It's been difficult all year to disentangle opposition to the Democrats from free-floating anti-incumbent sentiment, and policy objections from throw-the-bums-out rage.
Two polls in the last day suggest that Republican incuments face some of the same vulnerabilities as Democrats, though probably not to the same depth: O.K. Henderson reports with some surprise that Chuck Grassley has dropped below 50% in his Iowa re-election campaign. Meanwhile Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (who isn't up this year) has, according to a new poll, a fairly stunning 49% disapproval rating in his home state of Kentucky.
Rick Snyder, whose "tough nerd" campaign theme has helped make him an unexpected contender for the Republican nomination for governor of Michigan, has a new ad out stressing his nerdiness.
New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg knocked Senator Scott Brown on his radio show today -- but actually meant to criticize Sherrod Brown, whose amendment would have limited the size of banks.
"There’s all sorts of this stuff where .... there’s a populist way of running the country. 'Let’s go after the banks and the insurance companies,'" Bloomberg complained. "I was pleased to see that last night Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand stood up for our city and our taxpayers, and they really do deserve our thanks. They voted no on an amendment from Scott Brown that would have devastated ... the city’s business and tax base. This Brown Amendment would ... explicitly and arbitrarily cap the size of financial firms, and then we couldn’t compete with financial firms overseas. Would have been devastating for our country because nobody would- could finance or if they’re going to finance, they’d use banks overseas."
The Republican Governors Association is going nuclear on the maverick GOP consultant John Weaver, whose candidate attacked RGA Chairman Haley Barbour as a crypto-Confederate lobbyist in a web video today, blasting Weaver as an "opportunist" while he compared their reaction to that of "scalded apes."
The candidate, Tim Cahill, a Democrat-turned-Independent who is running for Governor of Massachusetts, responded to RGA attack ads today with a video painting Barbour -- the Governor of Mississippi central figure in the Republican Party who is conisidering a presidential bid -- as a Mississippi good ol' boy and lobbyist with Confederate sympathies peddling special interest cash to Establishment candidates.
Weaver, one of Cahill's top consultants, is a former McCain aide who is working for two unconventional Republican hopefuls, Rick Snyder in Michigan Steve Levy in New York, this cycle, candidates who might hope to get funding from the deep-pocketed RGA this cycle.
Weaver sought to praise Barbour and defend Cahill's ad in an email:
Different candidates have different perspectives and strategists don't always agree with every decision a campaign makes. I can't blame Tim Cahill for not appreciating $1 milllion in unfounded personal attacks against him and he has every right to defend himself as he sees fit. My personal opinion is that Haley is a great governor who has been a great leader for the party. He happens to be wrong on this race because Tim Cahill is the more conservative candidate. I am not sure RGA donors want their money supporting liberals like Charlie Baker.
Weaver described himself as "someone who always advocates a broad and big GOP -- under a large tent."
"But even Barnum and Bailey couldn't find a tent big enough to hold the liberal fiscal and social policies of Baker and Tisei, who are completely out of the mainstream. Most conservative RGA donors would be shocked how liberal," he wrote of the Republican ticket in Massachusetts.
The spokesman for the RGA, Mike Schrimpf, responded with a scalding email suggesting that Barbour didn't take kindly to the caricature:
This looks to be a classic case of a consultant and candidate becoming mirrors of each other. Just like Cahill, he tries to be on all sides of an issue. He loves and respects Haley Barbour, but he also condones him being disparaged in a cheesy internet video. Sounds like Cahill endorsing Patrick's tax increases and then being against them. Now we know why these guys like each other. An opportunist has a 1000 different excuses but only one true character.
[A spokesman for Snyder, Jake Suski, defended Weaver. "We're focused on sharing Rick's plan to solve Michigan's severe economic problems. We're proud to have John Weaver, one of the nations best GOP strategists, on our team and we have nothing but respect for the leadership of Gov. Barbour," he said.]
Weaver, meanwhile, responded to the RGA blast by both distancing himself from the ad and rebuking Schrimpf.
"I opposed the ad after I was presented with it after the fact," he emailed. "But Tim Cahill, the only fiscal conservative in the race, has a right to defend himself. And he has done so obviously effectively or the beltway wonders wouldn't be acting like scalded apes. This kid at the RGA sounds like he could scare a third grader, but I was working with Haley when he was in diapers to elect Republicans and conservatives. This time the RGA is backing a fiscal ultra liberal and they're wrong and they know it."
