Mitt Romney appeared on Fox News to discuss his prediction last year that the government could shutdown if President Obama was re-elected.
Said Romney: “He’s ignored them; he’s attacked them; he’s blamed them. And of course the debt ceiling, it’s going to come up again, and then there’d be a threat of shutdown or default. And that of course chills the economy, puts more people out of work.”
“I’m more popular than I was when I went into jail.”
— Newark Mayor Sharpe James (D), quoted by the Wall Street Journal, promoting his new memoir, Political Prisoner.
John Podhoretz: “If ObamaCare had been as unpopular as conservatives believed, their plan for the shutdown — that there would be a public uprising to force Democratic senators in close races in 2014 to defund it — would’ve worked. It didn’t. Not a single senator budged.”
“Their tactic failed, and now what they are left with is House Speaker John Boehner basically begging the president of the United States to negotiate with him.”
“One thing we know for sure is that it’s not an equal fight, this fight between a man who received 65 million votes nationwide and a man who received 246,000 votes in one congressional district in Ohio.”
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Conservatives gathered in New York to roast former Vice President Dick Cheney “at an event where many of the biggest laugh lines touched on the most controversial policies of a key architect of his administration’s War on Terror,” BuzzFeed reports.
Former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) “said something to the effect that it’s nice that we’re all here at the Plaza instead of in cages after some war crimes trial,” recalled one person who was there.
The person added: “There were some waterboarding jokes that were really tasteless. I can see the case for enhanced interrogation techniques after Sept. 11 but I can’t really endorse sitting there drinking wine and fancy dinner at the Plaza laughing uproariously about it.”
A new AP-GfK poll finds that 62% of Americans mainly blamed Republicans for the government shutdown while 49% said Obama or the Democrats in Congress bear much responsibility.
Most interesting: “The poll found that the tea party is more than a gang of malcontents in the political landscape, as its supporters in Congress have been portrayed by Democrats. Rather, it’s a sizable — and divisive — force among Republicans. More than 4 in 10 Republicans identified with the tea party and were more apt than other Republicans to insist that their leaders hold firm in the standoff over reopening government and avoiding a default of the nation’s debt in coming weeks.”
Wow: “Most Americans disapprove of the way Obama is handling his job, the poll
suggests, with 53% unhappy with his performance and 37%
approving of it. Congress is scraping rock bottom, with a ghastly
approval rating of 5 percent.”
CNN: “In the span of a year, Cruz has transformed himself from a little-known Senate candidate into the face of a government shutdown that has roiled Washington politics and raised questions about the viability of the American political process.”
“Democrats are now raising his profile at every turn, in political campaigns from Brooklyn to San Diego, casting him as a right wing zealot and hoping to hang the controversial tea party icon around the necks of every Republican office-seeker in the country.”
“As President Obama steps up his declarations about the dire consequences of not raising the debt limit, increasing numbers of Congressional Republicans are disputing that forecast, as well as the timing of when the Treasury might run out of money and the implications of a default, further complicating the negotiating situation for both Mr. Obama and Speaker John Boehner, who must find a way out of the impasse,” the New York Times reports.
“Both men were counting on the prospect of a global economic meltdown to help pull restive Republicans into line. On Wall Street, among business leaders and in a vast majority of university economics departments, the threat of significant instability resulting from a debt default is not in question. But a lot of Republicans simply do not believe it.”
Roll Call: “While Democrats refuse to negotiate on the continuing resolution and the debt limit, apparently assuming the GOP will eventually cave, House Republicans insist they are prepared to bring borrowing authority to a screeching halt.”
In his first gubernatorial debate with challenger Barbara Buono (D), New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) was asked directly whether he was going to run for president but did not rule it out, at first joking that he “didn’t anticipate” the question at all, ABC News reports.
Said Christie: “Listen my mother told me a long time ago … do the job you have at the moment the best you possibly can and the future will take care of itself. The fact is there have been people talking about me running for president since 2010 and they all said I would do it in 2012 and I said I wouldn’t and I didn’t. And the fact is after 2017 I’m going to be looking for another job anyway.”
A new Quinnipiac poll in New Jersey finds Cory Booker (D) leading Steve Lonegan (R) by 12 points in the U.S. Senate race, 53% to 41%.
Said pollster Maurice Carroll: “It’s still not the predicted blow-out, but with a week to go, Newark Mayor Cory Booker hangs on to a nice, if not exactly comfortable, double-digit lead.”
“Iran is preparing a package of proposals to halt production of near-weapons-grade nuclear fuel, a key demand of the U.S. and other global powers,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Tehran in return will request that the U.S. and European Union begin scaling back sanctions that have left it largely frozen out of the international financial system and isolated its oil industry.”
David Frum: “Republicans have lost three major fights since 2009. They seem likely soon to lose a fourth–and all in the same way… Behind all four defeats can be seen the same seven mistakes: what you might call the seven habits of highly ineffective political parties.”
“We can’t make extortion routine as part of our democracy.”
— President Obama, in a statement on the current budget stalemate with Republicans.
President Obama “intensified his pressure on Republicans with a hastily scheduled news conference, calling on them to both fund and reopen the government and to raise the nation’s borrowing limit as the federal shutdown entered a second week,” the New York Times reports.
According to the White House, the president again told Speaker Boehner that he was willing to negotiate, but only after the “threat of government shutdown and default have been removed.”
As NBC News reports, Obama “suggested he might accept a short-term agreement that could jump-start talks with Congress.”
Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) was quoted last week by Roll Call saying the budget stalemate “isn’t some damn game.”
National Review quotes Boehner telling GOP members this morning he wants something that “puts points on the board.”
Daniel Drezner: “The thing is, in this kind of showdown, true ignorance can yield a bargaining advantage. If Republicans truly believe that their cause is just, their strategy is popular, and nothing bad will happen, then it is impossible to pressure them to come to the bargaining table. In The Strategy of Conflict, economist Thomas Schelling observed that in a game of chicken, one driver could gain an advantage from throwing the steering wheel out the window. It appears that Republicans have come up with an even more extreme version of that gambit — insisting loudly that they are immune to car crashes.”
Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY), who heads up the House Democratic campaign effort, told Democratic lawmakers at a closed door meeting today “that GOP shutdown shenanigans were giving Dems a big recruiting boost, by prompting reluctant Dem candidates to express renewed interest in running in very tough GOP-held districts,” Greg Sargent reports.
“Israel, the chair of the DCCC, also said that if the 2012 House elections had been held today, with polls showing what they are now showing, Dems would have taken back the House, according to several sources present.”
San Francisco Chronicle: “Is there ever a good time to ask the bald governor of your state whether he considered a hairpiece? Probably not. But we saw an opportunity, and went for it. The result is the most unusual Q&A … Jerry Brown answering eight baldness questions.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) railed against the “anarchy gang” for shutting down the federal government in a impressive speech on the Senate floor.
It’s more evidence whys she’s become so popular among Democrats.
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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