief organizations say what's needed most is cash. Shipping food and other supplies is expensive and there's no guarantee it will land in the right people's hands.

Alex Montanaces, of the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns, says as of late Monday, the group had raised about $50,000 for relief. Inspiring, he says.

In Filipino, we call it 'Bayanihan,' and it's like a sense of Filipinos like, the community coming together to help one another. So there's really a sense of Bayanihan spirit I think among the Filipino community here in this area.

Back at the shopping mall in Eagle Rock, people came to swap stories and check in with friends to see if they'd heard any more news.

For fundraiser Caren Mempin, no word yet on her extended family in Tacloban.

"Hopefully they're okay, because it's so sad when we cannot see and contact them," she says.

For now, while she waits, Mempin says she's praying.

The outcome in Virginia's governor's race this week seemed to illustrate anew the Democratic Party's grip on the women's vote, and the power of the abortion issue.

Even some Republicans argued that social conservative Ken Cuccinelli's defeat at the hands of Democrat Terry McAuliffe, who won women by a 9-point margin, was another sign that the GOP's anti-abortion stance would continue to doom the party at the polls.

This was the sentiment expressed in a post-election column on Virginia's popular conservative blog Bearingdrift.com, by an activist using the pseudonym Alexis Rose Bank:

"The Republican Party needs a new strategy on abortion....abortion opponents have in no unclear terms been the single most significant cause of Republican losses in recent years..."

The writer may be partly right, but the analysis was flawed in one very basic way: Republicans aren't losing because women reject their anti-abortion stance. Polls consistently show that women, like the rest of the country, are divided on the issue.

They're losing because women, and other voters, perceive that Republicans are more extreme on the issue of abortion.

"The one thing that we always feel has to be put out there is that women, as a group, are not fundamentally pro-choice," says Michael Dimock, director of the Pew Research Center for People & the Press. "There is a remarkably small gender gap on the pro-choice issue.

"There is, however, a bigger gender gap on the politics of the issue than on abortion attitudes," Dimock says.

In that sense, the Virginia results do serve up an important abortion lesson for Republicans. It can be summarized in two words: "transvaginal ultrasound."

Position Vs. Extreme Position

On the same day Cuccinelli was losing purple Virginia, Republican Gov. Chris Christie, who opposes abortion, was winning re-election in deep blue New Jersey.

Here's how Christie has characterized his position on abortion: "I am pro-life," he said on NBC's Meet the Press in 2011. "I believe in exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. That's my position, take it or leave it."

That's what John Sides characterizes as a "garden variety" Republican position on abortion, one that doesn't advocate overturning Roe v. Wade or move otherwise to the extreme of the issue.

Christie's position puts him "in the majority of opinion" on abortion, says Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University, adding that Cuccinelli's position — he opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest — "was a minority position."

That brings us to transvaginal ultrasounds. Cuccinelli, as the state's attorney general, supported a bill that would have made the invasive procedure mandatory for women considering undergoing an abortion in Virginia. That was ample fodder for McAuliffe's well-financed advertising campaign.

"Both sides are trying to find dimensions on this issue that they can get leverage out of," Sides says. "On the left, it can be vaginal ultrasounds; on the right, it could be 'partial birth' abortion.

"When a legal right to abortion is being seen as going too far, or when an attempt to restrict rights to abortion goes too far, that's where you'll see backlash," he says.

Research suggests that being associated with an extreme position on abortion, not being against abortion, is what hurts candidates like Cuccinelli — and Republicans Richard Mourdock in Indiana and Todd Aiken in Missouri, both of whom saw their U.S. Senate hopes go up in flames in 2012 after extreme comments on pregnancy and abortion.

Numbers, Not Anecdotes

An analysis by Sides and Lynn Vavreck at UCLA found little voter movement on the abortion issue in the 2012 presidential race, even when controversy was bubbling around Mourdock, Aiken and others.

"Conservative attitudes on abortion among Republican-leaning women shored up their support for Romney," Sides and Vavreck wrote this week in an analysis for Bloomberg. "The abortion views of Democratic-leaning women shored up their support for Obama in roughly equal measure."

Both Sides and Dimock, of Pew, reiterate that while abortion is a more personal issue for many women, there is little gender gap on attitudes.

"Women are a little more likely than men to take the pro-choice position, but 7 points more likely to say Democrats represented their views," Dimock says, "and they are 10 points more likely than men to say it's an important issue to them."

Pew's polling shows that there is a perception among Americans — even moderate Republicans — that Democrats are closer to the people on the issue, with 55 percent saying the GOP is more extreme.

That comes with a caution, for both parties.

"Abortion itself is not always a black and white issue to a lot of Americans," Dimock says, noting that 57 percent of women Pew polled last election season said they supported legal abortion in "most cases." And 49 percent of Americans in an August Pew poll said that having an abortion was "morally wrong."

Republicans who oppose abortion can win, and have won. The problems arise when specific candidates promote positions that are beyond what mainstream voters — women and men — can accept.

Now that President Obama has apologized to those who've seen their health care plans canceled due to the Affordable Care Act, losses he pledged beforehand wouldn't happen, he joins the line of modern presidents who have had to look the American people in the eye and give their regrets.

Actually, Obama didn't so much look Americans in the eye as much as he did NBC News interviewer Chuck Todd. Predictably, the president's apology was rated unsatisfactory to many of his and Obamacare's critics. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, for instance, called it "halfhearted." And that was among the nice things critics said.

It's true that, as apologies go, the mea culpa was arguably weak tea. "And I am sorry that they — you know, are finding themselves in this situation, based on assurances they got from me," Obama said, creating an odd distancing between his administration's actions and their effect on the citizenry.

While it might be too much to expect a president to say: "I'm sorry my administration's policies really screwed these Americans," if Obama's formulation seemed off-key, it was because it was so circumspect and indirect.

In that, however, Obama isn't alone. Being president means never having to say you're sorry, at least not in a soulful, direct way that resonates with other humans.

Consider just a few examples from Obama's predecessors.

George W. Bush: After Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast and his administration's response proved to be singularly inept, Bush faced a crisis of confidence in his leadership, fueled by his memorable "You're doing a heckuva job, Brownie" and other impressions he left that he thought all was well.

Instead of gushing "I'm sorry" — which really wasn't his style, after all — Bush opted for the "I'm responsible" approach. Three weeks after the hurricane swamped New Orleans, Bush took advantage of a joint press conference with the then-Iraqi president to say:

"Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government. And to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility."

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