Friday’s political round-up

August 17, 2007

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:

* The GOP congressional leadership realizes that if they’re going to have any kind of success in 2008, they’ll have to keep incumbent retirements to a minimum. Fourteen months out, the strategy isn’t working out well: Reps. Chip Pickering (R-Miss.), Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio), and Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) have all announced their retirements over the last 24 hours. The Politico added: “The retirements come at a time when the National Republican Congressional Committee is lagging well behind the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in cash on hand and can ill-afford too many retirements in competitive congressional districts.”

* Rudy Giuliani was asked yesterday by a conservative voter why the presidential candidate should expect loyalty from voters when he doesn’t get it from his children. “I love my family very, very much and will do anything for them. There are complexities in every family in America,” Giuliani said calmly and quietly. “The best thing I can say is kind of, ‘Leave my family alone, just like I’ll leave your family alone.'” The voter wasn’t entirely satisfied with the response. “If a person is running for president, I would assume their children would be behind them.” she said. “If they’re not, you’ve got to wonder.”

* The Illinois Straw poll at the Illinois State Fair, which practically no one was paying attention to, wrapped up last night. Mitt Romney won with 40% support, followed by Fred Thompson with 20%. Ron Paul was third with 19%, followed by Giuliani with 12%, and John McCain with 4%.

* CNN: “One of Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson’s top organizers in rural Nevada resigned Thursday after the campaign learned he had worked for a brothel and was wanted on a felony arrest warrant in California.” The AP brought the staffer’s record to the campaign’s attention yesterday, and Richardson’s aides promptly accepted the staffer’s resignation.

* And Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), a leading voice on federal immigration policy, reversed course yesterday and announced he would not retire next year. Gutierrez had said he would step down at the end of his eighth term, but with immigration reform legislation likely to come back, Gutierrez said he wants to stay on.

‘Leave my family alone, just like I’ll leave your family alone.’

So what’s the alternative? If we don’t “leave his family alone,” Rudy will bother our families, perhaps with a length of chain?

Creep.

The AP brought the staffer’s record to the campaign’s attention yesterday, and Richardson’s aides promptly accepted the staffer’s resignation.

I’m surprised I haven’t heard the rabid shrieks of triumph from the fRight. Maybe they’re afraid the guy will start naming old clients.

  • Sounds like Ron Paul effectively tied Thompson for second in the Illinois straw-poll. Good for him. Nobody will stop Romney though. He’s the Republican nominee.

  • I heard Ron Paul on AirAmerica yesterday, and his views on everything other than Iraq made me shudder in horror.

  • So how much did Romney spend to win THIS straw poll?

    And has Fred Thompson even started campaigning?

    And will Ron Paul go the distance or will he eventually just be this cycle’s Ross Perot?

    And just how pathetic a showing does John McCain have to get before he decides to drop out?

    The GOP primary this year is just plain weird.

  • I heard Ron Paul on AirAmerica yesterday, and his views on everything other than Iraq made me shudder in horror.

    Can you give an example Anne? I’ve been looking for a reason not to like Ron Paul and so far I haven’t found one. As of now, I still plan on voting for him in the Vermont Republican primary.

  • “Mitt Romney won with 40% support, followed by Fred Thompson with 20%. Ron Paul was third with 19%, followed by Giuliani with 12%, and John McCain with 4%.”

    Jeez, Giuliani and McCain both lost to Ron Paul ? They’re in deep doo-doo.

    It’s also astonishing that Thompson just barely edged RP out. I’m thinking that Thompson has missed his chance to be a viable candidate. People, especially Republicans, want decisive leadership, and a man who spends half-a-year thinking that he maybe wants to run for President if the competition isn’t too fierce doesn’t really come across as decisive.

  • Percentages mean nothing. Which are you more impressed with:

    this headline:
    Mitt Romney won 40% of the vote in Illinois.

    or this one?
    Mitt Romney won 373 votes in Illinois.

  • Haik wrote: “I’ve been looking for a reason not to like Ron Paul and so far I haven’t found one. As of now, I still plan on voting for him in the Vermont Republican primary.”

    Check out the Wikipedia entry on RP’s views. He has advocated for withdrawal from NATO and the UN (pissing off the rest of the world even more), he wants to replace income tax (abolishing the IRS in the process) with a national sales tax (which would hammer lower income workers), he wants to make abortion illegal, and wants to let states display religious texts and imagery.

