“You guys tried to obstruct me. You fought me. Only I deserve the award.”
— The female undercover CIA agent heading up the hunt for Osama bin Laden, quoted by the Washington Post, hitting reply-all on an email crediting many of her colleagues for the mission.
Just published: Masters of Disaster: The Ten Commandments of Damage Control by Christopher Lehane, Mark Fabiani and Bill Guttentag.
A must read.
Wall Street Journal: “The unruly freshman class of 2010 has thwarted Mr. Boehner numerous times during his two years as speaker. To bolster his position, Mr. Boehner has been slowly bringing Republican freshmen to his side by introducing them to the realities of legislating and congressional leadership. Mr. Boehner’s strategy, and his future as speaker, will get tested between now and year-end as Washington wrestles with negotiations designed to avert tax increases and spending cuts due to begin in early January.”
“Boehner has used both carrot and stick to unify his ranks, lawmakers said. Rep. Steve Southerland, a voluble freshman, got a job managing a transportation bill. Three freshmen who continued to defy the House leadership on key votes got booted from plum committees. Others learned the limits of their power by watching bills the House passed disappear in the Senate.”
“Boehner mended fences with his No. 2, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), after the two repeatedly clashed over various budget negotiations, aides to both men said. He has made an overt effort to cultivate Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House budget committee and Mitt Romney’s running mate. Mr. Ryan didn’t embrace Mr. Boehner’s efforts to negotiate a deficit deal in 2011. This year, he is sitting in on Mr. Boehner’s daily strategy session and has endorsed the speaker’s plan to raise fresh tax revenue.”
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New York Daily News: “Bill de Blasio says he’s proud of his marriage — and his wife’s outspoken lesbian past.”
The Week has a useful guide to the bruising right-to-work fight in one of America’s most pro-union states.
Charlie Cook: “While the vast majority of major corporate leaders either backed Mitt Romney last year or stayed neutral, they don’t really see the Republican Party as the good guys and Democrats as the bad guys. They see the whole political and governing process as dysfunctional.”
Gerald Seib: “Based on nearly complete results, of the 234 Republicans elected to the House, just 15 come from districts that the Democratic president carried… Of 201 Democrats elected, just nine come from districts Republican Mitt Romney carried… Not only are House members coming from reliably partisan districts, many are winning in landslides. In this fall’s election, 125 House members — 42 Republicans and 83 Democrats — won their districts with 70% or more of the vote…”
“The situation is similar in the Senate. There will be 45 Republican senators in the new Congress. Only 10 of them come from states President Obama won. There will be 55 Democrats and independents who caucus with Democrats. Just 11 of them come from states Mr. Romney won…”
“Voting in that presidential race, meanwhile, was starkly partisan. President Obama won the votes of just 6% of Republicans, exit polls indicate. Mr. Romney won just 7% of Democrats.”
New York Times: “Of the 234 House Republicans who will sit in the 113th Congress, 85
percent won re-election with 55 percent of the vote; more than half of
next year’s House Republican Conference won more than 60 percent. And
virtually every one of them ran on holding the line against tax
increases and the Obama agenda.”
A new Quinnipiac poll in Ohio finds Gov. John Kasich (R) has a 42% to 35% job approval rating — his first positive rating since he took office — but voters still say he does not deserve a second term by a 44% to 37% margin.
The White House and House Speaker John Boehner’s office held more negotiations on on ways to break the stalemate over the “fiscal cliff,” Reuters reports.
The Wall Street Journal reports talks “have progressed steadily in recent days, people close to the process said, breathing life into talks that appeared to have stalled… The people familiar with the matter say talks have taken a marked shift in recent days as staff and leaders have consulted, becoming more ‘serious.’ Both sides have agreed to keep details private, according to the people, who declined to detail where new ground was being broken.”
Meanwhile, Bloomberg notes President Obama has softened his rhetoric about Republicans which “coincides with an acceleration of private
meetings and discussions with the clock ticking down on the
deadline for a deal.”
