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“We’ve got a politics that’s stuck right now. And the reason it’s stuck
is because people spend more time thinking about the next election than
they do thinking about the next generation.”
— President Obama, quoted by Reuters, at a fundraiser for House Democrats.
A new Public Policy Institute of California poll finds 48% of voters approve of Gov. Jerry Brown’s (D) job performance while just 36% disapprove
Georgia Democratic Party Chairman Mike Barton said that he “would resign amid mounting legal problems and growing pushback from fellow Democrats who feared his leadership could complicate the party’s comeback bid,” the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports.
Berlon “had vowed to serve out the remaining two years of his four-year term after a trying month in which he was suspended by the State Bar of Georgia, reprimanded by Georgia’s top court and sued by a former client.”
Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) was highly critical of a proposal by Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) for mass arrests of 18,000 Gangster Disciples, telling the Chicago Sun-Times that Kirk’s approach is “headline grabbing” and an “upper-middle-class, elitist white boy solution to a problem he knows nothing about.”
“One of Kirk’s top priorities is targeting gangs; he has been meeting with law enforcement officials to devise a plan to execute the mass arrests.”
Rob Lowe will play President John F. Kennedy in National Geographic’s telepic Killing Kennedy, Variety reports.
“Based on a book by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard, Killing Kennedy centers on the assassination of JFK and will debut later this year, timed with the 50th anniversary of the prez’s death.”
David Petraeus, the former U.S. Army general who resigned last year as Central Intelligence Agency chief, is rebooting his career with KKR & Co., the giant private-equity firm, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Petraeus “instantly becomes one of the most recognizable faces at KKR. A former four-star general who led forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Petraeus has traveled the world and knows military, economic and political leaders. Those connections could help KKR land deals in some foreign countries where the firm has less experience and better evaluate the risks and rewards of offbeat investments.”
“I’ve never understood the allure of putting your name on a building that was built with taxpayers’ money.”
— Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-SC), quoted by the Washington Post.
Advertising executive Donny Deutsch to HuffPost Live:
“What I believe fascinated everybody about Sarah Palin, and I just know this as a marketer: she was the first woman in power that a lot of people felt was just physically attractive. And people didn’t know what to do with that. They never saw that before.”
President Obama will tap former Justice Department official James Comey to become the next FBI Director, NPR reports.
“Comey, 52, has an extensive track record at the highest levels of federal law enforcement. He served as the deputy attorney general — the second in command at Justice — in the George W. Bush administration, and as the top federal prosecutor in Southern District of New York, where he filed charges against housewares maven Martha Stewart for lying about stock trades, among other notable cases. As a young prosecutor in Virginia, he pioneered an effort to remove guns from Richmond’s streets.”
The New York Times reports that less than three years and $95 million spent to deploy new voting machines in New York City, “election officials say the counting process with the machines is too cumbersome to use them for the mayoral primary this year, and then for the runoff that seems increasingly likely to follow as soon as two weeks later.”
“In a last-ditch effort to avoid an electoral embarrassment, the city is poised to go back in time: it is seeking to redeploy lever machines, a technology first put in place in the 1890s, for use this September at polling places across the five boroughs. The city’s fleet of lever machines was acquired in 1962 and has been preserved in two warehouses in Brooklyn, shielded from dust by plastic covers.”
Oklahoma State Rep. Doug Cox (R) wrote in the Oklahoman that the Republican party supports abortion laws that don’t work “in the real world.”
“As a practicing physician (who never has or will perform an abortion), I deal with the real world. In the real world, 15- and 16-year-olds get pregnant (sadly, 12-, 13- and 14-year-olds do also). In the real world, 62 percent of women ages 20 to 24 who give birth are unmarried. And in the world I work and live in, an unplanned pregnancy can throw up a real roadblock on a woman’s path to escaping the shackles of poverty.”
“Yet I cannot convince my Republican colleagues that one of the best ways to eliminate abortions is to ensure access to contraception.”
“It’s freedom of speech. You folks should understand that better than I. It is the First Amendment, then there is the Second and I love ’em both. The minute we start stifling our speech, we might as well go home, roll up our sleeves and get our guns out.”
— Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R), quoted by the Portland Press Herald, on being denied a request to speak to lawmakers.
A new Public Policy Polling survey in Virginia finds Terry McAuliffe (D) leading Ken Cuccinelli (R) in the race for goverrnor, 42% to 37%.
However, the poll also finds that “as voters get to know the candidates better more are becoming undecided. That’s not the normal trend, but it’s also not normal to have an election where voters dislike both candidates five months out.”
Key findings: McAuliffe is not popular, with 29% of voters holding a favorable opinion of him to 33% with a negative one. But Ken Cuccinelli is even more unpopular, with 44% of voters rating him unfavorably to just 32% with a positive opinion.
Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee will switch his political party once again and become a Democrat, the Providence Journal reports.
“Chafee was a Republican councilman and mayor of Warwick and U.S. Senator. He shed his party affiliation after losing his 2006 bid for re-election to the Senate. He was elected governor as an independent in 2010.”
A trial date has been set in an Iowa lawsuit alleging that Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) stole and misused an e-mail distribution list during her failed 2012 presidential campaign, the Des Moines Register reports.
The Week: “As the president prepares an aggressive push for his judicial nominees, Republicans are calling foul.”
Coming this summer: JFK’s Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President by Thurston Clarke.
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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— Chuck Todd, host of “Meet the Press”
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— Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the Rothenberg Political Report
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— Charlie Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report
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— Larry Sabato, Center for Politics, University of Virginia
“Political Wire is a great, great site.”
— Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”
“Taegan Goddard has a knack for digging out political gems that too often get passed over by the mainstream press, and for delivering the latest electoral developments in a sharp, no frills style that makes his Political Wire an addictive blog habit you don’t want to kick.”
— Arianna Huffington, founder of The Huffington Post
“Political Wire is one of the absolute must-read sites in the blogosphere.”
— Glenn Reynolds, founder of Instapundit
“I rely on Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire for straight, fair political news, he gets right to the point. It’s an eagerly anticipated part of my news reading.”
— Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.