    The one thing I give him, which the other candidates don’t have, is that he seems to actually be a principled conservative. He opposes both capital punishment and abortion as the taking of human life, unlike most R’s, and has been against the PATRIOT act and the Iraq war from the start.

    My impression is that he’s still nuts, but compared to the other candidates who are in a hurry to start the apocalypse, he seems relatively sane. He’s certainly the best choice for a vote in the primary, but I wouldn’t want him in the White House in a million years (as compared with a billion years for the other candidates).

  • With Fred Thompson getting in, what are the chances that the Republican will have a brokered convention?

  • And Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), a leading voice on federal immigration policy, reversed course yesterday and announced he would not retire next year.

    Good. He’s my congresscritter, and I think he (mostly) does a great job. (My district is about 50% Latino, so he’s serving a huge contingency as a voice on immigration.)

    Hastert: RIP, fathead.

  • “Leave my family alone” — Julie-Annie Corleone

    “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” — Harry Truman

    Also, you might give some thought to how your public behavior, combined with pompous sanctimony, affects your family. Oh, I forgot. You’re a Republican.

  • Haik – to be fair (why do we always have to do that?), I tuned in fairly near the end of the interview, and heard most of a discussion about abortion. He thinks women can make all kinds of choices, but abortion should not be one of them, because we are talking about ending the life of a baby. He made the point that we should not be able to end the life of a fetus when, if the fetus were to die as a result of a car accident in which the mother was involved, we could prosecute the driver of the other vehicle for murder. If it’s manslaughter in that instance, why is it not when that life is terminated by the mother? After all this talk about making decisions about what life is, he then retreated to what is always the last refuge of the Republican: let the states make the decision. He failed , in my mind, to explain how it is that in State A, it would not be allowed because all life is sacred, but in State B, it would be legal, because State B thinks it is the woman’s choice.

    There was also a discussion about the fact that in California, there are laws that make access to beaches completely public, so that if you own beachfront property, you cannot keep people from using the beach. It wasn’t so much this particular issue that got my attention, but what appeared to be Paul’s belief that the government should have nothing to say about who can and cannot own any property – he made the comment that private beaches were always cleaner than government-owned beaches. He more or less said that the government can never do as well what the private sector can do, that the less government is involved in people’s lives, the better. Well, except for things like abortion and gay marriage, where he thinks state government should be regulating.

    I guess what struck me is that it was the same old Republican song-and-dance: keep the government out of the regulation business and depend on the private sector, something that in my opinion has been an abysmal failure at protecting the consumer, and has been a windfall of profit for a small segment of society.

    I guess my thought would be that whatever sense his Iraq policy makes, I could not in good conscience sell out the rest of what I think is important just for that.

  • Debbie Pryce woke up one morning and realized that without Ken Blackwell she’d never have a chance in an honest election so she’s running for the exit with her tail between her legs.

    Good.

  • Anne wrote: “I guess what struck me is that it was the same old Republican song-and-dance: keep the government out of the regulation business and depend on the private sector, something that in my opinion has been an abysmal failure at protecting the consumer, and has been a windfall of profit for a small segment of society.”

    Well, you’ve convinced me, anyway, Anne. I was vaguely under the impression that Ron Paul had a little more coherent principle behind him, but your description convinces me that that’s only true in a relative sense. In other words, RP seems to have principles only because the rest of the R’s have none whatsoever.

    “he made the comment that private beaches were always cleaner than government-owned beaches.”

    Isn’t this sort of an apples-and-oranges comparison? Government (i.e. public) beaches typically have a much greater population than private beaches whose attendance is limited. I’m guessing the amount of trash present on a beach is pretty much directly proportional to the number of people who frequent it.

  • The importance of open seats cannot be overstated. In 1996, the first election after the Democrats lost the House, several Members, fearing that their party would not regain the majority chose not to seek reelection. Tom Bevill (AL), Sonny Montgomery (MS), Pat Williams (MT), Bill Brewster (OK) and Pete Geren (TX) retired, and Glen Browder (AL), Dick Durbin (IL), Tim Johnson (SD) and John Bryant (TX) sought higher office. When the Democrats did fail to regain control, Bill Richardson accepted an appointment with the Clinton Administration. Republicans swept all of these open seats. Two years later, they won five more open seats, those vacated by Vic Fazio (CA), Jane Harman (CA), Scotty Baesler (KY), Bill Hefner (NC), and Paul McHale (PA).

