Former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka told the Dickinson Press that he regrets not running against Barack Obama to represent Illinois in the U.S. Senate in 2004.
Said Ditka: “Biggest mistake I’ve ever made. Not that I would have won, but I probably would have and he wouldn’t be in the White House.”
House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) said that he “intends to go to conference on the budget, signaling the end to one of the year’s greatest impasses between the two parties and chambers,” Roll Call reports.
Said Ryan: “We’re gonna start negotiations. I intend to go to conference.”
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A new University of North Florida poll finds Charlie Crist (D) leading Gov. Rick Scott (R) in the race for govenror, 44% to 40%, with another 16% either undecided or for other candidates.
Tom Holbrook takes a detailed look at the trend in party favorability and notes “there is not a single poll in this series of 44 polls in which the Republican party registered a net positive rating, and not a single case in which the net Republican rating was higher than the net Democrat rating.”
“Even worse for the Republicans is that their favorability rating continues to degrade.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) brought his pollster to a closed-door GOP lunch to convince members the shutdown was helping the Republican party, David Drucker reports.
“The survey’s findings mirrored other national polls: More voters blame the Republicans for the government shutdown than blame President Obama or the Democrats. But Cruz argued, based on the poll, that Republicans are in a much better position than they were during the 1995 shutdown because this impasse is defined by a disagreement over funding for the Affordable Care Act as opposed to a general disagreement over government spending.”
“You may not be able to swim in that river, but it’s probably, I think, because of all the bodies floating around of shooting victims in your city.”
— New Jersey Senate candidate Steve Lonegan (R), quoted ny the Newark Star Ledger, in a very nasty debate with Cory Booker (D).
For some reason, Anthony Weiner agreed to an interview with Sean Hannity.
Former Sen. Bob Smith (R-NH) tells the New Hampshire Union Leader that he has decided against a comeback bid.
Said Smith: “I gave it a lot of thought. Normally, I’m very decisive but I had a lot of difficulty making up my mind. I went into all aspects of it and right up until yesterday, I was on the fence. That’s when I decided that I wasn’t going to do it.”
Rick Klein: “Bipartisan meetings are nice, and new plans that depend on the other side budging certainly can’t hurt at this stage of a standoff. But there may be only one way to jolt the system: SELL. Conversations with Republican strategists in recent days suggest that only a major event, most likely in the form of a major southward turn in the markets, could shake things loose inside the GOP conference enough to push away from the current crises. That’s what will draw constituent phone calls, and what will turn anger into action – more so, certainly, than vague threats of primary challenges engineered by business interests.”
A must-read: Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House by Peter Baker.
New York Times Magazine: “Over the course of conducting hundreds of interviews with key players in the Bush White House, including Cheney, and examining thousands of pages of never-released notes, memos and other internal documents, I came to see a relationship that differs substantially from the commonly accepted narrative. Even in the early days, when a young, untested president relied on the advice of his seasoned No. 2, Cheney was hardly the puppeteer that critics imagined. To the extent that the vice president exerted outsize influence in the first term, he became more marginalized over the course of the second, as Bush sought new paths to right his troubled presidency.”
Ken Cuccinelli (R) “is getting crushed on the Virginia airwaves, and it’s probably only going to get worse – a major factor thwarting the Republican’s hopes of a comeback in a governor’s race that’s been slipping away,” Politico reports.
With nearly all polls showing him considerably behind Terry McAuliffe (D), “the result is that Cuccinelli’s campaign has been making smaller and smaller ad buys over the past three weeks. He spent $1.2 million on broadcast in the final week of September, $716,000 last week and reserved $685,000 for this week.”
A new Quinnipiac poll finds McAuliffe leading 47% to 39%, with Libertarian Robert Sarvis at 8%.
A new Brigham Young University poll in Utah finds 51% of Utah voters now disapprove of the performance of Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT).
“The survey also finds that 57% of Utahns want Lee, whose crusade against funding Obamacare helped bring about a budget impasse and the shutdown of the federal government, to be more conciliatory and compromise on a budget, even if it means funding President Barack Obama’s signature health care law.”
Byron York: “Many House Republicans, including some key leaders, have decided they can live with a government shutdown but not with the threat of default. In the hours ahead, look for the GOP to seek a deal with President Obama and Democrats on at least a short-term increase in the debt limit, while standing firm on their requirement that a continuing resolution to fund the government must contain some significant measure to limit Obamacare. The bottom line: Republicans have discovered the world did not end when shutdown became a reality — but they’re not willing to risk it with the debt ceiling.”
Wonk Wire: Short term deal taking shape.
“Top House Republicans prepared to head to the White House Thursday to discuss the issues underlying the standoff that has resulted in the nine-day partial government shutdown and that now threatens the country’s ability to borrow,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The White House said the session isn’t a negotiation, in keeping with Mr. Obama’s demand that lawmakers raise the debt ceiling and fully reopen the government without conditions before policy talks are held. But the meeting may allow House Republicans to say they had a policy conversation with the president, which they have been saying is a condition of resolving the impasse.”
“Key GOP figures on Wednesday sent their clearest signals that they are abandoning their bid to immediately stop the federal health-care law — the issue that forced the government to shut down — and are scrambling for a fallback strategy,” the Washington Post reports.
“Republican Party leaders, activists and donors now widely acknowledge that the effort to kill President Obama’s signature initiative by hitting the brakes on the government has been a failure. The law has largely disappeared from their calculus as they look for a way out of the impasse over the shutdown and for a way to avoid a possible default on U.S. debt.”
Roll Call notes the effort is being led by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) while Politico reports Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and fellow Republican senators “are quietly seeing whether they can break the political impasse.”
Erick Erickson: “I’m being told by several sources that Speaker Boehner and Majority
Leader Eric Cantor are plotting to give up trying to either defund or
delay Obamacare.”
New York Times: “As the government shutdown grinds toward a potential debt default, some of the country’s most influential business executives have come to a conclusion all but unthinkable a few years ago: Their voices are carrying little weight with the House majority that their millions of dollars in campaign contributions helped build and sustain.”
“Their frustration has grown so intense in recent days that several trade association officials warned in interviews on Wednesday that they were considering helping wage primary campaigns against Republican lawmakers who had worked to engineer the political standoff in Washington.”
Wall Street Journal: “The pushback is part of a small but growing move by pro-business
interests to stem the tea-party tide by supporting more traditional
conservative candidates.”
A new Quinnipiac poll in New Jersey finds Gov. Chris Christie (R) leading challenger Barbara Buono (D) by a whopping 62% to 33% in the race for governor.
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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