Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) told MSNBC that he won’t be launching a gubernatorial bid after all.
Said Nelson: “Look, I have no plans to run for governor. I have no intention of running for governor.”
Nelson’s statement comes after Roll Call quoted a “senior Democratic official” who said that the senator was considering a bid.
Here’s a must-read: Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House by Peter Baker.
“Taking readers into the offices of the West Wing and the cabins of Air Force One, Peter Baker tells the gripping inside story of the Bush and Cheney era.”
Now available for pre-order.
“George W. Bush’s flaws are greatly overshadowed by his virtues, starting with his moral clarity.”
– Karl Rove, writing in the Wall Street Journal, to which Andrew Sullivan replies that he was also the first president in U.S. history to authorize the torture of captured prisoners.
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Stephen Colbert takes a hilarious look at Pennsylvania’s 17th congressional district.
Ready for pre-order: This Town: The Way it Works in Suck Up City by Mark Leibovich.
Politico describes the book as a chronicle of “the incestuous ecology of insider Washington.”
Former Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT) said he isn’t ruling out a run for the Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), the Billings Gazette reports.
“The Republican is coming off a bruising loss last year to Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Tester. The two engaged in a heavyweight battle that saw record spending and an unprecedented flood of television advertising. But an open Senate seat could entice Rehberg to run again in 2014.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) “is scheduled to speak to the New Hampshire Republican Party’s Liberty Day Dinner on May 20. That’s 10 days after an address to the Republican Party of Iowa’s Lincoln Day Dinner in Cedar Rapids,” the Louisville Courier-Journal reports.
A new Quinnipiac poll finds the gun background-check amendment co-sponsored by Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) helped push his approval rate to 48% — the highest point of his three-plus-year term — with 30% disapproving.
Keith Hennessey: “President Bush is extremely smart by any traditional standard. He’s highly analytical and was incredibly quick to be able to discern the core question he needed to answer. It was occasionally a little embarrassing when he would jump ahead of one of his Cabinet secretaries in a policy discussion and the advisor would struggle to catch up. He would sometimes force us to accelerate through policy presentations because he so quickly grasped what we were presenting.”
“I use words like briefing and presentation to describe our policy meetings with him, but those are inaccurate. Every meeting was a dialogue, and you had to be ready at all times to be grilled by him and to defend both your analysis and your recommendation. That was scary.”
“Talks to revive gun control legislation are quietly under way on Capitol Hill as a bipartisan group of senators seeks a way to bridge the differences that led to last week’s collapse of the most serious effort to overhaul the country’s gun laws in 20 years,” the New York Times reports.
Meanwhile, Greg Sargent notes the NRA doesn’t think the gun fight is over and is still running ads in key senators’ states.
Two weeks after Boston bombings, President Obama will have to walk a line between heartfelt and funny at this weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Former Clinton speechwriter Mark Katz writes in the Daily Beast about how the the Oklahoma City Federal Building tragedy kept President Clinton from delivering a very funny speech.
Here’s the speech he never gave at the 1995 dinner.
David Drucker: “To repeal or dismantle? That is the internal debate roiling House Republicans as they plot their strategy on the landmark 2010 health care law, as its implementation accelerates.”
“House GOP leaders are pushing their conference to embrace a series of messaging bills altering or dismantling pieces of the law to publicize for voters what Republicans argue are the statute’s many failed and damaging policies. Their goal is to turn the law into an issue they can use against Democrats in the 2014 midterms.”
“But rank-and-file Republicans, particularly freshmen and sophomore members, worry that any legislation to repeal a portion of the law could be interpreted by their constituents as strengthening it.”
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Frank Luntz told a group of college students that Rush Limbaugh and right-wing talk radio are “problematic” for the Republican party and partly responsible for the nation’s polarization.
Mother Jones notes he “only dared to speak so candidly about Limbaugh and other conservative hosts off the record. A secretly recorded video, though, captured Luntz’s remark.”
Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL) has opted not to run for the Republican Illinois governor nomination and instead will seek a fourth term in Congress next year, the Chicago Tribune reports.
“Schock’s decision removes from the potential field a youthful former state legislator with a demonstrated ability to raise money.”
The Senate unanimously approved a patch to fix the deep cuts that have furloughed air traffic controllers and delayed flights across the country, NBC News reports.
“The House could take the bill up tomorrow and pass it with 2/3 support of that chamber. All of this was a last minute scramble to avert a crisis that was becoming more and more politically problematic by the day.”
Harry Enten: “Bush’s retrospective approval is the second worst among presidents in the last 50 years ago. To save you doing the math, Carter’s 52% approval rating is higher than Bush’s 47%. Only the Watergate-tainted Richard Nixon recorded a lower retrospective approval than Bush… Thus, not only did Bush tie for the second worst final approval rating while in office, but he is also has the second worst retrospective job approval rating.”
A new Survey USA poll in Los Angeles finds Wendy Greuel has surged into a small lead over Eric Garcetti, 45% to 42%.
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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