Bill Clinton told the Denver Post that he’s “behind Hillary Clinton if she wants to run for president — but he reiterated that his wife is nowhere near making that decision.”
Said Clinton: “Like I said, I’m a bit player and whatever she wants to do is fine with me.”
“Although Islam has a religious component, it is much more than a simple religious ideology. It is a complete geo-political structure and, as such, does not deserve First Amendment protection.”
— Georgia congressional candidate Jody Hice (R), quoted by the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
“Tuesday brings the end to the early primary season, and with it the last, best chance for Republican insurgents to win a seat in the Senate,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
Voters head to the polls today in Mississippi, Oklahoma, New York, Colorado and Maryland.
Roll Call: 6 things to watch in tonight’s primaries
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“With young immigrants slipping into the U.S. under the mistaken impression they will be allowed to stay, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) warned Monday of a deadly ‘trail of tears’ in the unforgiving Rio Grande Valley if the federal government doesn’t act,” the Los Angeles Times reports.
“More than 52,000 unaccompanied youths have been caught along the Southwest border this fiscal year, almost double last year’s total. The influx is fueled by danger at home, experts say, and by false rumors that minors and women with young children will be welcomed.”
New York Times: “Regardless of who wins Tuesday’s unpredictable Republican Senate runoff in Mississippi, the fracas has sent a message to incumbents in Congress: It is no longer enough to be a diligent member, quietly representing your constituents’ interests. You have to join the partisan fray.”
Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) released a brutal ad against challenger Chris McDaniel (R) in the final day of campaigning before their GOP Senate runoff.
“Dissatisfaction with President Obama’s conduct of foreign policy has shot up among both Republicans and Democrats in the past month, even though a slim majority supports his recent decision to send military advisers to Iraq to confront the growing threat from militants there,” according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
“The poll found that 58% of Americans disapprove of the way Mr. Obama is handling foreign policy, a jump of 10 points in the last month to the highest level since Mr. Obama took office in 2009. The spike in disapproval is especially striking among Democrats, nearly a third of whom said they did not approve of his handling of foreign policy.”
“The honeymoon ended quickly for new White House press secretary Josh Earnest,” the Washington Post reports.
“Earnest made his official debut Monday as the Obama administration’s top spokesman. The hour-long daily briefing went fairly smoothly until the final question, when a Bloomberg reporter asked him to confirm a report from Moscow that President Obama had spoken with Russia’s Vladimir Putin about Ukraine. Earnest confirmed it. That’s when things got testy.”
“Lawyers for the U.S. House sought a deal with the Securities and Exchange Commission to shield from prosecution a congressional aide who has become a key figure in an insider-trading investigation,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The SEC rejected the offer and instead went to court Friday to force the House to turn over documents and evidence in the matter.”
Rep. Charlie Rangel’s (D-NY) campaign is out with a catchy biographical rap about their candidate.
The Week: “It’s doubtful anyone besides Rangel would really bump this, window down, while rolling through Harlem. But hey, points for effort.”
“You know I’m not in the ‘Ready for Hillary’ camp, right? Why not? It’s because of our differences when I endorsed Obama. The differences haven’t healed, and I’m not in the suck-up camp.”
— Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D), quoted by the Washington Post, on why he’s not backing Hillary Clinton for president.
Phillip Klein: “Hillary Clinton has stepped in it again. After previously trying to justify her six-figure speaking fees by claiming she and Bill Clinton were ‘dead broke‘ when leaving the White House, she’s come under fire for stating that she wasn’t that ‘well-off.’ This has led to a spate of stories about whether the Clintons’ enormous wealth would weigh on her presidential ambitions in a nation with growing populist sentiment. But the deeper takeaway from her recent dustups isn’t her wealth, but that she’s an overrated politician.”
“To understand how a clever politician can handle such an issue, consider how a very able politician — who happens to be Hillary Clinton’s husband — handled the matter of his newfound wealth in a speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.”
A new report finds Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R) “may have taken longer than he should have to investigate allegations of sexual abuse of boys at Penn State, but there was no evidence that he tried to slow the case for political purposes as he ran for the state’s highest office,” the New York Times reports.
“The report delved into how Corbett — a Republican who was attorney general when allegations arose in 2008 and reached his office in 2009 that the former Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, 70, had sexually assaulted boys — handled the high-profile case that centered on the vaunted football program at the state’s largest public university.”
Some great clicks over at Wonk Wire:
Dan Walters: “The outcome of the top-of-the-ticket contest between Gov. Jerry Brown and Republican challenger Neel Kashkari is virtually certain months in advance, there’s no U.S. Senate contest, and there will be no barnburner ballot measures to motivate occasional voters.”
“The most heavily contested races will be at the legislative or congressional levels, but only a handful – scarcely a dozen – of the 153 districts involved are truly competitive. Given this year’s lackluster dynamics, the steady erosion of voter turnout that California has been experiencing, and the pattern of past non-presidential, non-senatorial elections in the state, we could see a record-low general election turnout.”
“All but one of the nine high court justices earned teaching income or book royalties in 2013, hauling in a quarter of a million dollars for their work shaping young legal minds in the classroom or through the written word,” the Center for Public Integrity found.
“Top earner Justice Antonin Scalia raked in more than $100,000 in book royalties for his 2012 tome Reading Law: Interpretation of Legal Texts and teaching wages from Southern Methodist University, Duke University, Tufts University and Pennsylvania State University… Justice Sonia Sotomayor did not report any outside income in 2013, despite the recent success of her memoir, My Beloved World, for which she received $1.9 million in advances from her publisher Knopf Doubleday in 2012.”
Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID) “may run for House GOP leadership again in November and said he’ll build on his reputation as an informal leader among conservative reformers,” the Idaho Statesman reports.
Said Labrador: “I’m not going to wait anymore… Now, I’m not making an announcement that I’m running for anything, but if I think there’s a vacuum and it needs to be filled I’m not going to be asking anybody else to fill that vacuum. I think it’s my responsibility to do that.”
A new NBC/Wall Street Journal/Annenberg poll finds that near-majorities believe that Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, both possible 2016 presidential candidates, would each “represent too much of a return to the policies of the past” as president.
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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