Vice President Biden, left, shakes hands with European Parliament President Jerzy Buzez at the European Parliament in Brussels, Thursday, May 6. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)
Palin, putting loyalty over movement ideology, backs Carly Fiorina in California.
Chuck Devore's spokesman grumbles to Weigel:
Sarah Palin's endorsement brings with it tremendous media attention, but not necessarily votes. Conservative activists in California know and like Chuck DeVore -- and that's our bottom line.
I think the best I can do is point you toward the responses from the conservative base on Palin's Facebook page, and on Twitter: there's a lot of them respectfully but firmly telling the former Governor that she's been misled here. And they're right.
Tim Cahill, the Republican Democratic official running as an independent in Massachusetts, goes right at RGA Chairman Haley Barbour with this scathing ad painting him as a pro-Confederate "good ol' boy."
"This Republican governor from Mississippi thinks he can buy the Massachusetts governor's race," says Cahill in the video above. "Who are you gonna believe? The guy from Yazoo City, Mississippi or the guy from Quincy?"
This is the sort of thing that make even Barbour's admirers wonder if he can be a national candidate.
With Republican hopes fading fast in New York, RGA Chairman Haley Barbour tells the AP what, as Maggie Haberman first reported here, he'd been telling local Republicans: Despite Steve Levy's suggestions, the party won't commit money to the long-shot Cuomo challenge unless it's close.
“Our policy is to take the resources contributors are generous enough to give us and put them where they do the most good,” Barbour said. “It’s the same in New York as in every other state: if we have a sure winner or a sure loser, we won’t put any money in there.”
The Ohio blog whose interview of a Lee Fisher, now the Democratic candidate for governor Senate, was featured in a strange, suggestive National Republican Senatorial Committee attack ad has asserted its copyright to the footage and had the ad removed from YouTube.
"We are deeply disappointed that the NRSC not only violated our copyright, but that they used the candidate’s remarks out of any reasonable context," wrote the Buckeye State Blog's editor David Potts.
Jon Ralston reports that one of the Republicans running for Senate in Nevada, Chad Christensen, is promoting a ballot initiative to get an immigration law similar to Arizona's passed in Nevada.
Jonathan Martin notes that Republican primary candidates there and elsewhere are scrambling to get to the right of the primary field on the issue.
The article by Governor Jim Gibbons' alleged girlfriend starts like this:
Confession: I’ve been intimate with only two men in my life: my first boyfriend, whom I met at 16 and stayed with until 26; my husband, whom I married at 29, and have four children with.
For my generation, I’m fairly much a prude.
The piece, in passing, also trashes Gibbons' wife and offers the number of women he's slept with.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is at some pains to beat back a perception that Americans for Job Security -- in the news for an ad featuring scenes from India -- is a Chamber front, something both groups deny.
And so Brad Peck, who writes the Chamber's blog, emailed one of the people who'd suggested it, Markos Moulitsas, to say, "We have no affiliation in any way with the Halter ad you posted on or the group running it."
You can't have an honest debate without the facts.
And right now, your side of this "debate" is hiding behind unaccountable front groups that refuse to release donor information, and have a well-documented history of flat out lying.
In other words, I don't believe you, and you have given me nothing but your word, and the word of some guy at AJS that you claim you don't even know, that all the documentation showing a connection between the Chamber and AJS is somehow untrue.
You also deny global warming. It doesn't mean I'm going to believe you just because you said so.
I'm sympathetic to Markos's view here that a well-funded, anonymous attack ad does, and should, immediately cast suspicion on the people who are able to benefit from it without being blamed, and that the media has a role in ensuring that anonymous attacks aren't cost free. It is, perhaps, a short step from there to trading allegations without evidence and demanding that people prove the negative, though that's not a step I'd take.
But imagine what fun we'll have if Citizens United is extended to anonymize all kinds of political spending.
The incoming president of the Service Employees International Union won't lead the giant union back into the AFL-CIO, she wrote in a letter to the rival Change to Win federation, which retiring President Andy Stern founded as an AFL rival.
"SEIU has had no discussion about returning to the AFL-CIO," Mary Kay Henry wrote in the letter. "The needs of hardworking women and men in this country transcend conversation about the configuration of the labor movement and instead call on us all to work together in the interest of workers and their families.
"SEIU remains strongly committed to our relationship with our Change to Win partners and we look forward to strengthening those relationships in the weeks and months to come," she wrote.
