“In the days since the U.S. midterm elections, President Obama has begun grooming his legacy in ways that place him on a collision course not just with Republicans in Congress, but with his own Democratic Party,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“All of it appears designed to demonstrate his continued relevancy on the heels of an election that solidified his status as a politically weakened lame duck.”
Politico: Obama turns to McConnell to secure legacy
A new Magellan Strategies poll in Louisiana finds Bill Cassidy (R) crushing Sen. Mary Landrieu (D) in their runoff race for U.S. Senate, 57% to 41%.
“The president has got to learn that he lost this last election round. The American people spoke loud and clear.”
— Mitt Romney, quoted by The Hill, saying President Obama should not be using executive actions to advance his policy agenda.
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“Jihadi John, the Briton who beheaded two British and two American hostages held by Islamic State terrorists, has been injured in a US-led air strike, according to reports received by the Foreign Office,” the Daily Mail reports.
“The masked ‘executioner’ with a London accent is believed to have narrowly escaped death when he attended a summit of the group’s leaders in an Iraqi town close to the Syrian border last Saturday. The meeting was targeted by American and Iraqi jets.”
Meanwhile, the New York Times reports President Obama confirmed the beheading of Peter Kassig saying he “was taken from us in an act of pure evil by a terrorist group.”
“The nonprofit group Organizing for Action is paying more than $1.2 million a year to rent what is widely believed to be the largest political email list ever created,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
“OFA is paying the Obama campaign — which still exists on paper — just under $5 million for a four-year rental of the campaign’s much vaunted email list and campaign data. OFA has paid about $1.3 million of the total balance, according to tax records.”
“Muslims discovered the Americas, not Columbus — or at least that’s what the president of Turkey wants people to believe,” the New York Post reports.
Said President Recep Tayyip Erdogan: “Muslims discovered America in 1178, not Christopher Columbus. Contacts between Latin America and Islam date back to the 12th century. Columbus mentioned the existence of a mosque on a hill on the Cuban coast.”
“The Spanish-employed sailor did speak of a mosque in his personal diary, which was published in 1996, but the notion has been widely considered to be a misunderstanding and should instead be viewed as a metaphor for the shape of the landscape. The fact that no Islamic structures have been unearthed that pre-date Columbus also debunks Erdogan’s claims.”
President Obama’s “anticipated order that would shield millions of immigrants now living illegally in the U.S. from deportation is not without precedent,” the AP reports.
“Two of the last three Republican presidents — Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush — did the same thing in extending amnesty to family members who were not covered by the last major overhaul of immigration law in 1986.”
“There was no political explosion then comparable to the one Republicans are threatening now.”
‘There was a collapse of the youth vote. The African-American vote held fairly steady and was remarkable… we had a little bit of a loss of the Hispanic vote perhaps because the president didn’t sign an order on executive action on immigration reform.”
— Bill Clinton, quoted by Politico, on the results of the 2014 midterm elections.
Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) “received $1.87 million from the securities and investment industry, making him the top recipient of Wall Street money this election cycle,” NPR reports. “Booker also received more money from real estate groups than any other member, as well as more from the entertainment and tech industries, accountants, and groups considered to be pro-Israel.”
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) “got the second highest draw from Wall Street – $1.26 million.”
“We should not return to the old rule. We should teach those blunderheads that they made a big mistake. And we have the votes to stop bad judges if we want to.”
— Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), quoted by Huffington Post, vowing to keep filibuster rules put in place by Democrats.
“House Republicans will operate the 114th Congress under essentially the same rules as the 113th — with two exceptions, including one that could have big implications for Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI),” Roll Call reports.
“Republicans voted Friday on conference rules for the 114th, approving a proposal that would allow Congress to hand out more medals and one that would require committee chairmen running for other office to hand over their gavel.”
Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is once again trying to avoid a government shutdown, the Washington Post reports.
“McConnell’s advisers are worried enough that by Friday evening they were circulating a memo showing how damaging last year’s shutdown was to the Republican Party — an effort designed to counter conservatives who point to this month’s triumphant election as proof that the shutdown did little damage.”
Politico: “Republican leaders wanted a quick and clean, drama-free lame duck session to kick off their new majority, but they find themselves heading toward a showdown over how to fund the government.”
Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell (R) “conceded the governor’s race to independent challenger Bill Walker, who has maintained a close lead in the vote count since election night,” the Alaska Dispatch News reports.
“Walker, who has been careful not to declare victory, has assembled a transition team that will meet next weekend in Anchorage to begin planning for a new administration.”
“The fact that an adviser who was never on our staff expressed an opinion that I completely disagree with in terms of the voters is not a reflection on the actual process that was run… I would just advise every press outlet here: Pull up every clip and every story. I think it’s fair to say there was not a provision in the health care law that was not extensively debated and was fully transparent.”
— President Obama, quoted by Politico, on recently-surfaced remarks by MIT professor Jonathan Gruber that suggested taxpayers were intentionally misled on health care taxes.
A Boston Globe review of “thousands of lobbying records and interviews with two dozen former aides reveals an informal network that is almost unrivaled in the nation’s capital, both in size and quiet clout. Some among them, who have gathered regularly over a good meal to kibitz, recall, and strategize, call themselves the T-birds — T for Teddy.”
“It is a remarkable flock… The stories of many of them are little known but, taken together, provide a revealing portrait of Kennedy power that continues to reach deep into Washington and Massachusetts. It is a corps of well-placed Washington players who say they still hear the echo of the late senator’s booming baritone in their ears and are still moved by his priorities, even as they have followed the well-worn track of many former Congressional staffers, parlaying inside connections into lucrative lobbying careers.”
New York Times: “They have spent at least 70 collective years in government: five sitting members of Congress, two civil servants from the George W. Bush administration, a pair of state legislators and a former governor. They are a counterintuitive fit with the antigovernment, anti-establishment fervor that has energized the Republican Party of late. And their victories seem hard to reconcile with the strong hostility toward government institutions that dominated the recent midterm elections.”
“When Republicans take over the Senate in January, the 11 men and women of the party’s freshman class will be, with a lone exception, people whose careers blossomed inside the government bureaucracy that some politicians love to loathe.”
A new Gallup poll finds that 71% “of those who bought new health insurance policies through the government exchanges earlier this year rate the quality of their healthcare and their healthcare coverage as ‘excellent’ or ‘good.’ These positive evaluations are generally similar to the reviews that all insured Americans give to their health insurance.”
“Among those who bought new health insurance policies through the exchanges, the majority are about as satisfied with their coverage and healthcare as are other Americans — suggesting that the end result of the exchange enrollment process is a generally positive one for those who take advantage of it.”
Nate Silver: “As the election season wore on, new polls hewed somewhat more closely to the polling averages. But the change was marginal until the final week or two of the campaign, when they started to track it much more closely. By the eve of the election, new polls came within about 1.7 percentage points of the polling average.”
“Perhaps you could construct some rationale, apart from herding, for why the polls behaved this way. Maybe it became easier to predict who was going to vote and that made methodological differences between polling firms matter less… But there are two dead giveaways that herding happened. One is the unusual shape of the curve. Rather than abiding by a linear progression, it suddenly veers toward zero in the final week or so of the campaign.”
“The other giveaway is… By the end of the campaign, new polls diverged from the polling averages by less than they plausibly could if they were taking random samples and not tinkering with them.”
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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