House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told CNN that Mitt Romney’s pick of Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate will give Democrats a better shot at retaking control of the House of Representatives.
Said Pelosi: “On August 11, when Gov. Romney chose Ryan, that was the pivotal day. That is the day things really changed. We were on a path. I would have said to you then we were dead even. Well, the momentum is very much with us, the Medicare issue in this campaign.”
Three of powerful New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s (D) adult children “remained registered to vote in their father’s Lower East Side district long after moving out,” the New York Post reports.
“And they continued to vote for years at the same Delancey Street polling place as their parents — presumably pulling the lever for Papa in his re-election bids — even when, as in the case of one child, they lived out of state.”
Said a Silver spokesman: “The election law is clear that voters have wide latitude to vote from the residence they choose, so long as they are not dually registered. They all vote from only one place, and under New York law that is clearly legal.”
Republican lawmakers “are grumbling about the direction of Mitt Romney’s campaign and say he needs to change course,” The Hill reports.
The GOP members say Romney must do a better job of communicating to voters what to expect of him, either by making a bold pledge or fleshing policy proposals with more details.
Said one Republican senator: “Papa Bush was down after the Democratic convention in 1988, people worried he couldn’t come back and then he made his ‘read my lips, no new taxes’ pledge.”
Said another: “My advice is don’t try to turn him into something he’s not. You’re never going to turn him into a teddy bear.”
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Nicholas Kristof: “Diplomacy is a minefield, and Mitt Romney spent the last week blowing up his foreign policy credentials to be president. He raised doubts about his capacity to deal with global crises, and we were left hoping that if that 3 a.m. call ever went to him, he’d have set up call forwarding.”
“The essential problem is that every time Romney touches foreign policy, he breaks things. He went on a friendly trip to Britain — the easiest possible test for a candidate, akin to rolling off a log — and endeared himself by questioning London’s readiness to host the Olympic Games. In the resulting firestorm, one newspaper, The Sun, denounced ‘Mitt the Twit’…”
“Then there was the Romney trip to Israel, where he insulted Palestinians and left some Jews uncomfortable with stereotyping by praising Jewish culture in the context of making money… Yet with the Middle East exploding in recent days because of a video insulting the Prophet Muhammad, Romney dived in with a statement that hit a trifecta: it was erroneous, inflammatory and offensive.”
“We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country. We will never have the elite, smart people on our side.”
— Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R), quoted by BuzzFeed, at the Value Voters Summit.
A fascinating hidden camera video shows Mitt Romney talking at a fundraiser about investing in a Chinese factory that he described as surrounded by barbed wire and packed with 12 women per dormitory room.
Romney’s point in telling the story was that “95% of life is settled if you’re born in America.”
John Heilemann: “And so it does, with the past week proving another maxim: that when shit rains, shit pours. In the space of 72 hours, what began, horrifically enough on September 11, with the murder of four Americans (including one of our best and bravest, Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya) at the consulate in Benghazi spiraled into a region-wide upheaval, with angry Muslim protests directed at American diplomatic missions erupting in sixteen countries. Suddenly, the president was facing just the kind of externality that his team had been bracing for: a full-blown foreign-policy crisis less than eight weeks out from Election Day. And a campaign marked by stasis and even torpor was jolted to life as if by a pair of defibrillator paddles applied squarely to its solar plexus.”
“Moments like this are not uncommon in presidential elections, and when they come, they tend to matter. For unlike the posturing and platitudes that constitute the bulk of what occurs on the campaign trail, big external events provide voters with something authentic and valuable: a real-time test of the temperament, character, and instincts of the men who would be commander-in-chief. And when it comes to the past week, the divergence between the resulting report cards could hardly be more stark.”
Out this week: The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin.
“This book is based principally on my interviews with the justices and
more than forty of their law clerks. The interviews were on a
not-for-attribution basis – that is, I could use the information
provided but without quoting directly or identifying the source.”
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) law repealing most collective bargaining for local and school employees was struck down by a judge, “yet another dramatic twist in a year and a half saga that likely sets up another showdown in the Supreme Court,” the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports.
“I am the adoptive father of four children, each of them either — each of them either black, Hispanic, Native American, and I am incensed that this president pays money to an entity that was
created for the sole purpose of killing children that look like mine — a
racist organization, and it continues specifically to target minorities
for abortion destruction.”
— Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS), quoted by NBC News, on President Obama’s support for Planned Parenthood.
President Obama’s campaign answers the question Mitt Romney keeps asking.
Greg Sargent: “The use of Clinton in the new ad is also interesting: As noted here recently, the Obama campaign believes that true undecided voters see Clinton as a kind of ‘referee’ figure on the economy — hence the ad’s back-to-back footage of Clinton and Obama both making the case that electing a Republican president would take us back to the policies that got us into trouble in the first place. Clinton will play a major role in trying to get swing voters to feel that things are indeed recovering.”
Mashable talks to @InvisibleObama, the Twitter handle born during Clint Eastwood’s bizarre convention appearance last night.
“I remain very, very skeptical of hearing anything that will change the course of history. We have a debt problem. We have a spending problem, but how many things did he list to cut?”
— Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), in an interview with Bloomberg TV, on Romney’s speech to the Republican convention.
The Pentagon “threatened legal action against the former member of the Navy SEALs who has written a first-person account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, but the author’s lawyer and the book’s publisher, Penguin, said they were proceeding with publication on Sept. 4,” the New York Times reports.
A spokesman said that the book’s author, Matt
Bissonnette, was “in material breach of nondisclosure agreements he
signed with the U.S. government” to not reveal classified information.
If you want to read the book, you might want to get your order in quickly.
In an Obama campaign conference call with reporters, senior adviser David Axelrod said that former President George W. Bush’s policies and legacy — but not Bush himself — will be key to the Obama campaign’s effort to draw a sharp contrast with Mitt Romney, Greg Sargent reports.
“Axelrod joked that Bush the man would get about as much of a mention at the DNC as he did at the RNC — which is to say, almost none at all — but said Bush economics would be very much on the agenda.”
Said Axelrod: “We are going to take issue with the policies that were in place in the last decade, because this is where they want to go back to. These are the policies that they want to embrace once again.”
Alex Castellanos, a former political adviser to Mitt Romney:
“At some point in a debate, Obama is going to turn and challenge Romney, saying, ‘Mitt, you have nothing new to offer. In fact, on social issues, foreign policy, taxes, spending, Medicare and everything else, you have nothing different to offer than taking us back to what George Bush proposed. That’s what got us into this mess.’ Romney has yet to answer that question. He has until the first presidential debate Oct. 3, in Denver, to find a response.”
“Republican voters, if you ask them about my particular policy positions, often agree with me. So there’s a difference between Republicans in Washington and Republican and Republican-leaning voters around the country. I think that after this election, we’ll be in a position to once again reach out to Republicans and say that the American people have rendered a judgment, and the positions we’re taking are well within what used to be considered bipartisan centrist approaches.”
— President Obama, in an interview with Parade, on how he’ll be able to work with Republicans after the election.
Runner’s World is investigating claims by Rep. Paul Ryan that he ran a marathon in under three hours but “has been unable to find any marathon results by Ryan.”
“Requests for more information from Ryan’s Washington and Wisconsin offices, and from the Romney-Paul campaign, have so far gone unanswered.”
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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