Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has a book coming out in January “and it may discomfort some members of Congress, as well as former colleagues from the Obama and Bush administrations,” USA Today reports.
In addition to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gates says he plans to write about “my political war with Congress each day I was in office,” and what he calls “the dramatic contrast between my public respect, bipartisanship and calm,and my private frustration, disgust and anger.”
West Virginia Secretary of State Natalie Tennant (D) is expected to announce her
candidacy Tuesday for the Democratic nomination to become West
Virginia’s next U.S. Senator, the Charleston Daily Mail reports.
“Long rumored to have interest in running,
Tennant began calling Democrats across the state Friday to let them know
her plans, said an unnamed Democrat.”
Louisville Courier-Journal:
“As Congress faces a potential meltdown over the budget and spending,
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is staring at tough political
choices. Should the Kentucky Republican get involved in trying to cut
another budget deal and open himself to charges from the right that he
is giving in to President Barack Obama? Or should he let others
negotiate and be subjected to criticism that he gets nothing done?”
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Bob Vander Plaats (R), a key socially conservative power broker in Iowa’s presidential caucuses, will consider a U.S. Senate run next month, BuzzFeed reports.
Said a spokesman: “He would consider looking at it in the middle of October, and decide by the end of the year.”
Wonk Wire has a timeline for the coming fights over the budget and debt ceiling.
A Republican leadership aide tells National Journal:
“I’m very confident in my belief that a shutdown will not happen. I’m
not going to rule out the chance that it ever does. But the leadership
team and overwhelming number of our members do not want to shut down the
government.”
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) will hold an event with Bill de Blasio (D) and Bill Thompson (D) later this morning “to help bring an end to the Democratic mayoral primary,” Capital New York reports.
“For Cuomo, who avoided public appearances in the city during the primary, it’s a bold entry that forestalls a potentially divisive run-off process, and projects his status as the central figure in the state’s Democratic politics.”
Politicker reports Thompson will drop out of the race today.
With just over a week until election day, a new Boston Globe poll finds Boston voters “remain flummoxed by the crowded mayoral race.”
John Connolly holds “a slight edge in a field so tightly bunched and volatile that as many as nine candidates have a plausible shot at the final.”
Politico: “In recent months, and especially since the start of the Syria mess, Obama has been enduring some of the toughest and most widespread press criticism of his four-and-a-half years as president. It isn’t just coming from the usual suspects on the right. Increasingly, the skepticism is coming from the center and even from the left — from White House reporters, progressive editorial boards, foreign policy experts and MSNBC hosts.”
Larry Summers’ withdrawal as a candidate for Federal Reserve chairman “came after an unprecedented campaign to stop a Fed nominee even before he was announced, spearheaded by Democratic senators who took on a president of their own party,” Bloomberg reports.
Peter Beinart: “Still not convinced that the Democratic Party’s becoming more anti-Wall Street?”
“It’s almost as though it was the end of traditional power. I’ve been here for 20 years, and I’ve never seen so much of a repudiation of the conventional sources of power in the legislative or executive branch. It portends for a much more chaotic fall.”
— Rep. James Moran (D-VA), quoted by the Washington Post, on the rank-and-file resistance to both President Obama and Speaker John Boehner on Capitol Hill.
With health insurance exchanges set to open on October 1, a new USA Today/Pew Research survey finds that 53% of Americans disapprove of President Obama’s health care law while 42% approve.
Key findings: “The 53% of the public who disapprove of the law are divided over what they would like elected officials who oppose the law to do now that the law has begun to take effect. About half of disapprovers (27% of the public overall) say these lawmakers ‘should do what they can to make the law work as well as possible,’ but nearly as many (23% of the public) say these officials ‘should do what they can to make the law fail.'”
A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll has the reason why: “Overall, nearly 70% of poll respondents said they didn’t understand the health-care overhaul passed by Democrats in March 2010 or only understood a part of it.”
“Iowa Democrats have often looked to Sen. Tom Harkin’s annual steak fry for a peek into the future of the party. On Sunday, Vice President Biden made clear he believes its future should be an extension of its present,” the Washington Post reports.
“Biden, flirting with a third try at the presidency in 2016, delivered a muscular and impassioned defense of the policies and priorities of President Obama’s administration and offered a marker by which he said they should be judged.”
Des Moines Register: “He made only joking references to the 2016 race as he spoke in the leadoff presidential-nominating state. But he shook hands for more than 45 minutes afterward, engaging in the friendly, back-slapping retail politics he’s famous for.”
“The Russian-American deal to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal gives President Obama some breathing space after a politically damaging few weeks. But the list of things that could still go wrong is extensive and daunting,” the New York Times reports.
“The two sides could deadlock over the text of a United Nations Security Council resolution codifying the agreement. Syria could insist on deal-breaking conditions or fail to turn over a complete accounting of its weapons within a week, as mandated. International inspectors could be obstructed on the ground or chemical stocks could be hidden from them.”
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that Secretary of State John Kerry insisted that a deal to rid Syria of chemical weapons will be enforced by the United Nations.
Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers called President Obama to say he is pulling out of the contest to succeed Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Said Summers: “I have reluctantly concluded that any possible confirmation process for me would be acrimonious and would not serve the interest of the Federal Reserve, the Administration or, ultimately, the interests of the nation’s ongoing economic recovery.”
The Week: Will Janet Yellen be the next Fed chair?
New York Times: “The school year at the University of Alabama has barely gotten started, and already the campus has found itself in a charged self-examination on issues of politics, power and race… But the turmoil began some weeks earlier. It raised the specter of the Machine, a secret society representing a league of select and almost exclusively white fraternities and sororities, which has been around for a century or more. Once a breeding ground for state political leaders, the Machine (it has long been known by that nickname) today maintains a solid hold on student government through an effective, and critics say coercive, brand of old-fashioned organization politics.”
“But the Machine’s apparent involvement in an August school board election, a rare appearance in municipal politics, has prompted a lawsuit, accusations of voter fraud and an outcry that in many ways primed the campus for the larger storm over inclusion and tradition that is now taking place.”
“Republican lawmakers are growing increasingly frustrated with what they say is a lack of communication from their leaders,” The Hill reports.
“Both centrist and conservative members in the House believe that Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and his lieutenants could have done more earlier this year to counter the Tea Party’s effort to defund ObamaCare. Some Republicans on Capitol Hill say such an effort is politically impossible with a Democratic-controlled Senate and a Democrat in the White House. Regardless, the rift on what to do on ObamaCare has opened up a civil war within the GOP.”
Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley (D), “who only three years ago appeared to be finished politically, will join the race for governor with an announcement in her home town of Medford on Monday followed by an 18-city barnstorming tour for the next three days,” the Boston Globe reports.
“After a lackluster performance that led to her humiliating loss to Scott Brown in the 2010 US Senate race, Coakley is expected to be a formidable candidate in the primary. Recent polls show she is now one of the most popular political figures in the state.”
President Obama declined to say in an interview with ABC News whether he would stay neutral in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election that could potentially pit Vice President Joe Biden against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Said Obama: “What I would say to folks out there is we are tremendously lucky to have an incredible former secretary of state who couldn’t have served me better, and an incredible vice president who couldn’t, who couldn’t be serving me better. And I suspect if you asked both of them, they’d say, ‘It’s way too premature to start talking about 2016.'”
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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