George Packer issues a last-ditch challenge to Twitter, crack for media addicts.
Republicans will tie candidates to Obama.
Edwards' 'shaming' is a TV draw.
Michelle Cottle pans Frank Luntz.
Gitcho goes to Brown.
One more Roger Ailes tidbit: Unlike many figures he doesn't, a colleague points out, pretend not to read the criticism:
HUFFINGTON: Aren't you concerned about the language that Glenn Beck is using, which is, after all, inciting the American people? There is a lot of suffering out there, as you know, and when he talks about people being slaughtered, about who is going to be the next in the killing spree...
AILES: Well, he was talking about Hitler and Stalin slaughtering people. So I think he was probably accurate. Also, I'm a little....
HUFFINGTON: No, no, he was talking about this administration.
AILES: I don't -- I think he speaks English. I don't know, but I mean, I don't misinterpret any of his words. He did say one unfortunate thing, which he apologized for, but that happens in live television. So I don't think it's -- I think if we start going around as the word police in this business, it will be...
HUFFINGTON: It's not about the word police. It's about something deeper. It's about the fact that there is a tradition as the historian Richard Hofstetter said, in American politics, of the paranoid style. And the paranoid style is dangerous when there is real pain out there. I mean, with...
AILES: I agree with you. I read something on your blog that said I looked like J. Edgar Hoover, I had a face like a fist, and I was essentially a malignant tumor...
HUFFINGTON: Well, that's...
AILES: And I thought -- and then it got nasty after that...
HUFFINGTON: ... that was never by anybody that we had...
AILES: Then it really went nasty, and I thought, gee, maybe Arianna ought to cut this out, but...
Ailes was referring to a Huffington Post column by Bill Mann, a former TV critic for the Honolulu Advertiser and publisher of the website DC Weasels. He described Ailes as a "J. Edgar Hoover lookalike [with] a face like a clenched fist, and called Fox News "a malignant tumor on the body politic."
Two related news items today:
Roger Ailes, the nation's most influential Republican, says America's most important political issue is the "safety and sovereignty of the United States."
A series of recent controversies — capped by Friday’s decision to pull a key 9/11 trial out of Manhattan — is prompting Republicans to turn up the pressure on President Barack Obama, by resurrecting the kind of “soft on terrorism” charge that has dogged Democrats in the past.
Obama largely escaped any controversy over terrorism in the 2008 campaign, because voters were so focused on the economic crisis and because many were supportive of Obama’s plans to break from the Bush-era war on terror, by ending the Iraq war and shutting down Guantanamo Bay prison.
But a series of stumbles in recent weeks has given Republicans a chance to renew that line of attack against Obama, at a time when he’s already confronting public criticism of his handling of the economy and health care.
The GOP has leapt on Obama’s handling of the Christmas Day bombing plot, saying he was slow to speak to the public about the initial attack and criticizing the Justice Department’s decision to try the suspect in a civilian court, not a military one. Republicans also are criticizing the Justice Department for an FBI decision to end questioning of the suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, after less than an hour and read him his Miranda rights.
That came on top of the congressional uproar over Obama’s plan to close Guantanamo Bay prison by moving the detainees to U.S. prisons. Obama missed a self-imposed one-year deadline to close the facility. Republicans also criticized the Justice Department’s decision to send five alleged 9/11 plotters to trial in Manhattan, just blocks from the World Trade Center site — a decision the administration abruptly abandoned Friday after powerful Democrats came out against the New York venue.
“It’s the death of a thousand self-inflicted cuts,” said Peter Feaver, a National Security Council official under presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. “Conservatives like Vice President Cheney have been making the critique from the beginning but it did not stick until the self-inflicted wounds reached a culmination point.. I think they did with the underwear bomber. Prior to that the self-inflicted wounds were separated. They didn’t congeal into a single story line, but now I think they have.”
My story from yesterday:
With polls showing deep voter anger driving members of both parties into frenzies of populist outrage and President Barack Obama frequently railing against “fat cats,” some New York Democrats see a political upside in standing up for Wall Street.
