“There are a bunch of fools running, literally. These are not even C-team people. It’s the D team. They’re silly people.”
— Democratic media consultant Neil Oxman, quoted by The Atlantic, on the Republican U.S. Senate candidates running in today’s Pennsylvania primary.
First Read: “This GOP field should be a warning sign to Republicans who want to make
this state competitive in November: They couldn’t find a top-tier or
even second-tier challenger to take on Casey in this battleground state.”
A new NY1/Marist College poll finds New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D) breaking away from the Democratic pack of mayoral candidates.
Quinn leads with 32%, a full 20 points ahead of her nearest rival, former City Comptroller Bill Thompson (D).
Meanwhile, Republicans are trying to convince police commissioner Ray Kelly to run.
Nadia Lockyer, wife of California Treasurer Bill Lockyer (D), resigned from the Alameda County Board of Supervisors and spoke to the San Jose Mercury News about her drug addiction and “tortured extramarital affair with a methamphetamine addict.”
However, her account “raises serious questions” about her husband’s actions. “While she tried to defend him last week, saying that she holds responsibility for taking drugs, she did not deny her earlier claim that Bill Lockyer bought and supplied her with some of those drugs years ago.”
Lockyer “also revealed for the first time that she had sought dependency treatment in June 2010 — after winning a spot for the November runoff, not after the election was over, as previously reported. Bill Lockyer financed most of her campaign from his own political coffers, and of the $1.5 million he kicked in, more than two-thirds came after the June election. If he in effect bought her the office knowing she was addicted to drugs or alcohol, his own judgment — and his respect for the public he’s supposed to serve — are in serious question.”
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Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is tried to convince New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to support Mitt Romney’s bid for president in a meeting yesterday, the New York Post reports.
Said McCain: “I just came in to pay my respects to the mayor. He and I are old friends from many years back. I told him that I just spent last weekend with Romney and I thought that Romney was on message . . . and tried to convince the mayor that we’ve got a winning campaign.”
Maggie Haberman: “Bloomberg, having decided against a run himself, could end up making his voice heard with an endorsement, and he’s made clear privately to many people he doesn’t think highly of the job President Obama has done.”
Barely an hour into the first day of testimony in the John Edwards criminal trial, “sex and conniving had already surfaced” when defense lawyers had asked permission to mention in their opening statement a one-night stand that former aide Andrew Young, a married father of three, had with a co-worker in 2007, the Raleigh News and Observer reports.
Young wrote a tell all book about the Edwards scandal and is a key witness for the prosecution.
However, in a packed courtroom, the judge “muzzled any unprompted mentioning of Young’s alleged sexual liaison.”
A new WMUR/University of New Hampshire poll finds President Obama leading Mitt Romney in the Granite state by nine points, 51% to 42%.
First Read: “Much of the southern part of the state is essentially a suburb of Boston. And what these poll numbers suggest is that Republicans are struggling in the ‘burbs. So if Romney’s down in New Hampshire, that also means he’s trailing in Northern Virginia and the Philly suburbs.”
A Dartmouth poll last week showed Romney with a two point lead.
Nate Silver looks the impact of a vice presidential nominee’s home state on the ticket’s ultimate success and finds it is “is normally quite modest — perhaps two or three percentage points on average, if a little more in some cases and a little less in others. To be sure, two or three percentage points in the right swing state is not trivial, but it is probably not enough to outweigh the other strengths and weaknesses that a vice presidential candidate could potentially impart onto the ticket.”
“Indeed, presidential campaigns in recent years have largely abided by
this principle, with recent vice presidential nominees hailing from
states like Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, New York and Wyoming that did
not figure to be competitive.”
A new Winthrop poll in South Carolina finds Gov. Nikki Haley’s (R) approval rating “is on the mend — but it’s still not good.”
Key findings: Nearly 38% of registered voters said they approved of Haley’s job performance. In December it was just 35%.
Newt Gingrich suggested he “may withdraw from the presidential race if he has a poor showing in the Delaware primary Tuesday — a state where he has been actively campaigning for several weeks,” NBC News reports.
Said Gingrich: “I think we need to take a deep look at what we are doing.”
In the mail: It’s Even Worse Than it Looks by Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein.
