“Vincent Harris, Ted Cruz’s top digital operative, is leaving the Texas senator’s team to work for Sen. Rand Paul’s political operation, as the jostling for staff ramps up ahead of the 2016 GOP presidential primary contest,” CNN reports.
Landrieu Was Silent at 70% of Energy Hearings
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) “is presenting herself as a leading voice for Louisiana on energy issues in the U.S. Capitol, showcasing her inside influence by forcing a Senate vote on a bill that would allow construction of the Keystone pipeline, a project backed by industries and voters in her state,” Bloomberg reports.
“Yet her outspokenness and perseverance in legislative forums is relatively new, emerging in the 10 months since she took over the chairmanship of the Senate Energy and National Resources Committee and as she faces an uphill battle in a Dec. 6 runoff against Republican Representative Bill Cassidy. Between January 2009 and this week, Landrieu didn’t speak or submit written testimony or questions at almost 70% of the energy committee hearings, according to an analysis of congressional records, videos and transcripts. Her attendance at 137 of the 200 hearings of the full panel or her subcommittees during that six-year period cannot be confirmed through public records.”
Extra Bonus Quote of the Day
“I really don’t long for publicity. So, I’m perfectly content to be out of the limelight.”
— George W. Bush, in a Fox News interview.
A Constant in Midterm and Presidential Elections
Nathan Gonzales: “There’s plenty of discussion about the difference between midterm and presidential electorates, but there is one emerging constant: the white evangelical vote.”
“In the recent midterm elections, white evangelicals or born-again Christians made up 26 percent of the electorate and voted for Republican candidates 78 percent to 20 percent, according to the National Exit Poll. Two years before in the 2012 presidential election, white evangelicals made up 26 percent of the electorate and voted for Republican Mitt Romney 78 percent to 21 percent over President Barack Obama. And in 2010, white evangelicals made up 25 percent of the electorate and voted for Republican candidates 77 percent to 19 percent.”
Questions About Sharpton’s Finances Grow
The Rev. Al Sharpton’s “influence and visibility have reached new heights this year, fueled by his close relationships with the mayor and the president,” the New York Times reports.
“Obscured in his ascent, however, has been his troubling financial past, which continues to shadow his present. Mr. Sharpton has regularly sidestepped the sorts of obligations most people see as inevitable, like taxes, rent and other bills. Records reviewed by The New York Times show more than $4.5 million in current state and federal tax liens against him and his for-profit businesses. And though he said in recent interviews that he was paying both down, his balance with the state, at least, has actually grown in recent years. His National Action Network appears to have been sustained for years by not paying federal payroll taxes on its employees.”
GOP Leaders Work to Avoid Government Shutdown
“Republican leaders have intensified their planning to prevent a government funding showdown, weighing legislative options that would redirect GOP anger at Barack Obama’s expected action on immigration and stave off a political disaster,” Politico reports.
“Speaker John Boehner, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and their top aides and deputies are mulling several options that would give Capitol Hill Republicans the opportunity to vent their frustration with what they view as an unconstitutional power grab by the White House — without jeopardizing the government financing bill.”
Jonathan Chait: “That a shutdown gives Republicans any actual leverage, as opposed to imagined leverage, is another right-wing fantasy. It is now fairly well-established that the sole impact of a government shutdown is to make the public hate the party that controls Congress. The gun the conservatives are holding is pointed at their own head.”
Bonus Quote of the Day
“I think there will be a political problem for the Republican Party going into 2016 if we don’t define what we are for on the environment. I don’t know what the environmental policy of the Republican Party is.”
— Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), quoted by Roll Call.
Could Obama Trade Keystone XL Approval for Something?
The New York Times reports that people “familiar with the president’s thinking say that in 2015 he might use Keystone as a bargaining chip: He would offer Republicans approval of it in exchange for approval of one of his policies.”
Jonathan Chait: “The superficial logic of a Keystone trade makes sense. Obama doesn’t really care about the project much one way or the other. He regards it as a sideshow with negligible effects on climate change. Republicans, on the other hand, constantly implore him to approve it. That would seem, on the surface, to lay the basis for a logical trade of one kind or another.”
“The trouble is, there’s little reason to think Republicans actually care about approving Keystone. Its value to them lies entirely in its use as a talking point. The pipeline is an easy, tangible example of a thing they propose to create jobs. In fact, the number of jobs the pipeline would create is pathetically negligible — around 2,000 jobs a year for two years to build it, after which maintaining the pipeline would require about 35 jobs. But the number of jobs Keystone creates is not the point. The point is that it sounds like something that creates jobs, because describing an actual tangible project makes it easy to visualize how people would be put to work on it.”
Nixon Rambles When Asked If Buck Stops with Him
After declaring a state of emergency in anticipation of a grand jury decision on a police officer shooting, TPM notes Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D) couldn’t give a straight answer to the question, “Does the buck ultimately stop with you?”
Said Nixon: “I mean, you know… our goal here is to, you know, keep the peace and allow folks’ voices to be heard. In that balance, I’m attempting, you know, I am using the resources we have to martial, to be predictable for both those pillars.”
