Wednesday’s political round-up

November 9, 2005

Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn’t generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers:

* Now that Republican officials have come up dry looking for Senate candidates they can support in Florida, they’re prepared to re-embrace Rep. Katherine Harris. Harris acknowledged yesterday that she’s had some difficulties securing support for her flailing campaign, but said she’s “turned a corner” with Jeb Bush and the White House. The St. Petersburg Times reported that Jeb met with Harris in Tallahassee recently and said he has stopped recruiting alternate candidates.

* In New York City, Michael Bloomberg had a big night, winning the city’s mayoral race by 20 points, but his coattails were short. Despite Bloomberg’s work for Republican candidates in several city council districts, including endorsements and campaign appearances, all of Bloomberg’s GOP candidates lost.

* Cincinnati voters, for the first time, elected an African-American mayor yesterday, just four years after riots nearly tore the city apart. State Sen. Mark Mallory defeated Councilman David Pepper, both Democrats, in a nonpartisan mayoral runoff Tuesday to lead Ohio’s third-largest city.

* After trailing badly as recently as late-September, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick (D) staged an amazing comeback and defeated rival Freman Hendrix, 53% to 47%. The Detroit Free Press reported that Kilpatrick used his tremendous personal appeal and a series of impressive public appearances in the wake of civil rights legend Rosa Parks’ death Oct. 24 to apparently overcome what had been a 19-point deficit in late September.

* Iowa’s 2006 gubernatorial race began in earnest this week when Rep. Jim Nussle (R) aired the campaign’s first TV commercial, a full year before the election. A commercial touting Nussle’s congressional record began running in the TV markets of western Iowa — the home turf of party rival Bob Vander Plaats, a Sioux City businessman.

* And my favorite campaign-related quote of the day comes by way of the LA Times. After all of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ballot measures were rejected by voters, a Republican strategist and occasional Schwarzenegger advisor said, “The act is getting stale.”

Wow, tumble weeds blowing through the comments section. I guess the cons are sucking sour grapes today, and are too busy to take their medicine (predictably). Here’s the message from yesterday’s elections: enough. Enough dead soldiers, enough no-bid, cost plus contracts for shoddy goods and lousy service, enough questioning others patriotism, enough stonewalling investigations into the misuse of intelligence (both literally and figuratively), enough leaking covert CIA names to the press for political retribution, in short, enough GOP. I look for the cons to bang the war drums loudly just before the mid-terms; hey, it worked once didn’t it?

  • I wouldn’t read too much into the Bloomberg mayoral victory–rout, actually. New York City politics are atypical of the country at large. Bloomberg is only a converted, expedient Republican because of NYC’s weird and offputting Dem balkanization. People here like him because he is competent, honest, inclusive and surprisingly down to earth for a gazillionaire. We forgive his occasional bad, bad ideas–like wanting to build a football stadium in Manhattan. His opponent was a real divider, waffler and loser who managed to tick off even his expected ethnic constituency–a weak choice also, unfortunately, typical of a city full of hack Dem mayoral hopefuls. The rest of the Repug defeats were indicative of the fact that this city is gratifyingly blue, blue, blue.

  • I think the biggest political news of the day is the Kaine victory in purple-tinted Virginia–and how Bush probably helped drag Kilgore, the Repug candidate, down a couple of points. It’s also interesting that Kilgore actually said when Bush campaigned for him right before the election, that Bush was popular with Virginians and had just come back from a very successful trip to Latin America. Uh, say what? Guess Virginians are joining the reality-based community. That’s reason for hope. Second biggest poliical news is that Ohio apparently and, inexplicably, doesn’t want to fix their screwed up electoral process.

  • Just a note on the Cincinnati mayor… Mark Mallory won’t be the first African-American mayor to serve in Cincinnati, just the first one to be directly elected. For many years, the city elected the City Council and the council chose the mayor, so there have been relatively few directly-elected mayors at all… at least in my lifetime. I believe the system changed in the late 90s. Ken Blackwell and Dwight Tillery were both mayor under the old council-selected system.

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