    Had these Democrats stuck around, the party probably would have regained control of the House in 1998. The House votes to impeach Clinton were taken by a lame-duck Congress. If Democrats had won in 1998, would those votes have occurred?

  • gg – apparently in California, there was a big brouhaha a few years back because, while those who own property that fronts on the ocean do not “own” the beach, they were restricting access to it over their private property. The courts ruled in favor of the public – am pretty sure that communities had to provide x-number of designated access areas, but someone from California would know better.

    In the broader sense, though, Paul was advocating against the government owning and protecting the land – why shouldn’t it all be able to be bought and sold and developed as people wished – the old “let the market forces” determine this.

    I’m not saying he doesn’t have principles, just that I don’t subscribe to the ones he espouses. I just don’t get how someone can oppose a woman’s right to reproductive freedom on the one hand, and be saying that the government has no interest in mandating vaccination against diseases like polio and chicken pox and what-not on the other.

    And if you believe that abortion is wrong, you cannot take the position that it should be up to the states to decide – it’s either wrong or it’s not, and if you believe that strongly, why not work to make it the law of the land? He wants choice – but he wants it to be the states’ choice, not the individual’s. Does that make sense to you? It doesn’t to me.

  • Anne wrote: “I’m not saying he doesn’t have principles, just that I don’t subscribe to the ones he espouses.”

    I know that’s not what you were saying, but that’s what I took away from your observations anyway! In particular, as you point out he doesn’t seem to have a particularly principled stance on abortion. It seems like a rather arbitrary line he’s drawn: the individual is not allowed to make decisions on abortions, and the federal government is not allowed to make such distinctions – only governments at the state level can make that choice. Why the state level? Why not the county level, or the city level? What’s so special about the state as a decider of right and wrong? I’m guessing he doesn’t have an answer: “state’s rights” is just a Republican phrase that’s used because it sounds good to the base.

    “apparently in California, there was a big brouhaha a few years back because, while those who own property that fronts on the ocean do not “own” the beach, they were restricting access to it over their private property.”

    This specific case is a perfect example of what I was trying to say above. Of course, if you restrict access to a beach, it will be cleaner than one in which anyone is allowed to visit: more visitors = more trash, in pretty much any situation. Extrapolating from this to saying that somehow the government’s poor management is at fault is fundamentally dishonest. It’s the same argument as conservatives saying that private schools do better than public schools: there isn’t a comparison, because the private schools have the ability to screen out low performers (in spite of which, they evidently don’t do much better). It’s also the same argument people could make about the ‘quality’ of healthcare under government-run medicaid vs. private insurance. The conservative would say that the fact that there are more sick people in medicaid ‘proves’ that it is an inferior program, while the sensible person would point out that private insurers just don’t take care of really sick and poor people.

    From what I’ve seen of your posts, I’m pretty sure you knew all this already; I just felt like venting a bit! 🙂

  • “I love my family very, very much and will do anything for them. There are complexities in every family in America,” Giuliani said calmly and quietly. “The best thing I can say is kind of, ‘Leave my family alone, just like I’ll leave your family alone.’”

    “And if you don’t,” he continued, “You’ll find your beloved pet ferret’s head in the bed next to you one day.”

  • gg – venting is good!

    What you’ve written above is exactly how I felt after listening to Ron Paul, and because we’ve heard these same things from Republicans for years, I don’t see him as being all that different than any other Republican running for president. His Iraq views are different, but so what? Whatever he might be able to do with regard to that mess does not outweigh his – or any other Republican candidate’s – ability to continue to dismantle the parts of the government that actually work pretty well.

    It’s time we asked people like Ron Paul why they do not advocate the total elimination of government, at all levels. If, as they espouse, people do better when they decide how to spend their own money, where to send their kids to school and how to educate them, and if businesses and the economy thrive when the government stops trying to regulate them, if free markets will flourish without artificial government control and intervention – why have it at all?

    They keep taking money out of programs that work, and when those programs do not continue to succeed, they blame the fact that it is the failure of government, and is proof that it is the programs themselves that do not work, rather than being the result of having insufficient funding to run them. It would be like saying that when your car won’t start, it’s because the car is no good, and has nothing to do with your having failed to put any gas in it.

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