He added: “I don’t, you know, I’m more, I just will have to say I don’t spend a tremendous amount of time personalizing this vis a vis me.”
Why Is Everyone Ignoring Martin O’Malley?
Molly Ball: “Martin O’Malley ought to be a Democrat’s dream candidate… But while Maryland’s governor looks perfectly presidential on paper, Democratic voters outside the state have proved staunchly resistant to forming an impression of him.”
“This is not for lack of media attention. A political press corps preemptively bored by the prospect of another airless Hillary Clinton campaign has dutifully floated O’Malley as an alternative, noting his hypothetical ability to run to Clinton’s left and his appeal as a practical progressive—he’s more liberal than Clinton or New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, but less of a firebrand than Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. And yet he has fluctuated between 1 and 2 percent in recent polls of prospective primary voters, languishing behind not only Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden but also Warren and Cuomo. He’s even polling behind Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont.”
Begich Finally Concedes Senate Race
Alaska Dispatch News: “After holding on to dwindling hope for days, Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) on Monday conceded he had lost his U.S. Senate race to Republican Dan Sullivan. With the concession coming nearly two weeks after the Nov. 4 general election and with few votes left to count, the statement was largely a formality.”
Small Politics in an Age of Big Problems
“This is an era of titanic challenges and tiny politics. On issue after issue, the Republican and Democratic parties preen and pose but ultimately duck their responsibilities to solve the transcendent problems of our times,” Ron Fournier writes.
First Read: “Compared with all the big problems at home and abroad, our politics right now seems so small… And the biggest takeaway here is that Washington can no longer handle the large issues — unless it has a gun held to head (the expiring Bush tax cuts, the need to raise the debt limit). So much of this is a function of divided government; elections have consequences, right?”
“But as we’ve noted before, what separates our current era of politics from past ones is the unwillingness to give the opposition any kind of ‘win.’ Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill didn’t agree on much and fought over plenty, but they compromised enough on the low-hanging fruit for Americans to have faith in the political system. Ditto George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy when it came to education reform. Yet what’s different today is that there’s no compromise on the low-hanging fruit. And everything now turns into a huge political battle, even on subjects that weren’t controversial decades ago — like when Reagan and Bush 41 used executive action to protect certain undocumented immigrants from deportation.”
Why Extreme Wealth is Bad for Everyone
Michael Lewis reviews Billionaires: Reflections on the Upper Crust by Darrell West and notes “there is a growing awareness that the yawning gap between rich and poor is no longer a matter of simple justice but also the enemy of economic success and human happiness. It’s not just bad for the poor. It’s also bad for the rich. It’s funny, when you think about it, how many rich people don’t know this.”
Wonk Wire: Are we inured to a new gilded age?
The Greening of Barack Obama
“During his earlier years in office, Obama never pushed the environment to the forefront of the national agenda. The economy took precedence. Then health care. At one point, toward the end of Obama’s first term, environmentalists counted the months between presidential uses of the term ‘climate change,'” Politico reports.
“But now, Obama is aiming to make global reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions one of the signature achievements of his presidency — with his “historic agreement” with China last week just the start of a series of administrative actions aimed at combating climate change. What changed, according to political and environmental sources close to the president, was Obama’s awareness that the environment is one of the few areas where a president can act unilaterally and to broad effect.”
Wonk Wire: How green is your state?
Facebook App That Helped Obama Win is Shut Down
President Obama’s reelection campaign “pioneered a pathway for political campaigns to reach voters through Facebook when it released an app that helped supporters target their friends with Obama-related material,” Yahoo News reports.
“But as the 2016 presidential campaign approaches, Facebook is rolling out a change that will prevent future campaigns from doing this, closing the door on one of the most sophisticated social targeting efforts ever undertaken.”
Said Obama digital chief Teddy Goff: “It’s a fairly significant shift. The thing we did that will be most affected — by which I mean rendered impossible — by the changes they’re making is the targeted sharing tool.”
Quote of the Day
“I say this only half-jokingly, that you have to be crazy to want to be president. Anyone who’s seen the pictures of this president or any of the former presidents can see the before and after, no matter how fit, no matter how young they are, they age pretty rapidly when you look at their hair and everything else involved with it.”
— Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R), quoted by Fox6 Now.
Keystone XL Pipeline Stuck at 59 Votes
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and other supporters of the Keystone XL oil pipeline “are stuck at 59 votes — one vote shy of the supermajority they need to move their bill forward on Tuesday,” The Hill reports.
However, Landrieu remained adamant on Monday evening that she had the 60 votes.
Politico: “The parlor game on Capitol Hill regarding the 60th vote has become so intense that Democrats merely rumored to be thinking about voting ‘yes’ have found themselves under attack from pipeline opponents on social media.”
Walker Raises Clinton’s Age
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) raised the subject of Hillary Clinton’s age when discussing when he might run for president in an interview with a Wisconsin Fox affiliate.
Said Walker: “Whether it’s two years, six years, 20 years from now, because at 47, I mean I think about Hillary Clinton, I could run 20 years from now for president and still be about the same age as the former secretary of State is right now.”