New York’s governor, Democrat David Paterson, and two prominent Democratic insurgents, are campaigning this year on a pledge to protect Wall Street from the peasants with pitchforks marching north from Washington, echoing the argument of Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-Independent New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg that New York’s jobs and tax revenue alike depend on the government leaving bankers’ bonuses alone.
The clarion call from Paterson, who’s feuded with the White House which has pushed him not to run for a full term as governor, wasn’t exactly heeded by most New York politicians. His predecessor, Elliot Spitzer, rode his reputation as the “Sheriff of Wall Street” straight to the governor’s mansion. Even Sen. Chuck Schumer, who raised millions from the finance industry for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and fought for a time to protect traders from a tax on carried interest, has largely supported consumer protections, new fees, and tighter regulations advanced by the White House in a climate of intense anger at bankers at large and at the large banks that benefited from government intervention in particular.
But at least two high-profile political hopefuls seem to see an unlikely opening in disdaining populism and standing up for the bankers when nobody else will. Paterson has been joined by former Tennessee Rep. Harold Ford Jr., who has taken a leave of absence from his post at Merrill Lynch to test the waters for a challenge to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, and by Reshma Saujani, a former hedge fund lawyer whose challenge to Rep. Carolyn Maloney is being taken seriously in part because she recently announced raising more $400, 000 – much of it from Wall Street executives – in just two months.
Ford casts his partial defense of the finance industry – he backs more transparency and stiffer regulations, but opposes President Obama’s proposed new tax on large banks – as a bread-and-butter issue for New Yorkers.
“The most compelling case study of how piling on a state's major industry can devastate a state's economy is Michigan. The collapse of property values, school enrollments and health services in Detroit is directly linked to the demise of the car industry,” Ford told POLITICO in an e-mail.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, he went a step further, pledging to “support no bill that does harm to New York's financial industry."“I don’t think we can afford to be populist right now – I think people want to be inspired not angered,” said Saujani, whose recent resume includes stints at the Fortress Investment Group, a giant hedge fund manager, and at a failed hedge fund run by the Carlyle Group.
“Our approach toward banks and the financial services industry should be that we’re all in this together,” she said.
Sarah Palin, Cillizza scoops, raised a Pawlenty-esque $1.4 million. It's enough to keep her a political player, and comes without much effort: Her PAC advertised widely online, with Drudge banners and the like, but doesn't seem to have done much else. And her personal activity was aimed largely at earning money for her family, not her PAC.
Meanwhile Newt, unhindered by hard-money regulations, raised $6.4 million.
Genius from the BBC.
Holden Caufield delivers the State of the Union.
Obama goes to the ballgame.
Anthony Weiner says the backing down on the trials makes New York look scared.
The military will hold a "special investigation" into Don't Ask, Don't Tell, postponing action.
Irwin Stelzer would prefer uncertainty to the status quo.
The sex tape is somewhere safe.
Tea Party Convention organizers push back.
And Jurgen Habermas arrives on Twitter.
My colleagues' smart take on yesterday's remarkable exchange:
President Obama, groping for a new strategy after the Massachusetts defeat, seemed to find the perfect foundation for one Friday: direct engagement with the GOP in front of a national TV audience.
In a lively Q-and-A with House Republicans at their annual retreat in Baltimore, Obama showcased the campaign skills that won him the Oval Office — he was cerebral, combative, cool and quick.
And he was also able to forcefully express his strongest political and policy argument: that Republicans have little authentic interest in compromise.
“I don’t believe the American people want us to focus on our job security. ... I don’t think they want more gridlock. I don’t think they want more partisanship,” he said. “They didn’t send us to Washington to fight each other in some sort of steel-cage match to see who comes out alive.”
Obama is getting the blame for much of what ails Washington these days, including the partisan feuding. What his advisers are trying to do — first with the State of the Union and more dramatically with Friday's event — is make clear that he wants to work with Republicans and that the minority party deserves blame, too.
By that measure, Friday’s event was a home run. It also showed Obama’s determination to ditch a Rose Garden strategy that pinned him down, month after month, in fruitless White House wrangling over heath care.