Wonk Wire: What to expect if we go over the cliff.
Dan Froomkin: “Post-mortems of contemporary election coverage typically include regrets about horserace journalism, he-said-she-said stenography, and the lack of enlightening stories about the issues.”
“But according to longtime political observers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, campaign coverage in 2012 was a particularly calamitous failure, almost entirely missing the single biggest story of the race: Namely, the radical right-wing, off-the-rails lurch of the Republican Party, both in terms of its agenda and its relationship to the truth.”
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) told The Cable that he will join the Senate Foreign Relations Committee ahead of confirmation hearings for whomever President Obama nominates to replace Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
NBC News: “U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice is reportedly a finalist for Secretary of State. McCain has been a main critic of Rice’s, stemming from her appearances on Sunday shows following the attacks in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including an ambassador. But McCain’s move may not be all about Rice. Because of Republican Conference rules, he is term-limited as ranking member of the Armed Services Committee.”
The RNC “is rolling out a plan to review what worked and what didn’t for the party in the 2012 cycle,” Politico reports.
“The plan is to focus on: campaign mechanics, fundraising, demographics, messaging, outside groups, campaign finance, the national primary process and, last but not least, what the successful Democratic efforts revealed about the way forward, and recommend plans for the way forward.”
However, BuzzFeed reports that two of the people leading the effort — former Bush spokesman Ari
Fleischer and Republican committeeman Henry Barbour — pushed the
narrative that the polls were skewed, and Mitt Romney would ultimately
prevail.
Two Democrats in the Washington state Senate abandoned their caucus, “vowing to work with Republicans to control the chamber and push conservative budgeting principles,” the AP reports.
“Under the new plan, Republicans will chair six committees, including the
panel that controls the state budget. Democrats will control another
six committees while the parties will co-chair three others.”
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) said that she would not appoint a “placeholder” to fill the seat of Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) when he leaves in January, the Washington Post reports.
The announcement bolsters speculation that Haley will appoint Rep. Tim Scott (R-SC), “a well-liked conservative with ambitions for higher office.”
A new Public Policy Polling survey in South Carolina finds Stephen Colbert tops the list of who voters would like to
see appointed at 20%, followed by Tim Scott at 15%, Trey Gowdy at
14%, Jenny Sanford at 11%, Henry McMaster and Mark Sanford at 8%, Jeff
Duncan and Joe Wilson at 5%, and Mick Mulvaney at 4%.
Jonathan Chait: “In the immediate wake of the election, Republicans felt so
stunned — in no small part because they had deluded themselves into
expecting victory — that it seemed momentarily possible that the party’s
long march to the right may halt or even reverse. But the future of the
party is already taking shape, and that future will be, in some form or
fashion, a conservative reaction against the Republican leadership that
has sold them out. The smarter Republicans have already shaken off the
trauma of electoral defeat and begun positioning themselves to
capitalize.”
Top officials in Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s (R) administration “used personal email accounts to craft a media strategy for imposing hundreds of millions of dollars in Medicaid cuts — a method of communication that can make it more difficult to track under public records laws despite Jindal’s pledge to bring more transparency to state government,” the AP reports.
Paul Waldman takes another look at Dick Morris and his Super PAC, “an organization whose entire
purpose is to raise money, and its expenditures involve raising money and finding new donors. And not, say, getting Mitt Romney elected.”
“Perhaps there’s a more innocent explanation for all this, but the way it looks is that 1) People (should we call them ‘marks’?) donate money to Morris’ super PAC; 2) he pays that money to Newsmax for ‘fundraising’; then 3) Newsmax turns around and pays the money back to Morris, for access to his list of donors. Perhaps Newsmax takes a cut, or perhaps the list is their cut, because these people can then become marks for all kinds of future scams.”
Wonk Wire highlights how money is still ruining elections even if it isn’t necessarily deciding them.
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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