“I think it’s deliberate. I think he has a world view, and increasingly what he’s found is that it isn’t consistent with reality.”
— Dick Cheney, quoted by the Huffington Post, on why he thinks President Obama has been so wrong in response to the terrorist threat to the United States.
“The U.S. believes it has identified the British-accented masked man in the videos depicting the beheadings of two American journalists and a British aid worker,” the AP reports.
“FBI Director James Comey told reporters at the bureau’s headquarters he would not reveal the man’s name or nationality.”
A Gallup poll finds that 42% of Coloradans in the first half of 2014 identified as or leaned Republican and 42% identified as or leaned Democratic.
If you’re a Political Wire reader, you already know that political donors, activists, and even casual news junkies wind up on all kinds of lists. And scammers love those lists. The BBC recently caught a scam call center on hidden cameras where workers openly laughed about tricking people — one bragged he’d made $250,000 off victims.
Here’s the part they don’t say out loud: scammers don’t pick numbers at random. They buy data from brokers — sometimes the same data brokers who collect political donor info, petition signatures, email sign-ups and even the sites you visit.
That’s why I recommend Incogni. They contact data brokers on your behalf, demand removal, monitor for new exposures, and follow up automatically until your information is gone.
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Attorney General Eric Holder “is resigning, the Justice Department said Thursday, but plans to remain in office until a successor is confirmed,” the New York Times reports.
“Mr. Holder, the 82nd attorney general and the first African-American to serve in that position, had previously said he planned to leave office by the end of this year. Particularly in President Obama’s second term, Mr. Holder has been the most prominent liberal voice of the administration, leading its push for same-sex marriage and voting rights.”
The Hill reports that some Republicans “are warning President Obama against using a lame-duck session of Congress to push through Holder’s replacement, even as the White House signals its intention to fill the post quickly.”
Joe Klein: “It sounded to me, at first, like the Republicans had wised up in 2014. They were serving up smoked brisket, not red meat. There was a rationale for this: white women are likely to be the swing group in the North Carolina and Georgia elections. Women tend not to respond to rhetorical violence. Walker, the minister running for Congress, mentioned neither gay rights nor abortion. It was, I thought, grounds for optimism about the growing climate threat of political overheating. But after I saw the Perdue ad in Georgia, I realized that I–like the lovely folks who set up my road-trip meetings–was living in a community-oriented past, where speeches and rallies meant something. Nowadays, a candidate can be all smiles and more-in-sadness-than-in-anger on the stump, and run ads that are sicker than swamp gas on television, where it really counts.”
A new Public Policy Polling survey in Colorado finds Cory Gardner (R) just ahead of Sen. Mark Udall (D) in the U.S. Senate race, 47% to 45%.
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) jumped into a lawsuit “filed by a disgruntled voter seeking to force Kansas Democrats to name a new U.S. Senate nominee in hopes of speeding the resolution of a legal dispute shadowing a race with possible national implications,” the Kansas City Star reports.
“Kobach, like the voter, argues that a state election law requires Democrats to replace ex-nominee Chad Taylor, who earlier this month dropped out of the race against three-term Republican Sen. Pat Roberts.”
“In one of his first public appearances of the 2014 campaign, former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida had a vivid preview Wednesday of the challenges he would face with his party’s conservative base should he seek the Republican nomination for president in 2016,” the New York Times reports.
“Standing alongside Thom Tillis, the North Carolina House speaker and Republican Senate candidate, Mr. Bush outlined his views on two of the issues he cares most passionately about: immigration policy and education standards. But as Mr. Bush made the case for an immigration overhaul and the Common Core standards, Mr. Tillis gently put distance between himself and his guest of honor, who had flown here from Florida on a dreary day to offer his endorsement in a race that could decide which party controls the Senate.”
Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) “put a signature to documents associated with the mortgage on a Virginia residence that identify the Fairfax County home as ‘principal residence’ of the three-term incumbent Republican,” the Topeka Capital Journal reports.
“The re-election campaign of the Kansan has been awash in controversy about whether his ownership of a duplex in Dodge City, which is rented out, and his payment of about $300 a month for a room in a Dodge City supporter’s home satisfied legal requirements for public office.”
Kyle Kondik: “The national numbers indicate that Republicans should be on the verge of big House gains. But a district-by-district analysis suggests a different story.”
“The GOP is already at close to a high-water mark in the House, and their list of truly appetizing targets is limited. Meanwhile, Democrats do not have nearly the broad playing field they had to defend in 2010, and their national third-party groups, like the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and House Majority PAC (the shadow DCCC), have a distinct dollar edge over their GOP rivals. That doesn’t mean the Democrats can overcome a poor national environment and capture the House — or even net a seat or two — but it does mean that the Democrats are decently positioned to limit their losses even if the national environment gets worse.”
Washington Post: “War in Iraq is a subject that won’t go away for Clinton, whose Senate vote in 2002 to authorize the last war in that Middle Eastern country put her out of step with the Democratic base six years later. She lost her bid for president to a challenger who, as an obscure Illinois state senator, had come down on the antiwar side.”
“Now weighing another White House run, Clinton is faced again with the problems in Iraq and her role in shaping U.S. policy in the region. The airstrikes on the Islamic State group have inflamed the Democratic left, adding another potential line of attack against her if she decides to run for the White House.”
A new Quinnipiac poll in Virginia finds Sen. Mark Warner (D) leading challenger Ed Gillespie (R) in the U.S. Senate race, 48T to 39% among likely voters, with Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis at 6%.
Sam Wang, founder of the Princeton Election Consortium, joins us on the Political Wire podcast for a discussion of his midterm election forecasting model which has consistently shown Democrats likely to retain control of the Senate.
Listen here:
Subscribe via iTunes or RSS to get episodes automatically downloaded.
Special thanks to the Cook Political Report for sponsoring this episode. If you aren’t reading it, you’re missing a lot.
A new Keystone Report/Magellan Strategies poll in Pennsylvania finds Tom Wolf (D) leading Gov. Tom Corbett (R) by nine points, 49% to 40%.
Other recent polls have shown Wolf leading by a much larger margin.
The Heritage Foundation — “which prides itself as being the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement” — held a conference on the future of liberalism, MSNBC reports.
Heritage’s David Azerrad set the tone by describing the philosophy of the left: “Give up your economic freedom, give up your political freedom, and you will be rewarded with license. It’s all sex all the time. It’s not just the sex itself — it’s the permission to indulge.”
A new Public Policy Institute of California poll finds Gov. Jerry Brown (D) holding a commanding 54% to 33% lead among likely voters over challenger Neel Kashkari (R).
A new WBUR poll in Massachusetts finds Martha Coakley (D) maintains “a stable lead” in the five-way race for governor, beating out Charlie Baker (R) by 10 points, 46% to 36%.
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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