Friday’s political round-up

January 26, 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:

* Barack Obama’s presidential campaign got some good news yesterday when some of John Kerry’s top fundraisiers announced they would begin supporting the Illinois Senator. As the NYT noted, “So far, at least, the list includes: Bob Farmer, who was Mr. Kerry’s chief fundraiser; Mark Gorenberg, Mr. Kerry’s top money man in California; and Alan Solomont, a major fundraiser in New England for Mr. Kerry and a former national finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Orin Kramer, a prominent New York Democratic fundraiser, has also signed on with Mr. Obama.”

* The Rev. Al Sharpton was on Capitol Hill yesterday doing some “comparison shopping,” meeting with senators running for president. Sharpton met with Obama, Clinton, Dodd, and Biden, with upcoming meetings planned for Edwards and Richardson. Asked who he favored among the Democratic candidates, he said, “We’re talking.”

* Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), who started talking about a possible presidential campaign over a year ago, acknowledged yesterday that he’s still considering the 2008 race, despite the fact that his criticism of Bush, Cheney, and the war in Iraq has cost him some GOP support. “Hagel joked during the interview about teaming up with New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a moderate Republican, and also floated the possibility of joining a bipartisan unity ticket with a Democrat — with his name first, of course. Hagel clearly admires Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and calls him ‘a star,’ but he doubts the two could ever team up given the vast difference in their parties’ principles. ‘I don’t know if it gets to that point, but there is a shift going on out there, and there’s nothing like a war that does that,’ Hagel said.”

* Former Rep. Harold Ford Jr. (D-Tenn), who lost a competitive Senate race in November, said he has no plans to run for the Senate again in 2008 against Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander. “My plan is right away to try to do a good job with the DLC,” Ford told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “I’m proud to say that I’m associated with Vanderbilt University; I’m now a professor of public policy.”

* And in a sign of what we can expect from likely presidential candidate Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), the xenophobic representative announced yesterday that he’d like to abolish the Congressional Black Caucus and other race-based groups of lawmakers, calling them “divisive.”

While I understand why groups such as the Black Caucus were formed, and are quite possibly needed, they do represent something of a dilemma. From the article cited:

However, the group would not have permitted Cohen to join, its new chairwoman told The Associated Press. Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, D-Mich., said the caucus decided early on that official membership would be restricted to blacks.

On one hand, admitting others would most likely alter any such a group’s focus and diminish its effectiveness. On the other, prohibiting others is unquestionably denying membership based on race.

I’m not wise enough to propose a better means to accomplish the goals of the Black Caucus, any more than I have an better alternative to race-based affirmative action. But the existence of such groups does not necessarily make them divisive, as Tancredo claims. And it is telling that a likely presidential candidate would single out as an issue like this at a time when the country is faced with so many real and critical issues.

  • Well, Tancredo obviously has ulterior rascist motives, but as a matter of principle there shouldn’t be governmental groups whose sole criteria for admittance is race. On a practical level it is understandable, but idealistically no.

  • Hagle and McCain still have the primaries to contend with. Both has problems with the party establishment and/or voters for one reason or another.

    Hagle has good credential except for his pesky opposition, and increasingly vocal resistance to the Iraq situation while McCain is more prone to being a loose cannon and is distrusted by the religious nutters.

  • Hagel as President on a “unity ticket”? Sorry, no. I admire and respect Senator Hagel as a man of priniciple, and he reminds me of the kind of Republicans I used to be able to work with to get progress 30 years ago, but I wouldn’t have voted for any of them back then because we had fundamental disagreements on too many important points (though back then compromise was not surrender). With Senator Hagel, I also have fundamental disagreement on pretty much everything else than his opposition to the war. Don’t get me wrong, I’m more than happy to welcome anyone to the Stop Bush fight, and we need everyone we can get and opposition is the only criteria we need to use for membership, but past that, what we want to do is get back to the kind of “civilized” politics we could have 30 years ago. That doesn’t include sweeping everything under the rug in the name of “unity.”