The book identifies the two scourges most responsible for our dysfunctional government: the polarization between two adversarial political parties and a governing system that makes it very difficult for majorities to act. This is coupled with an “escalating extremism” of the Republican party.
Perhaps most important, the authors note that several popular “cures” for our nation’s problems — a balanced budget amendment and term limits — would only exacerbate the gridlock.
A new Merrill/Morrison Institute poll in Arizona finds Mitt Romney barely leading President Obama in a general election match up, 42% to 40%, with another 18% undecided.
Said pollster Bruce Merrill: “The eventual outcome also may be dependent on whether former Surgeon General Richard Carmona can mount a vigorous campaign for retiring Sen. John Kyl’s seat, a campaign that would stimulate turnout in the Hispanic community. While I think if the election were held today Romney probably would win, it appears Obama can mount a competitive campaign in Arizona.”
House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) told Fox News that his party faces a “real challenge” in holding on to its majority in the House.
Said Boehner: “We have 50 of our members in tough races, 89 freshmen running for their first reelections and we have 32 districts that are in states where there is no presidential campaign going to be run, no big Senate race and we call these orphan districts. You take 18 of them, California, Illinois and New York, where you know we’re not likely to do well at the top of the ticket and those districts are frankly pretty vulnerable.”
He added: “I would say that there is a two in three chance that we win control of the House again but there’s a one in three chance that we could lose and I’m being myself, frank. We’ve got a big challenge and we’ve got work to do.”
Howard Kurtz: “I started pondering this when we all got swept up in the spectacle of Hilary Rosen denigrating Ann Romney for not working… That, in turn, followed our collective enthrallment over Romney aide Eric Fehrnstrom describing their Etch a Sketch operation, which in turn followed the uproar over Rush Limbaugh calling a law student a slut, which followed…well, it’s hard to remember at this point.”
“Each of these episodes, considered separately, contains elements of substance that were soon overwhelmed by the rhetoric emanating from the media echo chamber. Collectively, they suggest that what should be a serious campaign in hard economic times has turned into a spectacle in which we are amusing ourselves to death.”
Nothing has been heard from former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich reported to prison nearly six weeks ago, but Fox Chicago News reports that Blagojevich “is now washing pots and pans, and could soon be teaching Shakespeare and Greek mythology to other inmates.”
Also interesting: “He’s got three cellmates, and so far,
has no problems with any of them.”
Said his lawyer: “All things considered, he looked good, he’s still got a headful of hair, it’s gone from black to brown, not gray, as everyone predicted. It’s gone from black to brown but he looks good.”
The law firm where former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (I) works, gave $50,000 to a pro-Obama Super PAC, the Tampa Bay Times reports.
The head of the firm is “a big time Democratic donor” but the donation also “adds a layer to Crist’s political conversion, from Republican governor to independent candidate for U.S. Senate to talked about Democratic candidate for governor.”
Edward Luce: “By this stage in the 1984 election, Ronald Reagan was proclaiming ‘Morning in America’. Barack Obama has so far had no such opportunity. Unlike the sharp rebound from the brutal recession of Reagan’s first term, today’s recovery has yet to break through dawn. It began just under three years ago. Most Americans say they feel no different.”
“Nor has Mr Obama found a good catchline to frame his side of the story. Last year he picked the slogan: ‘Winning the future’. It quickly vanished. In his State of the Union address this year, he switched to ‘An America built to last’ — and that was pretty much the last that was heard of it. He has yet to find a campaign theme that is built to last.”
“The cash-strapped Republican Party of Minnesota has been served eviction papers at its St. Paul headquarters,” the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports.
The party has not paid rent since last August.
Florida prosecutors did not end up charging Rep. David Rivera (R-FL), but their 18-month investigation revealed that the former state lawmaker practically lived off campaign contributions for nearly a decade, the Miami Herald reports.
He was “paying mortgages on four different properties and jetting around the globe though he never held a full-time job or earned more than $28,000 a year.”
“So how did he do it? Newly released FDLE investigative reports show that Rivera used back-dated campaign records, a web of bank accounts and undisclosed loans, a batch of credit cards and misleading disclosure forms to disguise his finances from the public eye during much of his eight-year tenure in the Florida Legislature.”
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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