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Just four months after helping elect Rep. Rod Blum (R-IA), Jack Melton is running as a challenger to Blum’s re-election in 2016, the Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier reports.
Said Melton: “I’m sick of the Republican hate speech towards homosexuals, anti-immigration and desire to govern women’s uteruses.”
He added: “To be honest with you, it’s not about me winning. It’s about beating Rod. I do not want him to win.”
Rep. Steve King (R-IA), a leading conservative opponent of President Obama’s executive action on immigration, said Speaker John Boehner’s office canceled funding at the last-minute for what he called “a very important diplomatic mission,” CNN reports.
“That came after King and a group of about 50 Republicans opposed Boehner’s eleventh-hour attempt to fund the Department of Homeland Security without rolling back the executive order.”
Said King: “He’s currently throwing tantrums. This is retribution on the highest scale.”
Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL) “doesn’t have to face voters at the ballot box until next year. But in order to run for re-election, it appears he may first have to surmount a primary challenge,” the Peoria Star reports.
If you follow politics closely, you know some of the most powerful ideas in history weren’t just argued — they were designed, printed, and plastered on walls.
That’s why I recommend Propaganda Posters, a site that curates and sells some of the most iconic political posters from history. The prints are high quality, richly detailed, and full of bold, vivid color — the kind that immediately draws your eye and holds it.
I’ve been genuinely impressed with how good these posters look in person. They feel substantial, display beautifully, and turn political history into real, conversation-starting art.
If you’re a Political Wire reader who appreciates the power of political messaging, this is a collection worth seeing.
“Hillary Clinton is closing in on April 1 as the operational start date of her long-awaited presidential campaign,” multiple sources with knowledge of Clinton’s growing operation in Iowa have told the Guardian.
“With plans to hire as many as 40 staffers in the battleground state around the beginning of April, the sources said, there is essentially no turning back on Clinton campaign expenditures – nor on the starting gun for the 2016 election.”
“Hillary Clinton has weathered a barrage of attacks and retained strong support across the Democratic Party, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows, even as the Republican primary electorate is splintered among the many potential GOP candidates for president.”
“The poll found that 86% of Democratic primary voters said they could see themselves supporting Mrs. Clinton for president. That commanding level of support cut across all major demographic groups within the party — men and women, liberals and conservatives, whites and minorities.”
“I was saying how amusing it is to me that the conservative movement—a big chunk of which is faith-based—seems to have never read Matthew 25.”
— Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), quoted by National Journal, on the New Testament passage where Jesus admonishes his followers to aid the less fortunate.
A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that more Americans are clamoring for change in the upcoming 2016 presidential election than they were in 2008.
“That desire for change is a potential roadblock for two of the leading frontrunners – Democrat Hillary Clinton (the former first lady, presidential candidate and secretary of state) and Republican Jeb Bush (the former Florida governor whose brother and father served as president). But it might be a more significant challenge for Bush, given that fewer than half of Republican primary voters believe he would provide new ideas and a vision for the future, versus nearly three-quarters of Democrats who think the same of Clinton.”
Key findings: 59% of all voters prefer a candidate who will bring greater changes to current policies, even if he or she is less experienced and tested – up from 55% who said this in July 2008 during the general-election contest between Barack Obama and John McCain.
New York Times: “You would be forgiven if you mistook the initial introductions of the 2016 presidential candidates with latter-day, and somewhat clichéd, versions of a Horatio Alger story. The current crop of White House hopefuls appears eager to outdo one another in recounting their up-from-poverty biographies, even if it means reaching back more than one generation.”
“Overhauling more than a half century of labor law in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker on Monday signed so-called right-to-work legislation banning labor contracts that require private sector workers to pay union fees,” the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports.
“In a matter of weeks, Republicans pushed through the measure making Wisconsin the 25th state with such a law, giving a victory to manufacturers in the state and a blow to organized labor and some construction firms, which had opposed the measure.”
New York Times: “Democrats assert that Mr. Walker’s real motivation is more about politics than job creation: breaking a dwindling union movement in Wisconsin and boosting his standing as the conservative choice for the Republican presidential nomination next year. And beyond Mr. Walker’s prospects, they say the new laws throughout the region are intended to help Republicans build a favorable electoral map for 2016, by weakening the labor groups that have traditionally provided muscle and money to Democratic candidates in crucial swing states.”
