“The question is: do you have another white-bread sandwich and, you know, is it just going to be boring to voters out there? I think that that’s the question with Portman.”
— Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (R), in a Fox News interview, on why Mitt Romney might not want to pick Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) as his running mate.
David Grann has a must-read piece on William Alexander Morgan, a Midwesterner who helped Fidel Castro rise to power in Cuba.
“In 1957, when Castro was still widely seen as fighting for democracy, Morgan had traveled from Florida to Cuba and headed into the jungle, joining a guerrilla force. In the words of one observer, Morgan was ‘like Holden Caulfield with a machine gun.’ He was the only American in the rebel army and the sole foreigner, other than Guevara, an Argentine, to rise to the army’s highest rank, comandante.”
“After the revolution, Morgan’s role in Cuba aroused even greater fascination, as the island became enmeshed in the larger battle of the Cold War. An American who knew Morgan said that he had served as Castro’s ‘chief cloak-and-dagger man,’ and Time called him Castro’s ‘crafty, U.S.-born double agent.'”
Later, Morgan “was charged with conspiring to overthrow Castro. The Cuban government claimed that Morgan had actually been working for U.S. intelligence — that he was, in effect, a triple agent. Morgan denied the allegations, but even some of his friends wondered who he really was, and why he had come to Cuba.”
Despite headlines showing President Obama’s re-election campaign beating Mitt Romney in the race for campaign dollars, Ken Vogel points out that super PACs, committees and Romney’s campaign have actually outraised the president and his backers $402 million to $340 million.
Politico reports that Democrats and Republicans are increasingly worried about the role Super PACs will play in this year’s presidential election.
“The risk from rogue third-party groups is a potential menace to both Republicans and Democrats. The GOP has seen more super PACs and 501(c)(4) groups form to support its candidates, but there’s nothing to stop an individual liberal gazillionaire from commissioning ads on a subject the Obama campaign doesn’t want to talk about — say, Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith.. Paul Begala, the veteran Democratic operative working with Priorities USA, said the simple reality is ‘candidates and campaigns are no longer masters of their own fate — even their own messaging, on their own side of the fight.'”
McKay Coppins: “If you’ve spent much time consuming conservative media lately, you’ve probably learned about a slow-burning ‘race war’ going on in America today. Sewing together disparate data points and compelling anecdotes like the attack in Norfolk, conservative bloggers and opinion-makers are driving the narrative with increasing frequency. Their message: Black-on-white violence is spiking — and the mainstream media is trying to cover it up.”
Despite criticisms from those in his own party, First Read says President Obama’s campaign isn’t backing down over attacking Mitt Romney’s years at Bain Capital.
“If Romney is going to make his Bain record the central rationale of his candidacy — more so than his four years as Massachusetts governor — and if he’s going to take credit for job gains created under Bain, then it’s only fair to point out examples when Bain-controlled companies took on huge debt, slashed worker pay and benefits, laid off employees and filed for bankruptcy, all while Bain investors made money, they argue.”
“Think of it this way, they say: If a presidential candidate says that the education reforms he enacted as a governor are the centerpiece of his presidential bid, then it would be only fair to examine those reforms. Did they work? How well? Can that experience work at the federal level?”
The campaign released a new video stepping up those attacks.
President Obama’s re-election campaign “is spending about half of what it raises to support a large political infrastructure that includes hundreds of workers and dozens of offices around the country,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“For now, it gives him at least one leg up on Mitt Romney, his presumptive Republican opponent, who still has far less money to spend despite making recent fundraising gains, according to federal filings released Sunday.”
An Associated Press review of campaign finance data found that “only a few hundred donors who contributed to candidates like Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum have changed course and gave to Romney’s campaign or the Republican Party in April. That’s as GOP stalwarts and some former rivals have called on supporters to rally around Romney’s White House run.”
“Out of more than 50,000 donors who gave to
other GOP candidates like Gingrich, Santorum and Texas Gov. Rick Perry
since the start of the nomination race, fewer than 600 appeared to write
checks to Romney in April.”
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said Mitt Romney “might be able to convince” him to serve as his running mate, CNN reports.
Said Christie: “He might be able to convince me. He’s a convincing guy, but I really love this job. I really want to stay in this job.”
He added: “I really have no interest in being vice president, but if Governor Romney calls and asks me to sit down and talk to him about it, I’d listen because I think you owe the nominee of your party that level of respect and who knows what he’s going to say. We’ll wait and see.”
