“Boy, that escalated quickly. Less than two months after the 2014 elections, the 2016 Republican presidential race is taking clear shape — with several major players moving quickly to carve out their own space (and maybe keep others from carving it up) in the contest,” Chris Cillizza writes.
“All of the sudden movement — particularly from Bush and Huckabee — has the potential to dramatically alter the face of the just-beginning race to be the next Republican presidential nominee.”
President Obama “will spend the days before his Jan. 20 State of the Union address pitching Americans on the economic policies he intends to propose,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Mr. Obama plans to roll out legislative proposals and executive actions over the week on issues including housing, manufacturing and higher education… He will do so while traveling the country highlighting progress in the economy.”
“The strategy is a shift from previous years when the White House has kept a tight lid on proposals Mr. Obama would announce in his State of the Union address. Mr. Obama’s aides hope the approach builds on momentum from the lame-duck congressional session, which resulted in an agreement to fund the government through September.”
“Republicans taking control of Congress this coming week will try to overcome their reputation as a divided party hobbled by infighting by working to reshape policy in ways that Americans will feel in corporate boardrooms, on factory floors and at the gas pump,” the Washington Post reports.
“Incoming committee chairmen are preparing fresh oversight of federal agencies while rank-and-file members will be encouraged to use a new budget plan and government spending bills to chip away at President Obama’s environmental regulations, health-care reform and outreach to Cuba and Iran.”
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New York Times: “Six years into his presidency, there seems to be almost nothing the nation does not know about Mr. Obama, ranging from his views on the use of drones to target terrorists to how his daughters have less interest in hanging out with him as they become teenagers. But little is known about the state of his game and what he is like on the golf course, where he has spent roughly 1,000 hours playing 214 rounds since he was elected in 2008.”
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX)announced morning that he will challenge House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to be the leader of the House Republicans, the Texas Tribune reports.
“Gohmert is, for now, likely a long-shot threat to Boehner. But two years ago, Boehner won re-election as speaker by one of the narrowest margins in modern history, thanks to a band of rebellious House Republicans.”
Los Angeles Times: “Attitudinally, midterm elections are opportunities to slap down leaders who voters believe have done too much, or not done enough. Presidential elections, particularly incumbent-free ones like 2016 is going to be, are less a referendum than a choice between two new options.”
“Still, there is a link between the two campaigns, and it centers on two perennial political issues that were in play in 2014 and will be again in 2015. One is the argument over the size of government and the tactics used to shrink it. The other is voters’ gut-level sense of economic well-being.”
“As Republicans prepare to take full control of Congress on Tuesday, the party’s leaders are counting on judges, not their newly elected majority on Capitol Hill, to roll back President Obama’s aggressive second-term agenda and block his executive actions on health care, climate change and immigration,” the New York Times reports.
“Democrats say the legal moves reflect a convenient turnabout for the Republican Party and a newfound willingness to seek an active role for the judiciary when it benefits conservative policy goals.”
Mike Huckabee announced on his Fox News show that he is leaving the network after more than six years to consider another bid for the GOP presidential nomination and will decide by late Spring, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Said Huckabee: “The continued chatter has put Fox News into a position that is not fair to them nor is it possible for me to openly determine political and financial support to justify a race. The honorable thing to do at this point is to end my tenure here at Fox. As much as I have loved doing the show, I cannot bring myself to rule out another presidential run.”
Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) “is just weeks away from leaving office after more than a decade running Texas — and he is turning his eye beyond the Lone Star State as he looks to kick-start another presidential bid,” The Hill reports.
“Perry will leave the governor’s mansion after 14 years on Jan. 20. Just a few days later, he’ll be in Iowa participating in the state’s first major candidate event of the 2016 campaign. It’s the latest stop in a heavy travel schedule as he edges toward a second run at the White House.”
Washington Post: “In the strange four months of enforced limbo that have separated McDonnell’s shocking guilty verdict from his much-anticipated sentencing Tuesday, the former Republican governor has in some ways presided over an extended wake for his own once-promising political and personal future.”
