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.
You're reading the free version of Political Wire
Upgrade to a paid membership to unlock full access. The process is quick and easy. You can even use Apple Pay.
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.'”
On the eve of another fiscal showdown with congressional Republicans, President Obama is outright refusing to negotiate over an increase to the nation’s debt limit, saying doing so would alter “the constitutional structure of this government entirely,” ABC News reports.
Said Obama: “If we continue to set a precedent in which a president … is in a situation in which each time the United States is called upon to pay its bills, the other party can simply sit there and say, ‘Well, we’re not going to put — pay the bills unless you give us … what we want,’ that changes the constitutional structure of this government entirely.”
In the mail: A Mayor’s Life by David Dinkins.
“How did a scrawny black kid–the son of a barber and a domestic who grew up in Harlem and Trenton–become the 106th mayor of New York City?”
The Atlantic: “Ever since the Senate voted down gun-control legislation in April, some advocates have remained convinced there was still hope. As of Tuesday, that hope is officially dead.”
“On Tuesday, two Colorado state senators, both Democrats, were recalled by voters for their votes in favor of gun control. Gun-rights advocates instigated the recall drives; the National Rifle Association spent $360,000, sending mailers and airing television ads calling the lawmakers ‘too extreme for Colorado.’ Gun-control proponents, buoyed by donations from New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, outspent their opponents five to one. But the NRA turned the money against the lawmakers, painting them as pawns of fancy-pants out-of-state liberal interests. And the NRA won.”
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.
“There are a lot of blogs and news sites claiming to understand politics, but only a few actually do. Political Wire is one of them.”
— Chuck Todd, host of “Meet the Press”
“Concise. Relevant. To the point. Political Wire is the first site I check when I’m looking for the latest political nugget. That pretty much says it all.”
— Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the Rothenberg Political Report
“Political Wire is one of only four or five sites that I check every day and sometimes several times a day, for the latest political news and developments.”
— Charlie Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report
“The big news, delicious tidbits, pearls of wisdom — nicely packaged, constantly updated… What political junkie could ask for more?”
— Larry Sabato, Center for Politics, University of Virginia
“Political Wire is a great, great site.”
— Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”
“Taegan Goddard has a knack for digging out political gems that too often get passed over by the mainstream press, and for delivering the latest electoral developments in a sharp, no frills style that makes his Political Wire an addictive blog habit you don’t want to kick.”
— Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post
“Political Wire is one of the absolute must-read sites in the blogosphere.”
— Glenn Reynolds, founder of Instapundit
“I rely on Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire for straight, fair political news, he gets right to the point. It’s an eagerly anticipated part of my news reading.”
— Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.