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:<\/p>\n
* Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco (D) announced yesterday that she will not seek<\/a> a second term this fall. The decision upends Louisiana’s political landscape and renews speculation that former Sen. John Breaux (D) will come out of retirement and run to succeed Blanco.<\/p>\n * In a huge surprise that will benefit Dems, former Rep. Scott McInnis (R) has changed his mind and will not run<\/a> for Colorado’s open U.S. Senate seat next year. McInnis was the only Republican in the race, leaving the GOP without a top-tier challenger to take on Rep. Mark Udall (D), who is expected to cruise to the Democratic nomination. It’s considered a key Dem pick-up opportunity, with incumbent Sen. Wayne Allard (R) retiring.<\/p>\n * Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), currently running a Quixotic presidential campaign, announced yesterday that he will not seek<\/a> re-election to the House, but will instead encourage his 30-year-old son, Duncan Jr., to replace him. The Hill reports that the son, an Iraq war veteran, expects to kick off his congressional campaign in April.<\/p>\n * Dems have long considered Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.) a vulnerable GOP incumbent, but given her role (and alleged ethics violations) in the prosecutor purge scandal, the DCCC is turning up the heat<\/a>. Specifically, the DCCC is poised to launch the first ad of the 2008 campaign cycle, questioning Wilson’s integrity. “A phone call is made … a scandal begins,” the ad’s narrator says. “Serious questions remain about Heather Wilson and violation of congressional ethics rules. It’s time for Heather Wilson to release her phone records and come clean,” the narrator says in the ad.<\/p>\n * And California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) is apparently in a public spat with Rush Limbaugh, who recently questioned Schwarzenegger’s principles and leadership abilities. Asked about the comments on The Today Show, the governor said, “Limbaugh is irrelevant<\/a>…. I’m not his servant. I am the people’s servant of California.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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: * Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco (D) announced yesterday that she will not seek a second term this fall. The decision upends Louisiana’s political landscape and renews speculation that former Sen. John Breaux (D) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10271\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}