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Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL) spoke on the House floor wearing a hooded sweatshirt — to protest the killing of Florida teen Trayvon Martin — and the presiding Republican ordered him removed from the chamber, reminding members they are not allowed to wear hats.
Said Rush: “Racial profiling has to stop. Just because someone wears a hoodie does not make them a hoodlum.”
Jay Leno pushed Mitt Romney last night “to explain what he would offer Americans with pre-existing medical conditions so that they might retain their coverage, perhaps the most popular provision of the president’s health care law,” NBC News reports.
Romney: “People with pre-existing conditions, as long as they have been insured before, they are going to be able to continue to have insurance.”
Leno: “Suppose they haven’t been insured.”
Romney: “If they are 45 years old and they show up and say I want insurance because I have heart disease, it’s like, ‘Hey guys. We can’t play the game like that. You’ve got to get insurance when you are well and then if you get ill, you are going to be covered.'”
Though Republicans are hoping the U.S. Supreme Court declares President Obama’s health care law unconstitutional, David Frum points out the GOP has no alternative and says they will be punished for it by voters.
“Republicans will need a Plan B. Unfortunately, they wasted the past three years that might have developed one. If the Supreme Court doesn’t rescue them from themselves, they’ll be heading into this election season arguing, in effect, Our plan is to take away the government-mandated insurance of millions of people under age 65, and replace it with nothing. And we’re doing this so as to better protect the government-mandated insurance of people over 65 — until we begin to phase out that insurance, too, for everybody now under 55.”
“Mitt Romney changes positions more often than a pornographic movie queen.”
— Former Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA), in an interview on Morning Joe, to promote his new book, Life Among Cannibals.
A must-read from Matt Bai:
“The Republican version of reality goes, briefly, like this: Boehner and Obama shook hands on a far-reaching deal to rewrite the tax code, roll back the cost of entitlements and slash deficits. But then Obama, reacting to pressure from Democrats in Congress, panicked at the last minute and suddenly demanded that Republicans accede to hundreds of billions of dollars in additional tax revenue. A frustrated Boehner no longer believed he could trust the president’s word, and he walked away. Obama moved the goal posts, is the Republican mantra.”
“In recent weeks, as it became clear that I was planning to write a more nuanced and detailed account of the final week of negotiations, both sides — but primarily the speaker and his aides — went out of their way to give extensive accounts to reporters at other outlets, in an effort to reinforce their well-rehearsed narratives. And yet it’s possible now to get beyond these clashing realities.”
A new Franklin & Marshall poll in Pennsylvania finds Rick Santorum barely ahead of Mitt Romney in his home state, 30% to 28%, within the poll’s 4.2% margin of error.
That’s a big change from February, when Santorum held a commanding 15-percentage-point lead over Romney in the poll.
A new ABC News-Washington Post poll finds Mitt Romney trails President Obama by 19 points in popularity. Just 34% hold a favorable opinion of Romney as compared to 53% for Obama.
Meanwhile, Romney’s 50% unfavorable score is higher than Obama ever has received; it’s been exceeded by just one other Republican candidate this year, Newt Gingrich, and by only one top candidate in 28 years, Hillary Clinton in 2008.
A new Quinnipiac poll finds President Obama leading Mitt Romney in three crucial swing states.
Florida: Obama 49%, Romney 42%
Ohio: Obama 47%, Romney 41%
Pennsylvania: Obama 45%, Romney 42%
Said pollster Peter Brown: “President Obama is on a roll in the key swing states. If the election were today, he would carry at least two states. And if history repeats itself, that means he would be re-elected.”
Democratic campaign treasurer Kinde Durkee is expected to plead guilty to stealing millions from the accounts she controlled for her California political clients, including Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA), the Sacramento Bee reports.
“Feinstein, who says millions are missing from her re-election account, wrote a $5 million check to her campaign account to make up for the losses. The senior senator is one of several politicians who have filed lawsuits to recoup some of the allegedly stolen money.”
Newt Gingrich “is cutting back his campaign schedule, will lay off about a third of his cash-strapped campaign’s full-time staff, and has replaced his manager as part of what aides are calling a ‘big-choice convention’ strategy,” Politico reports.
James Carville told CNN a Supreme Court ruling invalidating President Obama’s health care law may not be such a bad thing — at least politically.
Said Carville: “I think this will be the best thing that has ever happened to the Democratic Party.”
He added: “Then the Republican Party will own the healthcare system for the foreseeable future. And I really believe that. That is not spin.”
James Carville was spotted in a Barnes & Noble store flipping through The Republican Brain.
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Jeff Greenfield compares Newt Gingrich to the Black Knight of Monty Python and the Holy Grail fame.
“As his limbs are progressively hacked off, the knight declares ’tis but a scratch! Then: ‘a flesh wound!’ And finally: ‘Alright, we’ll call it a draw.’ With barely a tenth of the delegates so far allocated, victories in two of 26 contests, and polling at 13 percent in Gallup’s latest survey of GOP voters, Gingrich’s rationale for remaining in the race is, to put it mildly, elusive.”
Meanwhile, a new CNN/Opinion Research poll finds 61% of Republican voters want Gingrich to exit the race.
A new Pew Research Center poll shows that 55% of people were entirely unaware of a Mitt Romney aide’s Etch-A-Sketch comments last week.
The Fix: “The numbers serve as a reminder — for the umpteenth time — that simply because 100 percent of people who do politics for a living (the Fix included) are closely following a story, it’s no guarantee that the story is penetrating nearly as broadly among the general public.”
A new Marquette Law School poll in Wisconsin finds Gov. Scott Walker (R) is locked in a very tight recall race with two potential Democratic challengers, Tom Barrett (D) and Kathleen Falk (D).
Walker edges Barrett, 47% to 45%, and leads Falk 49% to 45%.
Said pollster Charles Franklin: “I don’t think you need the poll to know this is going to be a very close race.”
Over at Political Job Hunt, check out the new cache of job listings!
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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