Jonathan Soros, son of liberal financier George Soros, “has started a new Super PAC aimed at lessening the impact of Super PACs. He wants to use the $5 million to $8 million he plans on raising for negative ads aiming at politicians who oppose campaign finance reform,” the New York Times reports.
Said Soros: “The irony is not lost on anybody.”
A new Quinnipiac poll in New Jersey finds Gov. Chris Christie (R) with a healthy 54% to 39% job approval.
However, New Jersey voters say by 53% to 40% that Christie would be a bad choice as the vice presidential candidate for Mitt Romney.
“I think it can now be said, without equivocation — without equivocation — that this man hates this country. He is trying, Barack Obama is trying, to dismantle, brick-by-brick, the
American dream. There’s no other way to put this. There’s no other way
to explain this.”
— Radio host Rush Limbaugh, quoted by Politico, about President Obama.
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An advertisement released by Mitt Romney’s campaign earlier today which accused President Obama of cronyism and mocked his singing has been taken down due to a copyright infringement, according to the Huffington Post.
A new Pew Research poll finds that by two-to-one (44% to 22%), the public says that raising taxes on incomes above $250,00o would help the economy rather than hurt it, while 24% say this would not make a difference.
Moreover, an identical percentage (44%) says a tax increase on higher incomes would make the tax system more fair, while just 21% say it would make the system less fair.
“The only person who has seen Romney’s taxes is John McCain and he took one look and picked Sarah Palin.”
— James Carville, interviewed by CBS News.
President Obama seized on a new report claiming that Mitt Romney’s economic plan would create jobs overseas to ramp up his attacks on his Republican rival, The Hill reports.
Said Obama: “Today we learned that Romney’s jobs plan would create 800,000 jobs. There’s only one problem: they wouldn’t be in America.”
Jonathan Chait: “Most campaign advice falls into two broad categories, each with its own cliché. One cliché is: When You’re Explaining, You’re Losing. The argument here is that attempting to rebut the details of attacks simply allows the campaign to remain on your opponents’ chosen terrain, so you must avoid any such arguments, deflect attacks, and turn to your own themes. The second main cliché is Never Let an Attack Go Unanswered. This supposed cardinal sin is to decline to respond to an opposing charge.”
“Of course, the two clichés point in opposite directions, which suggests that, when a campaign hits a stretch of rough media or bad polling, there’s a ready-made argument to show why it obviously blundered.”
A new Purple Strategies poll in four battleground states — Ohio, Florida, Colorado and Virginia — finds a stable presidential race with President Obama leading Mitt Romney by two points, 47% to 45%, the same lead as in June.
“The race is also steady among independents across these states. Romney retains a 5-point lead among this key swing constituency (47% to 42%), essentially unchanged from his 6-point lead in June.”
Josh Marshall: “The Obama team’s goal here is to make the entirety of Romney’s
professional life toxic and off-limits before Romney even gets the
chance to introduce himself to much of the public. And they’re off to a
pretty good start.”
A new Gallup survey finds Americans’ opinions of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts are now much more negative than they were seven years ago, coming after his vote to uphold President Obama’s healthcare law.
Overall, just 39% have a favorable view as compared to 50% just after his confirmation hearings. Republicans’ favorable rating of Roberts is down 40 percentage points from 2005, while Democrats’ is up 19.
David Frum: “Romney’s core problem is this: He heads a party that must win two-thirds of the white working-class vote in presidential elections to compensate for its weakness in almost every demographic category. The white working class is the most pessimistic and alienated group in the electorate, and it especially fears and dislikes the kind of financial methods that gained Romney his fortune.”
“Romney has a strong potential defense: Bain was in the business of making companies more efficient and profitable. Downsizing and outsourcing were necessary — and often indispensable — means to that end… However, it’s not an argument that appeals much to the voters Romney most intensely needs to win. Hence his unleashing of the war room — but in the end, there’s only so much a war room can do. And this time, by trying to do too much, the Romney war room may have blasted its own side with lethal friendly fire.”
When Mitt Romney signed a federal financial disclosure form for his current presidential bid, he stated under the penalty of perjury that he had not been involved “in any way” with Bain Capital after he left for Utah in February 1999.
Mother Jones reports that during a 2002 hearing to determine if Mitt Romney met the residency requirement to run for governor Romney said that “after he departed Bain in February 1999 he went through a transition period regarding his work in Boston.”
“When a lawyer challenging his eligibility asked Romney, ‘Did you remain more or less continuously in Salt Lake City from February ’99 to the end of the year,’ Romney answered: ‘Actually, there was some transition away from my work in Boston for the first few months and then I pretty much stayed there after.’ Trying to clarify this, the lawyer, after referring to this ‘transition,’ asked, ‘So from February through the end of the year you were pretty much full-time out in Utah, right?’ Romney replied: ‘Well again, the beginning of the year was a good deal of time back and forth, but towards the last half of the year it was pretty much exclusively in Utah.'”
Andrew Sullivan: “If there was a good deal of time back and forth in the first few months and some business conducted all the way through to December (‘pretty much exclusively’), and if Romney’s own lawyer tells an inquiry that Romney’s work for Bain ‘continued unabated just as they had,’ then it is incontrovertibly true that Romney’s statement under oath that he was not involved ‘in any way’ in Bain business after February 1999 was a lie under oath.
David Gergen disagrees that Romney lied: “I may be wrong but based on what we know so far, I would conclude that we do not have persuasive evidence to show that he has.”
About 15 years ago several residents “didn’t like the candidates who were running for mayor of Talkeetna, so as a joke, they encouraged enough people to elect Stubbs the cat as a write-in candidate, and he actually won,” KTUU-TV reports.
Gawker: “The position is mostly honorary, allowing the 15-year-old Manx mix to
spend most of his time greeting tourists at Nagley’s General Store.”
“He should have put it to rest back in 2008 when he ran originally because he knew all these things were going to be problems. There’s clearly a problem with the tax returns otherwise he would release, you know, ten years of tax returns. He’s only released one year of tax returns. That’s a problem.”
— GOP strategist Rick Tyler, in an interview on MSNBC.
Lawrence Lessig: “A tiny number of Americans — .26 percent — give more than $200 to a congressional campaign. .05 percent give the maximum amount to any congressional candidate. .01 percent give more than $10,000 in any election cycle. And .000063 percent — 196 Americans — have given more than 80 percent of the super-PAC money spent in the presidential elections so far.”
Paul Begala: “We can almost guarantee that 48 percent of each state’s voters will go for Obama, and another 48 percent will decide for Romney. And so the whole shootin’ match comes down to around 4 percent of the voters in six states.”
“I did the math so you won’t have to. Four percent of the presidential vote in Virginia, Florida, Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico, and Colorado is 916,643 people. That’s it. The American president will be selected by fewer than half the number of people who paid to get into a Houston Astros home game last year — and my beloved Astros sucked last year; they were the worst team in baseball. Put another way, there are about as many people in San Jose as there are swing voters who will decide this election. That’s not even as many people as attended Puerto Rican cockfights in the past year — although there are obvious similarities.”
Fewer than 1% of Mitt Romney’s donors “have hit the limit they can donate to his election bid, suggesting cash is likely to keep pouring into his coffers,” Reuters reports.
“Only 40 donors have given $75,800 — the maximum individuals are allowed to give before the November 6 election — to the joint Victory fund that Romney shares with the Republican National Committees, according to a Reuters analysis of the fund’s first campaign finance filing submitted late on Sunday.”
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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