Expect more of Friday’s Obama, his aides say, with the president out on the road, liberated from messy legislative process, taking scores of questions from friends and foes.
Expect monthly meetings with Republican leaders.
Expect a campaign.
He saved the voicemails for TV, and they illustrate one of the strangest features of the Edwards cover-up: The fact that Elizabeth Edwards seemed not to realize that he was just the fall guy:
In a voice mail to Young on Dec. 14, 2007 at 8:19, the day after Young said he agreed to claim paternity of Hunter's child, Edwards warned his aide that Elizabeth may be listening in on their next call: "I am going to leave this message just in case you get a call from me where I ask you what's going on. The reason we are calling is because Elizabeth is standing there. So, just be aware of that. If I am calling saying what happened, how did this happen, or what's going on, then that's because Elizabeth is standing there with me."
If they're going to cut ads like this.
Bill Burton officially names it "question time."
Luntz liked it.
Dems powwow with Snowe.
Gillibrand ratchets up her rebuttals.
8th graders could read Obama's SOTU, but not Bush's.
Republicans worry that Steele may cost them in November.
NRCC fundraising still lags DCCC's.
David Brooks sees the specter of a sane Perot, urges Obama to reclaim the role.
Dick Morris says Obama can't do Clinton-Morris triangulation.
NOW tackles Palin over Tebow ad.
Palin points at Obama's finger-pointing.
PPP finds Alaska ambivalent towards her.
White House infights on Sudan.
Rielle Hunter obtains court order for "personal" Edwards tape.
Edwards' lawyers contest Andrew Young's book.
Salinger's neighbors helped keep him hidden.
Tennessee state senators pen anti-Nelson legislation.
The Onion sponsors H.R. 517, "The First Lady Impunity Act."
And in Tokyo, an Obama effigy peddles pork buns.
(With Gabe Beltrone)
President Obama, in his extended rebuke of House Republicans, repeatedly suggested that their proposals were broad language doesn't measure up to the test of "independent experts" and suggested a gap between rhetoric and reality.
He didn't tie that criticism directly to the "Better Solutions" document that Rep. John Boehner and his colleagues handed him, but a Democrat points out that he could have.
In particular, only five of the 13 items in the document actually translated into bills, including the House Republican health care alternative whose effectiveness the Congressional Budget Office disputed and a bill to block the closure of Guantanamo Bay, legislation, but not exactly a solution.
The other "solutions" are also a bit less than that. They include, for instance, items like a December 9 letter to Obama that focused on broad calls like, “eliminate job killing federal tax increases," but which doesn't have corresponding legislation.
Of course, criticism is the prerogative of the minority, and it's not like detailed legislation would have been any more likely to be passed. But the Republicans are still making their way toward a positive platform after an early — and, it seems, astute — decision to adopt uniform, staunch opposition to virtually all White House plans.
A Twitter classic from North Carolina Republican Congresswoman Virginia Foxx:
Pres gave us another lecture. Our guys asked great questions. Need independent fact checker for his comments. Got autograph
Human Rights First goes after Liz Cheney's new group, Keep America Safe, with this new video on the theme, "Keep America Afraid."
A rich and weird Lloyd Grove story on the nonagenarian heiress who was John Edwards' last benefactor says she's "energized and amused" by the scandal surrounding him, and offers this detail on the financial backchannel that began by a chance acquaintance between a friend of hers and Andrew Young:
In 2007 and 2008, at the height of his crusade against the “Two Americas,” Mrs. Mellon secretly gave Edwards a total of $700,000 for his personal use—paying required gift taxes of up to 45 percent—at the behest of Young, who was acting as Edwards’ bag man. Young told her that the senator had an urgent “personal need,” according to a knowledgeable source. Bunny Mellon’s friends say Young didn’t reveal that the so-called “need” apparently was Edwards’ sex partner, New Age videographer Rielle Hunter, the mother of his love child—and they claim Mrs. Mellon was shocked, shocked, when she finally learned the truth.
