The Sarasota Herald-Tribune notes that the job running elections is in hot demand.
“For years, county elections supervisor jobs were viewed as mundane administrative posts with so little public policy work that most politicians did not even consider running for them. Now, along Florida’s west coast, seasoned political players are looking to parlay their years of experience in partisan battles into an advantage in becoming elections overseers.”
“We don’t need an outsourcing pioneer in the Oval Office.”
— President Obama, quoted by Politico, saying Mitt Romney led the wave of outsourcing American jobs while running Bain Capital.
President Obama’s re-election campaign opened an event registry to to allow your guests to give a campaign donation instead of a gift.
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Utah congressional candidate Ryan Combe (D) uses humor in an attempt to convince some voters to pick him in Tuesday’s 1st congressional district Democratic primary.
Very well done.
Jonathan Alter: “Across the country, the Republicans’ carefully orchestrated plan to make voting harder — let’s call it the Voter Suppression Project — may keep just enough young people and minorities from the polls that Republicans will soon be in charge of all three branches of the federal government.”
“Yes, both sides try to change voting laws to favor their team. The 1993 ‘motor voter‘ law that made voting more convenient by extending registration to the Department of Motor Vehicles helped mostly Democrats. That was at least in the long American tradition of expanding the franchise.”
“The Republican effort to restrict voting isn’t just anti- Democrat, it’s anti-democratic. No fair-minded person believes the tall tales of voters pretending they were someone else… This isn’t about stopping vote-stealing and other corruption, for which there are already plenty of laws on the books. It’s about rigging the system to keep power.”
The Daily Beast has the list.
John Avlon: “Mitt Romney has learned from experience that policy specifics can cause political headaches.” His recent speech on immigration “was a microcosm of a strategy we’re seeing over and over in this campaign: attack your opponent but avoid saying what you’d specifically do differently to solve the problem.”
Meanwhile, President Obama “has so far failed to lay out a compelling argument about how a second term would be different and better than his first one.”
“For voters, the key question is what the next president will actually do in office. That’s why policy matters, especially for challengers. The addiction to negative attacks offers heat but no light. After all, pointing out a problem is very different from having a plan to solve it.”
“Our state is doing extremely well. We still have 800,000 people out of work, but we’re changing it. Tourism is way up, jobs are up, housing prices are staying stable. If you want to buy a house, now is the time.”
— Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R), quoted by TPM, apparently not heeding the advice of Mitt Romney’s campaign to downplay positive economic news in Florida.
Mary Cheney, the openly gay daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, married her long-time partner Heather Poe this morning in Washington, D.C., the Daily Caller reports.
The former vice president and his wife, Lynne, said they are “delighted” the couple could have their “relationship recognized.”
Clay Shirky: “Clinton used mailing lists in ’92, and every election since then — famously Howard Dean to Barack Obama — has involved considerably more imaginative use of social media. And this election has not. I’ve been quite surprised by that.”
“I had a student looking at Super PACs a while ago, and we said, ‘Let’s try and find out what the Super PACs’ social media strategy is.’ As she came back about 10 days later, she said, ‘I think I know what the Super PAC’s social media strategy is: Don’t use it.’ That’s exactly the whole point of being a Super PAC, to be able to spend unlimited money on the kind of media where no one has the right or the ability to respond, and to minimize transparency. This election feels to me, right now, more Nixon-Kennedy than Obama-McCain because television has become the tool of choice for the source of unlimited fundraising. Politicians like television better; nobody gets to yell back to you if you’re yelling on TV.”
The Daily Beast provides 10 juiciest bits from Rielle Hunter’s new tell-all, What Really Happened: John Edwards, Our Daughter, and Me.
Jon Stewart takes President Obama to task for asserting executive privilege on documents requested by Congress related to the mismanaged program known as “Fast and Furious.”
Peggy Noonan: “Actually, it’s amazing that during an existential crisis — a crisis that is economic, cultural and political, and that bears on our role and purpose in the world — both candidates for our highest office have felt free to be so… well, insubstantial. Neither Mr. Romney nor Mr. Obama has caught hold of the overall meaning of his candidacy, Mr. Romney because so far he’s chosen not to, and Mr. Obama because he’s tried and failed.”
Coming later this summer: Dead Man Wins Election by Phil Mason.
The book is a collection of “the wackiest and most unbelievable tales” in politics.
With Commerce Secretary John Bryson’s resignation this week, a Smart Politics review of presidential cabinet data finds that President Obama currently ranks tied for fourth of the 23 administrations since FDR’s first term for the lowest rate of department head departures.
Charlie Cook: “A little more than four months out from the election, the tides seem about as neutral as they can be. Both parties have surprisingly comparable levels of exposure, largely because of redistricting. The relatively calm surface of this year’s waters belies a lot of offsetting tumult and change underneath. But for House Republicans, who hold a 25-seat majority, a status quo election producing minimal net change would be good news.”
“Republicans would need to mess up pretty badly to lose their House majority in the near future.”
USA Today notes the cost of gasoline could be below $3 a gallon by the November election.
“Nationally, regular gasoline averages $3.47 a gallon, down 47 cents from this year’s high in April and well below the $5-a-gallon fears fanned earlier this year by energy speculators, Middle East tensions and oil refinery glitches that crimped supplies. Those issues appear to be over, at least for now.”
Mitt Romney’s financial company, Bain Capital, “invested in a series of
firms that specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to
new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India,” the Washington Post reports.
“During the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in
running Bain, a private equity firm that he founded, it owned companies
that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United
States to overseas call centers and factories making computer
components, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange
Commission.”
More details: “Bain played several roles in helping these
outsourcing companies, such as investing venture capital so they could
grow and providing management and strategic business advice as they
navigated this rapidly developing field.”
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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