  • If abolishing divisive groups in Tancredo’s goal, there is one hugely divise group in Washington that is tearing this nation apart. It’s the Republican Party. Tom should take the wrecking ball to that group if he is really serious about unifying this nation or the government.

  • Caucuses are hardly “governmental groups”. Let’s get our heads on straight.
    Comment by Carol

    What do you call groups officially sanctioned by the US Congress, that function under rules set by Congress and use personnel, supplies and services paid for by the taxpayer?

  • I always wonder if guys like Hagel who “disagree with us on everything but the war” are ideologically sincere in their retrograde positions, or just holding them out of party loyalty as much as anything else. Didn’t Zell Miller still vote with the Democrats a majority of the time until at least 2001 or so, when he totally flipped out?

    They’re probably deluded, but I was reading the Atlantic Monthly piece about “Unity ’08,” the effort by a bunch of old political operatives from the 1970s to bring together a bipartisan ticket of candidates who are too right for the Democrats and too left for the Republicans, but palatable to the great middle. Hagel’s opposition to the war (and, IIRC, the Hate Amendment) almost certainly renders him unkosher to the Zombie Army; on the Dem side, I don’t think someone like Jim Webb (not that he’s running) would be willing to do the requisite pandering to get nominated, and even a probably-acceptable candidate like Richardson or Wes Clark seems to me unlikely to break through in 2008 because of the lumbering behemoths sucking up all the attention and money.

    Assume that the front-loaded schedule decides the nominations by mid-February, and then there’s a nationwide, bipartisan case of buyer’s remorse–not at all an unlikely scenario, methinks. At that point, a ticket of Clark/Hagel, or Hagel/Webb, or Bloomberg/Hagel, or some other combination, could seem feasible–if just as an escape from the zero-sum partisan scat-throwing that’s dominated our politics for 20 years.

  • It is pretty easy to document that things always get worse when one party is in control of both the executive and legislative branch (Niskanen et.al), although it is impossible to convince partisans of that fact. I support the best candidates of either party consistent with maintaining a divided government. I supported Democrats for the House in the mid-terms, thinking the Republicans would keep the Senate. However, they did not, and now it will now be structurally virtually impossible for the Dems to lose congress in ’08 as a result. They would have to screw up in two years on a scale of how the Republicans screwed up over the last six. Unlikely. They just don’t have time to screw up on that scale. So to maintain a divided government in ’08 the Republicans must maintain the White House.

    Chuck Hagel is a conservative in the Goldwater tradition, almost – but not quite libertarian. In that regard, he is more conservative than McCain, Giuliani, Romney, and certainly more conservative than Bush. Republicans better hope that Chuck Hagel runs for president and gets some traction in the party. He has been on the right side of this war since 2002 and that makes him the only electable Republican in the field. It is going to be a tough road. The President has now put us on a path that insures that the War in Iraq will be the only issue that matters in 2008. The Republican right is now so out of step with the majority of Americans over the War in Iraq, that I cannot see how Republicans can nominate an electable candidate. It’ll be too bad if he can’t make it through the gauntlet of Republicans who have redefined being a Republican with the single litmus test being of blind support of the President’s policies on Iraq. You don’t have to be a fiscal conservative to get their support. You don’t have to be a social conservative to get their support. You just have to put on your blinders and march lockstep on a flawed war strategy. If Republicans like these carry the day, it will be the end of the Republican Party as a relevant political force for a generation.

    Chuck is prominently featured in my most recent YouTube effort “It’s the war, stupid.” and recent blog post of the same name.

  • OT: Dem Now! and major blogs which covered this story (in utter brief) GOT IT WRONG. The problems at Ciber AFFECTED THE 2006 ELECTION, with thousands of machines not legally certified, and the Fed testing agency hiding the problem rather than tell the affected SecStates.

    Time to catch up with the REAL scandal:

    “As also recently reported, the delay in the public disclosure of the problems at Ciber, conveniently allowed both the firm’s founder and its CEO the time needed to unload $1.7 million of company stock before the news would eventually be reported by the New York Times earlier this month.”

    http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4077#more-4077

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