Just dropped · Trial Balloon · Ep. 189
Navigating the Nonsense
Some exciting news to announce this morning:
Wonk Wire, the public policy companion site to Political Wire, is now part of Roll Call. I’ll continue to highlight the day’s most important policy stories and analysis, but thousands of new and knowledgeable readers will join the conversation.
If that’s your thing, please drop by and say hello.
Roll Call is also launching other blogs today from Stu Rothenberg, Morton Kondracke, David Hawkings and David Drucker.
“Washington is dysfunctional, but it’s dysfunctional in a dysfunctional way. Members of Congress and the administration agree on too much. We agree on spending money we don’t have. We agree on not over sighting the programs that should be over sighted. We agree on continuing to spend money on programs that don’t work or are ineffective. Basically we agree on too much.”
— Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), in an interview with Meet the Press.
The National Republican Congressional Committee “is moving to reboot its polling operation after a messy 2012 cycle, the first concrete remedy taken by the Republican side since candidates and outside groups were left stunned on Election Day by results that their internal data never came close to predicting,” Politico reports.
The NRCC “is the first GOP entity to take specific steps to try to rectify the party’s widely acknowledged polling debacle. Republican strategists confirmed after the end of the 2012 race that a huge slice of their survey data was based on flawed assumptions, and failed to anticipate the diversity and scale of turnout on the Democratic side.”
With reports that Ashley Judd is telling advisers she’ll announce a U.S. Senate bid from Kentucky this spring, Ruby Cramer talks with staffers who ran campaigns for Clint Eastwood, Sonny Bono, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Al Franken who say the actress “can win if she gets in early, stays local, and works like hell.”
The Wall Street Journal estimates the unemployment rate would be just 7.1% without government job cuts over the last three years.
“Federal, state and local governments have shed nearly 750,000 jobs since June 2009… No other sector comes close to those job losses over the same period. Construction is in second worst place, but its 225,000 cuts are less than a third of the government reductions. To be sure, construction and other sectors performed worse during the depths of the recession, but no area has had a worse recovery.”
Staffers for Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV) “have been bullying other senators’ aides to protect the Nevada Republican’s space in the Russell Senate Office Building,” Roll Call reports.
“As part of the biennial Senate office lottery, junior members are obligated to show their office suites to more senior members, who then have 24 hours to decide whether to claim that space as their own. Heller’s office suite — which he inherited after the scandal-fueled resignation of Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) — may be particularly attractive to other senators because its floor plan includes a larger-than-average member office.”
“Though special courtesies are usually extended to aides and members visiting offices, Heller staffers repeatedly tried to keep them from seeing the spacious member office, sources reported, saying meetings were ongoing and could not be interrupted.”
“At a time when $46 billion in mandatory budget cuts are causing anxiety at the Pentagon, administration officials see one potential benefit: there may be an opening to argue for deep reductions in programs long in President Obama’s sights, and long resisted by Congress,” the New York Times reports.
“On the list are not only base closings but also an additional reduction in deployed nuclear weapons and stockpiles and a restructuring of the military medical insurance program that costs more than America spends on all of its diplomacy and foreign aid around the world. Also being considered is yet another scaling back in next-generation warplanes, starting with the F-35, the most expensive weapons program in United States history.”
“America’s fraught ties with Afghanistan suffered a jarring blow Sunday, when Afghan President Hamid Karzai said during a visit by the new U.S. defense secretary that the Taliban were killing Afghan civilians ‘in service to America,'” the Wall Street Journal reports.
Washington Post: “The remarks painted an embarrassing picture of discord that marred a visit by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, his first foreign trip as Pentagon chief, and plunged the tenuous allies into crisis mode at a time when the United States is struggling to wind down the unpopular war.”
Republican strategist Steve Schmidt told Meet the Press that his party is not very friendly to women.
