Gallup: “Throughout President Obama’s sixth full year in office, an average of 79% of Democrats, compared with 9% of Republicans, approved of the job he was doing. That 70-percentage-point party gap in approval ratings ties for the fifth-most-polarized year for a president in Gallup records dating back to 1953.”
“Each of Obama’s six years in office rank among the 10 most polarized in the last 60 years, with George W. Bush holding the other four spots.”
Leaders of New York’s Working Families Party urged Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to seek the Democratic nomination for president next year, the New York Times reports.
“By voting to encourage a Warren candidacy, the Working Families Party became the latest liberal group to support her as a potential primary challenger to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton… Several organizations on the left, led by MoveOn.org and Democracy for America, have already organized a campaign designed to lure Ms. Warren, with her brand of economic populism, into making a bid for the presidency.”
Embattled NBC News anchor Brian Williams is backing out of scheduled appearance on David Letterman’s “Late Show” on Thursday, the AP reports.
“That news from NBC came Sunday, a day after Williams said he was stepping away from NBC’s ‘Nightly News’ as the network looks into the anchor’s admission that he had told a false story about being on helicopter hit by a grenade while reporting on the Iraq war.”
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Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) reiterated that he is looking at the possibility of a presidential campaign “very, very seriously” but declined to hit back against criticism recently lobbed at him by former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the Washington Post reports.
“Perry jabbed at Cruz, noting that President Obama was also a young U.S. senator when he was elected as president.”
Said Cruz: “People occasionally throw rocks in politics. That’s his choice.”
“With advice from more than 200 policy experts, Hillary Rodham Clinton is trying to answer what has emerged as a central question of her early presidential campaign strategy: how to address the anger about income inequality without overly vilifying the wealthy,” the New York Times reports.
“Although people close to Mrs. Clinton say she has not yet settled on a specific platform, she is expected to embrace several principles. They include standard Democratic initiatives like raising the minimum wage, investing in infrastructure, closing corporate tax loopholes and cutting taxes for the middle class. Other ideas are newer, such as providing incentives to corporations to increase profit-sharing with employees and changing labor laws to give workers more collective bargaining power.”
A new Bloomberg Politics/Saint Anselm New Hampshire poll finds Jeb Bush has taken a slight lead over other potential Republican presidential candidates.
Bush leads with 16%, followed by Rand Paul at 13%, Scott Walker at 12%, Chris Christie at 10%, Mike Huckabee at 6%, Ben Carson at 6% and Marco Rubio at 5%.
Sources tell FTVLive that NBC News President Deborah Turness is strongly considering having Brian Williams step down, maybe as early as next week.
However, Howard Kurtz reports Williams plans to use an appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman next week “to try to clear the air and address the lingering questions.”
Jack Shafer: “Nobody can say Williams doesn’t deserve the scrutiny he’s now facing. If a politician, corporate leader, university professor or prominent clergyman made similarly inaccurate claims, the press would be digging their professional graves with backhoes… Now the once respected anchor has become a national punching-bag, as Twitter nation, comedians and wise guys have taken to mocking him. How long Williams can take the abuse depends on how much more his critics dig up on him.”
Politico: “The Republican governor started a trip to London by bobbling a question about whether measles vaccinations should be mandatory. The next day he snapped at a reporter who tried to ask him about foreign policy. He faced questions about a new federal investigation into his administration and came under scrutiny for his taste in luxurious travel. And back at home in New Jersey, for the first time in his tenure, fellow Republicans in the statehouse threatened to buck him.”
“It was a week that brought back to the surface the nagging question about Christie that he’s spent months trying to put to rest: Whether he has the discipline to survive the glare of the national stage.”
As Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) “moves closer to a 2016 bid, he is betting that in a field of big personalities, his low-key style and atypical pitch — mixing snarky asides, dovish takes on foreign policy and a compassionate plea for criminal-justice reform — will set his candidacy apart,” the Washington Post reports.
“The challenge for Paul is whether his approach, which has echoes of his father, former Texas congressman Ron Paul, will enable him to do better than the elder Paul’s third-place finish in the 2012 GOP presidential caucuses in Iowa.”
“As the president travels across the country promoting a bold and expensive domestic agenda for his last two years in office — including a trip on Friday to Indiana to push his community college proposal — his strategy on Capitol Hill is raising questions about what he hopes to accomplish,” the New York Times reports.
“Is he trying to pass legislation in cooperation with an often hostile Republican-controlled Congress? Or is he mainly trying to bring attention to issues that he sees as burnishing his legacy and that will set the table for the 2016 presidential campaign?”
Vice President Joe Biden is scheduled to be in Iowa next week, the Des Moines Register reports.
“The news comes in the wake of the release this past weekend of a new Iowa Poll that shows Biden trails both Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren in the horse race for most popular presidential pick among likely Democratic caucusgoers.”
“Biden’s timing suggests he wants to keep his name in circulation as presidential material – any time top-shelf politicians make a trip here it reinforces the notion that they harbor aspirations for the top job.”
“Obviously rape is awful… What is beautiful is the child that could come from this.”
— West Virginia Delegate Brian Kurcaba (R), quoted by the Charleston Gazette, on a bill banning abortions even in the cases of rape and incest.
Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum has labeled as “troubling” allegations against Gov. John Kitzhaber (D) and his fiancée linked to a potential conflict of interest over his future wife’s consulting work and her role as an unpaid adviser, Reuters reports.
Said Rosenblum: “Recent allegations relating to Governor Kitzhaber and Ms. Hayes are very serious – and troubling. My office is considering all of our legal options to ensure that we are best serving the state.”
Rod Dreher, writing for the American Conservative:
“I keep telling my friends in the national media that if you think Bobby Jindal has a chance in hell of becoming president, send a reporter down to spend a few days in Louisiana, seeing what condition he’s leaving his state in.”
Blue Nation Review reports that a month before the 2012 election, Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL) sold his home to one of his major campaign donors, Ali Bahaj, for more than three times the property’s assessed value.
Huffington Post: “According to Blue Nation Review, Bahaj and his wife, Gloria, were longtime GOP donors who each gave the legal maximum amount to Schock’s campaign in the 2008 election that first brought him to Congress. Once in office, Schock publicly defended Caterpillar Inc., the large manufacturing company where Bahaj served as vice president, when it came under criticism for tax evasion and mass layoffs.”
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“Would be 2016 presidential hopefuls including Rick Santorum and Bobby Jindal seized on President Obama’s comparison of Islamic extremism to the Christian Crusades and other violent excesses during Thursday’s National Prayer Breakfast, decrying the comments as ‘inappropriate’ and ‘insulting to every person of faith,'” CNN reports.
Said Jindal: “We will be happy to keep an eye out for runaway Christians, but it would be nice if he would face the reality of the situation today. The Medieval Christian threat is under control, Mr. President. Please deal with the Radical Islamic threat today.”
Said Santorum: “Today’s remarks by the President were inappropriate and his choice of venue was insulting to every person of faith at a time when Christians are being crucified, beheaded, and persecuted across the Middle East.”
Wisconsin Treasurer Matt Adamczyk (R) has proposed eliminating his own job as a cost-saving measure, the New York Times reports.
“In what may be the ultimate expression of many Republicans’ desire to whittle down government to the bone, Mr. Adamczyk ran for treasurer on the promise to eliminate the position during his one and only term in office. Despite its impressive name, the Office of the State Treasurer is virtually powerless. Most of its duties have gradually been transferred to other state agencies, like the Department of Revenue. One of the treasurer’s few remaining responsibilities is to help supervise a little-known agency called the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands.”
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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