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David Frum, author and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, is our guest on the latest episode of the Political Wire podcast.
He talks about the upcoming midterm elections and what Republicans should do about the growing gap between the Tea Party and the GOP Establishment.
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Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) campaign released a brutal video attack on primary challenger Matt Bevin (R).
Time: “In the following interactive, we put together 12 questions that have a statistical correlation to a person’s political leanings, even if the questions themselves are seemingly apolitical. At the end of this (completely anonymous) quiz, we’ll use your responses to guess your politics.”
Some great clicks from Wonk Wire:
‘I was blindsided yesterday morning.”
— New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), at a news conference over the bridge scandal.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) apologized “to the people of New Jersey” and the “people of Fort Lee” and fired a senior aide, Bridget Anne Kelly, one day after e-mails surfaced showing she was intimately involved in the decision to close two of three local access lanes from Fort Lee on to the George Washington Bridge in September, the Newark Star Ledger reports.
“The governor also announced his two-time campaign manager, Bill Stepien, will not take over as head of the New Jersey Republican Party, as had been announced Tuesday… Christie also asked Stepien to withdraw as a consultant for the Republican Governors Association, which Christie chairs.”
New York Times: “Federal prosecutors in New Jersey will begin a preliminary inquiry into the lane closures in Fort Lee, according to a law enforcement source.”
First Read: “But it’s also important to emphasize that we don’t know what this will ultimately mean for Christie’s White House ambitions. After all, we’ve seen plenty of successful politicians survive scandals and controversies — Gennifer Flowers for Bill Clinton. Tony Rezko and Jeremiah Wright for Barack Obama. But make no mistake: This is a serious story for Christie. By the way, if you are on Team Christie right now, you should know, plenty of folks will now be looking at other interactions between the Christie administration and local officials. If mayors were punished for not supporting Christie in his landslide bid for re-election, what did mayors get who DID endorse? The point is — everything Christie did and does locally will be viewed through a different prism now and with more suspicion. If this controversy has done one thing, it’s cost Christie that ‘benefit of the doubt’ aspect politicians need sometimes to weather controversies.”
First Read: “Congress is about to get more polarized in the Senate with all the retirements of moderates and look at the House, a place most would think couldn’t get MORE ideologically divided. Just in the last month, on the Republican side, there have been the retirements of Virginia’s Frank Wolf, Iowa’s Tom Latham, and Pennsylvania’s Jim Gerlach. On the Democratic side, out are North Carolina’s Mike McIntyre (announced yesterday) and Utah’s Jim Matheson. If you toss in Arkansas’ Tim Griffin and New Jersey’s Jon Runyan, and the pool of congressional members willing to vote with the other side is shrinking. Whatever’s left of the middle or the pragmatic caucus is disappearing. And there wasn’t much of a middle to begin with. Every one of these retiring members is going to be replaced by someone more partisan. It doesn’t matter which party wins control overall, the two parties, ideologically, will be farther apart and that guarantees even more gridlock.”
Not surprisingly, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) led off the Daily Show last night.
Jon Stewart: “As a guy who grew up in New Jersey, I’m disappointed, ashamed of the state I grew up in. Political payback through traffic congestion? To see New Jersey sink to such a piss-poor, third-rate quality of corruption….This is New Jersey! A state renowned for its piss-rich, first-rate corruption.”
“David Wildstein deserves an ass-kicking. Sorry. There, I said it.”
— Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich (D), quoted by the Newark Star Ledger, on the Port Authority official responsible creating traffic by closing lanes on the George Washington Bridge.
Gov. Chris Christie (R) “is learning that being a Party of One can be pretty lonely when times get tough,” Politico reports.
“Democrats predictably condemned the New Jersey governor after a bombshell report Wednesday tied one of his top staffers to a burgeoning scandal that’s already been dubbed ‘Bridge-gate.’ More notable was the dearth of Republicans who rose to Christie’s defense — and, privately, the schadenfreude expressed by some of them that a man who’s never been shy about taking shots at others was suddenly on the receiving end.”
New York Times: “The usually verbose and swaggering Mr. Christie, who once mocked questions from reporters about the abrupt closing of lanes to the bridge, seemed at a loss for how to respond on Wednesday.”
“Prominent Republicans are working to recast the party’s message about tackling poverty and boosting the middle class amid concerns that a relentless focus on the troubles of Obamacare will not be enough to guarantee electoral success,” the Los Angeles Times reports.
“The move seeks to address widespread public anxiety about the uneven economic recovery, a topic that Democrats have largely had to themselves in recent months. But even as party strategists push for a higher-profile approach, conservative lawmakers face a difficult challenge in crafting a message that appeals to middle-income and working-class voters while maintaining support among the party base.”
“It’s the latest acknowledgment that Republicans’ traditional emphasis on fiscal austerity and smaller government — while popular among grass-roots conservatives and gospel to much of their House majority — has been difficult to sell among the broader electorate.”
Karen Tumulty: “The ambitious ‘Great Society’ agenda begun half a century ago continues to touch nearly every aspect of American life. But the deep philosophical divide it created has come to define the nation’s harsh politics, especially in the Obama era.”
“On the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s declaration of a War on Poverty, Republicans and Democrats are engaged in a battle over whether its 40 government programs have succeeded in lifting people from privation or worsened the situation by trapping the poor in dependency.”
“Emergency responders were delayed in attending to four medical situations – including one in which a 91-year-old woman lay unconscious – due to traffic gridlock caused by unannounced closures of access lanes to the George Washington Bridge, according to the head of the borough’s EMS department,” the Bergen Record reports.
“The woman later died, borough records show.”
Newark Star Ledger: “Democrats have long accused Republican Gov. Chris Christie of ordering the lane closures as political retribution for Fort Lee’s Democratic mayor refusing to endorse his re-election bid last year. Today, newly unveiled e-mails show that one of Christie’s top aides knew about the closures in advance. The governor himself has denied being involved and today issued a statement admonishing the aide.”
The Week: Is Chris Christie finished?
“Robert Gates’s tenure running the Pentagon might go down as the greatest performance in acting history,” Politico reports.
“On the outside, he was an even-keeled, plain speaking former college president, one who declared to Congress he hadn’t returned to Washington to be a ‘bump on a log.’ He cleaned house at the Air Force after an embarrassing nuclear weapons scandal and, most of all, righted the course of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — as much as any secretary of defense could.”
“On the inside, according to an early copy of Gates’s new memoir… he was apparently hating every minute of it. But he kept almost everything behind the poker face he’d learned to wear during decades in the spy business.”
Roll Call: “Two longtime House Democrats — Reps. Mike McIntyre of North Carolina and Carolyn McCarthy of New York — will not seek re-election in 2014, according to a Democratic aides.”
Jonathan Chait: “To this point, Chris Christie has treated the George Washington Bridge closure story as a joke, and national reporters have regarded it as a minor irritation. The public release of e-mails among his staff changes all that. The e-mails prove that Christie’s loyalists closed the bridge deliberately as political retribution, not as a ‘traffic study’ as claimed. They display an almost comical venality bordering on outright sociopathy. And they will probably destroy Christie’s chances in 2016.”
Chris Cillizza: “Molehills can grow into mountains in politics. This is now a serious problem for Christie.”
Ron Fournier says President Obama may end up looking better than former Defense Secretary Robert Gates as more people read Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.
“If military commanders were shown disrespect or given obstacles to fighting war, that would be one thing. But if they were questioned and challenged and kept in check, it is another. Isn’t that the president’s job?”
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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