Said Schmidt: “It’s one of the problems we have structurally in the Republican Party… Any company, any organization in today’s day and age that doesn’t give equal opportunity to women, that doesn’t advance women to the table, is going to be an organization that has difficulty competing.”
Ashley Judd (D) has told key advisers that she is planning to announce her candidacy for U.S. Senate against Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the Huffington Post reports.
“Judd told one close ally that she plans to announce her run for the Democratic nomination for the 2014 race ‘around Derby’ — meaning in early May when the Kentucky Derby brings national attention to Louisville and the Bluegrass State.”
Man, you guys are crack addicts. You really are obsessed with all this politics… okay, heroin addict. Is that better?”
— Jeb Bush, in a Meet the Press interview, when asked if he’s considering a 2016 presidential bid.
House Republican can no longer “count on their members to support them on procedural votes,” The Hill reports.
“Sixteen Republicans defected Wednesday in a vote on the rule governing consideration of a government-funding bill meant to prevent a government shutdown. The defections could have caused the rule to fail since most Democrats voted also voted against it.”
“Even more striking? Seven of the Republicans who voted against the rule then voted for the funding bill.”
“Votes on rules are supposed to be party-line and serve as tests of a caucus’s unity. So it was disconcerting for leaders to see so many Republicans vote against the rule they had crafted. Worse, from a leadership perspective, is that some Republicans say they plan on doing it again if they feel leaders are limiting them from offering controversial amendments on the floor.”
John Aravosis reports that voucher schools in Louisiana and Indiana are using a U.S. History textbook in their eighth grade classes that teaches that the “hippies” of the 1960s were draft dodgers who were rude, didn’t bathe, and worshipped Satan.
New York City Council speaker Christine Quinn (D) “declared her candidacy for mayor on Sunday with a glossy biographical video and a walking tour of the city, a signal that her campaign hopes to attract voters with her outsize, off-the-cuff personality — or at least a carefully curated version of it,” the New York Times reports.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) says the Bush family name “will not drag down his political ambitions as he left open the possibility of running for president in 2016,” The Hill reports.
Said Bush: “I don’t think there’s any Bush baggage at all. I love my brother. I’m proud of his accomplishments. I love my dad. I’m proud to be a Bush and if I run for president it’s not because of something in my DNA that compels me to do it.”
He added: “It would be that it’s the right the thing to do for my family, that the conditions are right and that I have something to offer.”
“We need Ted Kennedy. It’s hard for a guy like me to say, but Ted would reach across the aisle and say ‘for the good of the country’ we need to solve this problem. You need some people stepping up like that.”
— Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R), quoted by Yahoo News, on finding a solution to the sequester.
U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, who lost out in a bruising bid for the job of secretary of state, “has emerged as far and away the front-runner to succeed Thomas Donilon as President Obama’s national security adviser later this year,” the Washington Post reports.
“The job would place her at the nexus of foreign-policy decision making and allow her to rival the influence of Secretary of State John F. Kerry in shaping the president’s foreign policy.”
“The appointment would mark a dramatic twist of fortune for Rice, whose prospects to become the country’s top diplomat fizzled last year after a round of television appearances in which she provided what turned out to be a flawed account of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.”
Peggy Noonan spoke with two senators who dined with President Obama on Wednesday night. One was “heartened and impressed by the meeting while retaining his skepticism” while the other “was more optimistic and left the meeting moved.”
“Each independently mentioned one aspect of the conversation that troubled them both: The president, while friendly and forthcoming, seemed to withdraw somewhat when talk turned to continuing the process.”
“Both senators said that near the end of the two-hour, 20-minute dinner, a senator or senators pressed the president: This has been a good discussion, it’s promising, but we need a plan, a process, so that whatever momentum comes from this talk isn’t squandered. The Republicans fear that members of the Senate from both parties will not be able to come to serious agreement unless the president is actively involved and puts the prestige of his office behind it.”
Taegan Goddard
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.
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