According to two sources close to Mrs. Mellon, her suspicions weren’t even aroused by the unusual method of payment: She was advised to write bank checks for “furniture,” made out to Bryan Huffman's Monroe, North Carolina-based interior design business. Huffman in turn endorsed them over to Young, who then got the money to Edwards.
“She loves intrigue,” says a Mellon confidante. But she came to despise Young, who persisted in shaking her down, even after she told him the well was dry because she was having “liquidity issues.” According to the confidante, Young cheekily suggested that she take out a mortgage or perhaps sell some of her priceless paintings, to meet the "need." It was at this point that Bunny Mellon had enough. She phoned Edwards bitterly to complain.
"She's very angry at Andrew Young because of his aggressive solicitations of funds," says a confidante, "but she remains friends with John Edwards."
UPDATE: Title improved with pun, thanks to a reader.
In linking Cindy Adams's conversation with Harold Ford earlier, I neglected this bit:
Campaigning for office is a form of birth control, so how's he figure he'll have time for the new wife?
"Ohh, listen, I'll find time for that. Always have, always will."
Pat Caddell, who became prominent as Jimmy Carter's boy-wonder pollster, has signed on to work for Andrew Romanoff's campaign for Senate from Colorado.
Caddell was among the first high-profile modern political gurus, but hasn't been active in Democratic politics in some two decades, backing Ralph Nader in 2000 and serving more recently as a Fox News contributor.
"I’ve long been retired from consulting," Caddell says in a statement from the campaign, "but our country and the Democratic Party so desperately need a change in direction and new leaders that I am honored to help Andrew Romanoff as he takes a principled stand for people against the entrenched interests and cesspool of Washington."
This should be quite a show. The other consultants include the ever-entertaining Joe Trippi and Celinda Lake, who has been battling national Democrats in the aftermath of her work for Martha Coakley.
Gawker's John Cook FOIAed the late Rep. Henry Hyde's FBI file, and finds that the Illinois congressman was the target of a major corruption investigation -- though he was never charged.
Still, the file contains details that don't look good, alleging that "Hyde offered to steer an Illinois Department of Public Aid contract to a mob-affiliated New York company called Computer Specifics Corporation in 1972 in exchange for a cash kickback amounting to 10% of the total contract."
The contract was never given, and the story never leaked, though the documents suggest the story may have torpedoed Hyde's bid at a cabinet post in the Reagan Administration.
A colleague notes that it's remarkable that this wasn't used against Hyde when he was leading the charge on impeachment, which has either to do with Clinton's restraint or, perhaps more likely, the FBI's discretion.
Mitt Romney's PAC just announced that he'd raised $2.9 million last year -- and also brags that he spent more than $120,000 helping Republican candidates.
That spending, as much as the raising, is a mark of how much farther along the organizational curve toward a presidential bid than are his likely rivals.
Full release after the jump.
» Continue reading Romney touts PAC spending
President Obama's appearance before House Republicans this afternoon offers him some wonderful optics, a chance to demonstrate his teleprompter-free chops, and a chance to lecture Republicans, at length, on their uncompromising rhetoric.
Obama made the case, in particular, that his health care proposal is a fairly moderate one, similar to a proposal from Bob Dole, Howard Baker, and Tom Daschle.
"You may not agree with Bob Dole and Howard Baker -- but that's not a radical bunch," he said. "If you were to listen to the debate and frankly how some of you went after this bill you’d think that this thing was some Bolshevik plot. That’s how you guys presented it."
"If the way these issues are being presentd by the Republicans is that this is some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in our lives... then you guys don't have a lot of room to negotiate with me," he said.
"All I’m saying is we’ve got to close the gap a bit between the rhetoric and the reality," he said. "You've given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion, because what you've been telling your constitunents is this guy has been doing all kinds of crazy stuff that will destroy America."
Obama conceded that the demonization is "not just on your side," but his target was clear.
The American Future Fund has some fun with Ben Nelson and underscores the extent to which the legislative horse-trading truly undermined health care legislation.