“The long, grueling GOP primary race is over. Now comes a summertime lull the candidates could find just as difficult — not because the schedule is crowded but because it isn’t,” the AP reports.
“It is four months until the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., in late August. Democrats hold their convention a week later in Charlotte, N.C. That’s a long time to fill, with no votes that matter, no debates to draw national attention. Voters tend to hibernate politically from the end of the primary season to the start of the conventions.”
That lull “should be a bigger problem” for Mitt Romney than for President Obama. “A challenger must keep stirring up enthusiasm if he hopes to oust an incumbent president.”
The Office of Congressional Ethics has voted unanimously to clear Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL) on allegations of insider trading, the Birmingham News reports.
The 6-0 vote by the independent agency means the case does not move forward to the House Ethics Committee.
Steve Kornacki: “The high-profile help that he’s lending Barack Obama — starring in a campaign video about Osama bin Laden’s killing, headlining a fund-raiser in Virginia last night, plotting campaign strategy with top Obama lieutenants — speaks to Bill Clinton’s unique status among former presidents: Not since Theodore Roosevelt a century ago has one managed to remain such a political force after leaving office.”
“Clinton is more popular than ever right now, notching a 67-29 percent favorable in one recent poll,
which helps explain why Obama is eager to enlist him in what should be a
tight general election campaign. There really is no modern precedent
for a former president being so actively engaged in a national election
so long after leaving the White House.”
Cheri Young, the wife of an ex-aide to John Edwards, testified that the former presidential candidate “asked the couple to hide an affair he was having and justified using wealthy donors’ money to do it,” the AP reports.
On a phone call, Edwards “emphasized the need to preserve his campaign and keep the affair from his wife, Elizabeth” and made the plan sound “as if it was for the good of the country.”
The New York Times reviews Passage to Power and notes it showcases Robert Caro’s “masterly gifts as a writer: his propulsive sense of narrative, his talent for enabling readers to see and feel history in the making and his ability to situate his subjects’ actions within the context of their times.”
“Caro’s descriptions of Johnson — and those of John and Robert Kennedy — have a novelistic depth and amplitude. He gives us a rich sense here of how past experiences shaped their interactions, how one encounter or misunderstanding often snowballed into another, and how Johnson and Robert Kennedy evinced a capacity to grow and change. Even more impressive in these pages is Mr. Caro’s ability to convey, on a visceral level, how daunting the challenges were facing Johnson upon his assumption of the presidency and the magnitude of his accomplishments in the months after Kennedy’s assassination.”
A video shows Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) received a less-than-hospitable reception at the Alaska Republican Party Convention as she tried to introduce Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY).
Alaska Dispatch: “Murkowski has faced some tough crowds in the past, particularly in 2010 when she was running for re-election against Joe Miller in the midst of a tea party uprising. But all of that was supposedly behind her. Her win in an historic write-in campaign against Miller seemed to take the wind out of the tea party movement in Alaska. For various reasons, like Alaska’s weird economy and geography, the tea party wasn’t gaining as much ground as in other states. That all seemed to change as Murkowski stood before her fellow Republicans at the Hilton in downtown Anchorage on Friday.”
“Of course, even Jimmy Carter would have given that order.”
— Mitt Romney, quoted by Politico, on whether he would have given the order to go after Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.
The New York Times profiles Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) noting he has become “perhaps the most influential policy maker in the Republican Party, its de facto head of economic policy, intent on a fundamental transformation of the federal government.”
“His prescriptions in the Republican budget plan he devised have become his party’s marching orders: cut income tax rates and simplify the code, privatize Medicare, shrink the food-stamp and Medicaid programs and turn almost all control over to the states, and reduce domestic federal spending to its smallest share of the economy since World War II.”
Jonathan Chait: “And so here we find a political dilemma for the Democrats. They have decided to make Ryan’s agenda the central issue of the election. There are strong reasons for doing so, namely that most of the policies Ryan champions are disliked by a majority of Americans. But elevating Ryan to right-wing bogeyman — a remake of nineties-era Speaker Gingrich, the man who might personify Republican overreach — has proved difficult.”
First Read: “Don’t overlook the fact that the White House used the opportunity of the White House Correspondents Dinner — when they knew they’d get lighter coverage for what they did – put a story that they’ve struggled to put into the mainstream, quietly trying to do for months, the Seamus story. It was frankly a way to get Seamus out there. Yes, Obama made fun of himself and eating dog, but they’ll take that to get the Seamus story mainlined; They’ve been trying for months.”
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.
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