Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis (D), “who skyrocketed to national fame after mounting a lengthy filibuster earlier this summer, on Monday said she won’t wait much longer to decide whether to enter the Texas gubernatorial race,” Politico reports.
Said Davis: “I’m still trying to decide, but I do think people are ready for a change from the partisan, very fractured leadership we have in Texas.”
Newt Gingrich told the Washington Times that the United States’ ability to “export democracy” needs to be reevaluated and that “alternative strategies” should be considered.
Said Gingrich: “I am a neoconservative. But at some point, even if you are a neoconservative, you need to take deep breath to ask if our strategies in Middle East have succeeded. It may be that our capacity to export democracy is a lot more limited than we thought.”
Better RNC debate plan. Held in hermetically sealed Fox studio. Avoid exposing swing voters to Crazy S*#t My Nominee Says.
— David Plouffe (@davidplouffe) August 5, 2013
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RNC chair Reince Priebus threatened to “ban 2016 presidential debate partnerships with CNN and NBC if the networks produce shows on Hillary Rodham Clinton ‘ahead of her likely candidacy for president’ because they will amount to free ‘political ads,'” the Lynn Sweet reports.
“NBC announced a Hillary Clinton miniseries is in the works; CNN is working on a documentary. The networks are rolling out the projects as speculation about whether the former Secretary of State will run in 2016 is soaring.”
GOP pollster Whit Ayres tells Greg Sargent that “much of the conventional wisdom is wrong: Republican voters do support immigration reform — including a path to citizenship — albeit with the proper conditions attached. Indeed they want to see something done.”
Said Ayres: “Our research has shown that roughly one third of Republican primary voters will never support a path to citizenship no matter what the conditions. But two thirds will support a path to citizenship as long as the conditions are strict and rigorous.”
USA Today: “The dead can’t vote, but they can give money to politicians. Thirty-two people listed on federal campaign records as “deceased” have contributed more than $586,000 to congressional and presidential candidates and political parties since Jan. 1, 2009.”
Jeff Zeleny: “August often has a way of surprising and shaking Washington with an
external event out of anyone’s control. This is a month where the
capital is scheduled to rest a bit, but the terror threats in the air
are a sober reminder that’s really not possible. Congress is away and
President Obama is scheduled to start his vacation by the end of the
week in Martha’s Vineyard. The White House is taking an all-is-normal
posture, with the president even dropping by Jay Leno. But quiet
conversations with members of Congress and aides in both parties, as
well as inside the administration, suggest these latest threats are
specific enough to be taken very seriously.”
First Read: “There isn’t a government official who’s seen some form of this intelligence who isn’t spooked by it.”
“I don’t intend to run to the right of Mitch McConnell. I don’t intend to run to the left of Mitch McConnell. I intend to run straight over the top of Mitch McConnell and right into the U.S. Senate.”
— Kentucky U.S. Senate candidate Matt Bevin (R), quoted by the Louisville Courier Journal, delivering “what may have been the sharpest attack of the day” at Fancy Farm.
“Beleaguered” San Diego Mayor Bob Filner (D) “is scheduled to begin two weeks of intensive therapy Monday at an undisclosed clinic to address his inappropriate sexual behavior toward women and while he’s gone the city will continue to pick up trash, the libraries will open on time and the scandal enveloping San Diego won’t be going away,” the San Diego Union Tribune reports.
“Filner won’t be ceding any authority during his self-imposed therapy sessions and plans to be briefed each morning and night on civic affairs and give direction to city staff.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said he was “almost certain” Congress would look at background checks again in 2014, the Reno Gazette Journal reports.
Said spokeswoman Kristen Orthman: “I think sometime next year we’ll revisit that issue, I’m almost certain of it.”
A new AFSCME poll in Arkansas finds Sen. Mark Pryor (D) leading Rep. Tom Cotton (R) in his re-election race by eight points, 43% to 35%.
Meanwhile, Smart Politics finds that no incumbent U.S. Senator has lost a general election race coming off a victory in which he did not face a major party opponent. Pryor only faced a Green Party candidate in 2008.
A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit “is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans,” Reuters reports.
“Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin – not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.”
“They are totally insulated from public opinion on this because of redistricting. Republicans are gonna continue to hold the House. But then we’ll head into the 2016 presidential election where the electorate is likely to be 2 percent less white than it was in 2012 and 4 percent less white than it was in 2008. This is a simple math equation.”
— GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, in an interview with the New York Times, on the harm House Republicans will do to the GOP’s national ambitions by not supporting immigration reform.
Stan Collender: “When it comes to the budget there’s so left much to do, so many moving pieces and so little time that the overall situation — let alone the fate of a particular bill — is virtually impossible to predict with any degree of certainty.”
“And when you add the somehow-still-increasingly-intractable budget politics to the mix, the odds of being right about what’s going to happen get even longer unless you’re suggesting something close to fiscal chaos.”
“That’s what I’m predicting: budget bedlam this fall and beyond.”
CNN Money has 8 things you should know about the budget showdown.
New York: “We have never had a president as outwardly angry as Christie, but then this country has rarely been as angry as it is now. In the tea-party era, conservative anger has often been channeled by figures such as Michele Bachmann and Ted Cruz into a hysteria over very abstract and inflated threats: health-care death panels, the national debt, the specter of a country overrun by illegal immigrants. Christie’s use of anger is very different: It is much more targeted, and therefore potentially much more useful.”
“What Christie is doing when he starts arguments with other Republicans-and it is telling that what looks very much like a presidential run has begun with a sequence of fights-is offering his party the chance to preserve its anger, while trading in its revolutionaries for a furious institutionalist… Christie is a small-craft warning of a human being; he is a rush of blood to the head; he is a bully. But the governor is something else, too, something that separates him from the nihilistic elements of his party and-maybe-gives him a chance to lead them. He is a believer.”
“Lawmakers hoping for a respite from Washington’s intense lobbying climate won’t get a break back home during the August recess,” the Washington Post reports.
“Once a lull in the political calendar, August is now officially part of the high season. An array of interest groups has methodically plotted how to use the congressional recess to press causes.”
“The sophisticated operations aim to drive a political narrative throughout the month, hoping to produce a strong display of voter sentiment that lawmakers will not be able to ignore when they return to Washington after Labor Day. At that point, they will immediately contend with a showdown over the budget, a House debate on immigration reform and the launch of new state health insurance marketplaces created by the Affordable Care Act.”
House Republicans “will take a carefully orchestrated, staunchly anti-Washington campaign to voters this month, blaming President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats for Americans’ unhappiness with government,” Politico reports.
A new Monmouth University poll finds posed four hypothetical 2016 match-ups with Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee running against Republicans Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz.
Christie comes closest in national preference, trailing Clinton by just 4 points, 43% to 39%. Bush is behind Clinton by 10 points, 47% to 37%, and Rubio trails by 11 points, 47% to 36%. Cruz is behind Clinton by 16 points, 48% to 32%.
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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