“It has been an emotional time for McDonnell, who potentially faces a sentence of a decade or more in prison. Friends and associates say the 60-year-old former governor has struggled to process how 12 Virginians could believe that he is a criminal, selling his office in exchange for $177,000 in loans and luxury gifts and vacations from a dietary supplement company executive. Friends say he has been downright depressed on some days, but more upbeat on others, smiling nostalgically when talking about his time in office, a time when he was popular enough that it was thought he might be planning a presidential campaign this year.”
Interesting detail: “But he has remained estranged from his wife, Maureen, who was convicted along with him, and has been blamed by many close to McDonnell for creating the scandal. After 38 years of marriage, the two left the courthouse separately after the September verdict and did not speak that night.”
Edward W. Brooke (R), the first African-American elected to the Senate since Reconstruction, died at the age of 95, Bloomberg reports.
Brooke was elected to the Senate in 1966 and served until 1979.
Shortly after Barack Obama was elected president, Brooke told the AP he was “thankful to God” that he lived to see the election of the first black president.
“President Obama is heading back to Washington on Saturday after a two-week holiday visit to Hawaii, but he won’t stick around for long,” the Los Angeles Times reports.
“Eager to stay on the offensive as new Republican majorities are seated in Congress, the president plans to take a more bullish economic message on the road next week in something of an early test drive of his State of the Union message. During stops in Michigan, Arizona and Tennessee, Obama plans to draw a connection between actions his administration took early in his presidency and increasingly positive economic trends in sectors such as manufacturing and housing.”
“Democrats are looking to reclaim their Senate majority in two years, but after losing nine Senate seats in 2014, their path back to that majority won’t be easy,” National Journal reports.
“Democrats will be benefiting from a favorable landscape, with Republicans defending 24 seats (many of them in blue territory) while Democrats will be defending only 10. To leverage that advantage into control of the Senate, however, Democrats need to net at least four seats (five, if Republicans win the presidency). That requires sweeping out blue-state freshman Republicans in states such as Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin while also defeating a couple of brand-name senators, such as Rob Portman or Marco Rubio, in perennial swing states.”
“In the first Republican-dominated Congress to confront President Barack Obama, GOP leaders will focus on bolstering the economy and cutting the budget — and oh yes, avoiding self-inflicted calamities that make voters wonder if the party can govern competently,” the AP reports.
“When the new Congress raises the curtain Tuesday, Republicans will run both the House and Senate for the first time in eight years. GOP leaders want to showcase their legislative priorities, mixing accomplishments with showdowns with Obama but shunning government shutdowns and other chaotic standoffs.”
Jonathan Alter: “Even then, most of us doubted he would show up and actually sign the papers allowing him to enter the 1992 New Hampshire primary. The New York Times had reported earlier that fall that Governor Mario Cuomo had spent only 36 nights out of more than 1,300 as governor in a bed other than his own at the Executive Mansion in Albany. The man just didn’t get out enough to be president.”
“But for liberal Democrats, the questions remain: Would he have won the presidency in 1992, and if he had, would the country have experienced a restoration of the New Deal and the Great Society and the liberal governing values he articulated so well?”
The new U.S. Senate sworn in next week will have 54 Republicans and 46 Democrats.
Vox: “But here’s a crazy fact: those 46 Democrats got more votes than the 54 Republicans across the 2010, 2012, and 2014 elections. According to Nathan Nicholson, a researcher at the voting reform advocacy group FairVote, ‘the 46 Democratic caucus members in the 114th Congress received a total of 67.8 million votes in winning their seats, while the 54 Republican caucus members received 47.1 million votes.'”
James Fallows: “National office in the modern United States—the presidency, or a serious candidacy for it—requires a broader range of skills than any real human being has ever possessed… To succeed fully in national leadership a person would in principle need to be as shrewd a manipulator as Lyndon Johnson, as confidently patient a commander as Dwight Eisenhower, as quickly intelligent as John F. Kennedy; as publicly sunny as Ronald Reagan; as fundamentally sane as Gerald Ford — you get the idea.”
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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