Henry's calls to improve SEIU's frayed relations with other unions had stirred speculation of reunification, and AFL President Richard Trumka has said he hopes SEIU will return. Henry's letter seems aimed, at least for now, at squashing that speculation and maintaining the union's independence -- as well as maintaining confidence in Change to Win, from which other unions are also threatening to defect.
Two striking new ads today. Above, Sestak reminds Pennsylvanians that George W. Bush supported Arlen Specter; and in a radio spot (audio here), the SEIU features an Arkansan saying, "I love President Obama. But I can't vote for Blanche Lincoln again."
The National Council for a New America, which Eric Cantor launched last year as a vehicle for Republican resurgence, had "flamed out" by August, POLITICO reported at the time.
This isn't actually a bad thing for the GOP. The group faded at least in part because the sort of long-term, politician-led "rebranding" campaign the group promised has been replaced by a genuine grassroots energy.
Marco Rubio now says he backs Arizona's controversial immigration law, after changes aimed at somewhat limiting the circumstances in which people can be asked for immigration papers, but leaving the central thrust of putting immigration enforcement in the hands of local authorities.
I was in Arizona a little under two months ago. People there had told me when I was there for a finance event, had shared with me how concerned they were about the unfortunate violence in Mexico now spreading across the border into their cities and into their state. And so this is inevitable.
And the reason that something like this happening was inevitable is because the federal government has failed to provide border security, has failed to provide a legal immigration system that works.
But right now, for the people of Arizona, this is not (from I gathered) this is not even an immigration issue. This is a public safety issue. And the fact is that Mexican drug violence has tragically crossed over the border and into an American state and American cities. So I congratulate them on taking steps to clarify even further the intent of the law.
JM: If you were in the Arizona state legislature, would you have voted for the law?
MR: The second one that passed hit the right note. Yes.
Rubio also rejected the notion of a "path to citizenship" or "amnesty," despite "the human stories."
"There are going to be stories of very young kids that were brought to this country at a very young age who don’t even speak Spanish that are going to be sent back to Nicaragua or some other place. And it’s gonna feel weird and I understand that," he said, suggesting that those hardships would be a price worth paying.
The Conservatives will fall nineteen seats short of a majority in a hung parliament, according to the final projection of the campaign from the PoliticsHome Poll Centre.
The final Poll Centre projection, incorporating all polls conducted up to and including the last day of campaigning before the election, projects a total of 307 seats for the Conservatives (up 16 from the last projection), 229 for Labour (down 1) and 82 for the Liberal Democrats (down 15).
The calls for a boycott of Arizona present a particular challenge for Democratic candidates inside the state, who hate the legislation but are loathe to support a boycott of their own state.
One political solution: If you Google "Arizona boycott," the first his is this ad from Andrei Cherny, who's running for State Treasurer.
Ken Vogel and Mike Allen write this morning that there's a plan, and a leadership -- Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie -- behind a new conservative infrastructure being crafted on the model of what Democrats built over the last decade.
The Republican Party’s best-connected political operatives have quietly built a massive fundraising, organizing and advertising machine based on the model assembled by Democrats early in the decade, and with the same ambitious goal — to recapture Congress and the White House.
The new groups could give Republicans and their allies a powerful campaign apparatus separate from the Republican National Committee. Karl Rove, political architect of the Bush presidency, and Ed Gillespie, former Republican Party chairman, are the most prominent forces behind what is, in effect, a network of five overlapping groups, three of which were started in the past few months.
The operating assumption of Rove, Gillespie and the other organizers is that despite the historical dominance of Republican fundraising and organizing, the GOP has been outmaneuvered by Democrats and their allies in recent years, and it is time to strike back.
“Where they have a chess piece on the board, we need a chess piece on the board,” said Gillespie, who is involved in all five groups in roles ranging from chairman to informal adviser. “Where they have a queen, we shouldn’t have three pawns"...
Rove, currently on a book tour, has provided “a laying-on of hands” for the groups — as one organizer put it — by encouraging major Republican donors to support them as part of the GOP’s path to revival. “Karl has always said: People call us a vast right-wing conspiracy, but we’re really a half-assed right-wing conspiracy,” he said. “Now, he wants to get more serious.”
The five groups, three of which share an office, are American Crossroads, a 527 aimed at countering the Democrats outside allies; the American Action Forum, a 501(c)3 that can't play politics directly; American Action Network, which will pay for polling and ads; the polling and strategy shop Resurgent Republic; and the Republican State Leadership Committee, which has a key role in redistricting fights.