Hillary Clinton “will soon address the controversy over her use of a private email account at the State Department, and is likely to hold a press conference in New York in the next several days to answer reporters’ questions,” Politico reports.
“The pressure on Clinton has ratcheted up as critics, including some congressional Democrats, have called on her to publicly address the reports. That pressure only increased on Monday as a spokesman for President Obama told reporters that Clinton and the president had, in fact, exchanged emails using Clinton’s private email account during her tenure at Foggy Bottom from 2009 to 2013.”
“In our view, this letter has no legal value and is mostly a propaganda ploy. It is very interesting that while negotiations are still in progress and while no agreement has been reached, some political pressure groups are so afraid even of the prospect of an agreement that they resort to unconventional methods, unprecedented in diplomatic history.”
— Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif, quoted by the New York Times, on a letter sent by 47 Senate Republicans to scuttle nuclear talks with Iran.
“Forty-seven Senate Republicans warned in an open letter to Iran’s leaders Monday that any agreement between the White House and Tehran on nuclear weapons could be quickly nullified or changed once President Barack Obama leaves office,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The letter, which was signed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and a number of top committee chairmen, said that unless approved by Congress, any agreement between world powers and Iran would be seen by GOP lawmakers as an executive agreement between Mr. Obama and Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei. Such an agreement may not stay in effect under future administrations and could be modified by lawmakers in the future, they wrote.”
The senators noted that Mr. Obama will leave office in January 2017, while “most of us will remain in office well beyond then—perhaps decades.”
Paul Waldman: “It’s safe to say that no president in modern times has had his legitimacy questioned by the opposition party as much as Barack Obama. But as his term in office enters its final phase, Republicans are embarking on an entirely new enterprise: They have decided that as long as he holds the office of the presidency, it’s no longer necessary to respect the office itself.”
Jonathan Chait has a great exit interview with White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer.
“The original premise of Obama’s first presidential campaign was that he could reason with Republicans—or else, by staking out obviously reasonable stances, force them to moderate or be exposed as extreme and unyielding. It took years for the White House to conclude that this was false… If you had to pinpoint the moment this worldview began to crystallize, it would probably be around the first debt-ceiling showdown, in 2011, when Obama tried repeatedly and desperately to cut a budget deal with House Speaker John Boehner only to realize, eventually, that Boehner did not have the power to negotiate. The administration has now decided that in many cases, even adversarial bargaining fails because the Republican leadership is not capable of planning tactically.”
Explained Pfeiffer: “You have to be careful not to presume a lot of strategy for this group. I’ve always believed that the fundamental, driving strategic ethos of the Republican House leadership has been, What do we do to get through the next caucus or conference without getting yelled at? We should never assume they have a long game. We used to spend a lot of time thinking that maybe Boehner is saying this to get himself some more room. And it’s like, no, that’s not actually the case. Usually he’s just saying it because he just said it or it’s the easiest thing to solve his immediate problem.”
Bill Clinton declined to weigh in on news that his wife exclusively used a private email account during her four-year tenure as secretary of State, The Hill reports.
When asked his wife has been treated fairly over the emails, Clinton said: “I’m not the one to judge that.”
He added: “I have an opinion, but I have a bias… That I shouldn’t be making news on this.”
“Now we’re going to go for the big enchilada, which is Hillary.”
— Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), quoted by the Baltimore Sun, reflecting on being the first female Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate in her own right.
Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL) took at least 10 of his House staffers on a $10,053 taxpayer-funded trip to New York last September, where most of them had few official duties, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned.
David Leonhardt: “The Democratic Party is on the cusp of a primary-election campaign unlike any in memory. It does not have an incumbent president running for re-election. It does not even have a sitting vice president with an easy path to the nomination. Yet the party may conduct one of the least competitive nominating contests in modern political history.”
“The closest recent parallels to her are George W. Bush in 2000 or Bob Dole in 1996 — and yet both of them faced stronger rivals than Mrs. Clinton probably will.”
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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