“Republicans say Jack Lew will have to answer for what they view as the president’s bare-knuckle tactics when Lew undergoes the Senate confirmation process for Treasury secretary,” The Hill reports.
“It is not often that members of the minority party get to grill the chief of staff of a sitting president and there is little love lost between Senate Republicans and President Obama.”
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), “who spent his first two years in office establishing himself as a fiscal conservative, turned left in his third annual address to the Legislature, and sought to reclaim the state’s progressive mantle,” the New York Times reports.
Cuomo “had two emotional fulcrums in his sprawling 78-minute address: gun violence and Hurricane Sandy. But most of the speech was devoted to an onslaught of proposals favored by the left wing of his party.”
National Journal: “Cuomo’s aggressive advocacy for some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation is already heightening speculation that he’s seriously thinking about a presidential campaign in 2016.”
The reshuffling of President Obama’s Cabinet gained speed when Labor Secretary Hilda Solis announced her resignation, the Washington Post reports.
But the White House said three others, including Attorney General Eric Holder, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki would remain in their posts.
The Week: Why is Holder staying on?
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New York Times: “President Hugo Chávez’s supporters have not ruled out swearing him in from his hospital in Havana. His detractors are calling for government investigators to go check his pulse themselves. The justices whom Mr. Chávez’s allies have named to the Supreme Court have decided that he can continue to govern in absentia.”
“In a country that Mr. Chávez has dominated for so long, his health crisis and the decision to proceed on Thursday with a quasi-presidential inauguration that he is unable to attend are producing a stream of bizarre developments and national angst about who is in charge.”
“The president is going to act. There are executives orders, there’s executive action that can be taken. We haven’t decided what that is yet.”
— Vice President Biden, quoted by CNN, in comments before a meeting with victims of gun violence.
ProPublica reports a small “dark money” group called Montana Hunters and Anglers, launched by liberal activists, bought radio and television ads in Montana’s U.S. Senate race — not supporting incumbent Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) but instead backing libertarian Dan Cox, describing him as the “real conservative” or the “true conservative.”
“Where did the group’s money come from? Nobody knows.”
A new Public Policy Polling survey shows New Jersey Gov. Chris Chrisitie (R) is now actually more popular with Democrats nationally than he is with Republicans.
Christie’s overall favorability is 51% to 23%, but his +29 standing with Democrats, 52% to 23%, is higher than his +21 with GOP voters, 48% to 27%. He’s most popular with independent voters at +34 at 52% to 18%.
The Cloakroom: Chris Christie fills the GOP void.
GOP pollster Bill McInturff:
“Republicans captured 49.4% of the two-party vote for Congress in 2012, yet won 54% of the seats in the House. This gap between the Republican vote and the seats they won is on the high side, but certainly not without precedent over the past 40 years. If you began your career as a Republican trying to win the House in the 1970s and 1980s, you would adopt, as I do, the borrowed adage ‘there’s no crying in redistricting.'”
Obama’s worst day: “Honey, have you seen my trillion dollar coin? I can’t find it.” “Check the laundry, I think I heard something.”
— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) January 9, 2013
A Biloxi Sun Herald editorial takes their local congressman to task for voting against disaster relief for people affected by Hurricane Sandy noting that, “Seldom has a single vote in Congress appeared as cold-blooded and hard-headed as one cast by Rep. Steven Palazzo (R-MS) last week.”
Palazzo quickly reversed himself in a statement saying, “I am fully committed to providing the relief they so desperately need.”
President Obama will nominate White House chief of staff Jack Lew for Treasury secretary as soon as Thursday, Politico reports.
“In doing so, Obama is throwing Lew straight into the middle of an increasingly nasty budget war, the likes of which Washington hasn’t seen since the mid-1990s.”
“Lew should be prepared for this type of fiscal and political environment, though — he helped President Bill Clinton strike the 1997 balanced budget accord as a top official at the Office of Management and Budget, the agency he has since run for both presidents. And Lew played an important role in the contentious 2011 debt ceiling debate.”
The downside, according to Kevin Roose: Lew’s terrible signature would be on our money.
The Week: The right choice?
National Journal says Sen. Al Franken’s (D-MN) “uncontroversial first term” raises doubts “about whether Republicans can even recruit a first-tier candidate against the former Saturday Night Live funnyman.”
Said former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN), who lost to Franken in 2008: “He’s been pretty much invisible. In that sense he hasn’t created a lot of enemies. I don’t know if that’s his strategy, but it’s a pretty good strategy if it is.”
The Cloakroom: Sometimes it’s alright just to tell them to “shut up.”
Mother Jones reports that a month after President Obama won reelection, “top brass from three dozen of the most powerful groups in liberal politics met at the headquarters of the National Education Association, a few blocks north of the White House.”
“At the end of the day, many of the attendees closed with a pledge of money and staff resources to build a national, coordinated campaign around three goals: getting big money out of politics, expanding the voting rolls while fighting voter ID laws, and rewriting Senate rules to curb the use of the filibuster to block legislation. The groups in attendance pledged a total of millions of dollars and dozens of organizers to form a united front on these issues–potentially, a coalition of a kind rarely seen in liberal politics, where squabbling is common and a stay-in-your-lane attitude often prevails.”
Steve Kornacki: “Barney Frank is breaking the rule of politics that says if you want a major appointment, you should never, ever talk about it publicly.”
“After all, there are a few reasons why it’s customary for appointment-seekers to keep quiet. One has to do with image-protection. How will you look if publicly campaign for a position only to be snubbed for it? If you never admit to being interested, at least you can always claim you never really wanted the job. This is apparently of no great concern to Frank, though.”
“The other obvious reason for staying quiet is strategic: Most people making decisions on appointments probably don’t appreciate a public pressure campaign. This is the risk to what Frank is doing. Because he has a national reputation, he’s created a real stir with his lobbying.”
“Actually, I don’t know what the hell the larger message is, come to think of it.”
— Former Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-NE), quoted by Politico, on the significance of Chuck Hagel’s nomination to be secretary of defense.
New York Times: “About 43 percent of Mr. Obama’s appointees have been women, about the same proportion as in the Clinton administration, but up from the roughly one-third appointed by George W. Bush… But Mr. Obama’s recent nominations raised concern that women were being underrepresented at the highest level of government and would be passed over for top positions.”
USA Today: Obama sticks to friends for top posts.
Out in April: This Town by Mark Leibovich.
The book is described as “a blistering, penetrating, controversial — and often hysterical — look at Washington’s incestuous ‘media industrial complex.'”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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