“Third Time’s The Charm?”: New Hampshire Says ‘No’ To Interloper Scott Brown
In New Hampshire, the Massachusetts invasion has been staved off—for now.
Incumbent Democrat Jeanne Shaheen has been declared the victor in the closely-fought race against Scott Brown, the former Massachusetts senator who slid across the border to the state where he keeps a family vacation home, declaring residency and announcing his candidacy in one fell swoop.
Brown had achieved national fame in 2009 when he crisscrossed Massachusetts in his pickup truck, going on to defeat attorney general Martha Coakley in a special election for the Senate seat formerly held by the late Ted Kennedy. That race presaged the Tea Party wave that was to come in 2010. Brown’s victory was short-lived however; in 2012, he was defeated by liberal favorite Elizabeth Warren.
Brown was a favorite of Wall Street and of moderate Republicans cheered by the possibility that a type of Rockefeller Republicanism was returning to the northeast. In the run-up to the midterms, he publicly flirted with running for president, before eventually being lured into the Senate race in neighboring New Hampshire.
It was a long shot to say the least. New Hampshire remains one of the most conservative states in the Northeast, with Republicans regularly competing in the presidential elections, but it is also fiercely independent, and resentful of the encroachment of the Boston suburbs.
Shaheen often played up her local roots. Brown did himself no favors when, in the campaign’s final debate, he seemed to flub a question about basic Granite State geography, calling Sullivan County north of Concord, when it is in fact west of Concord. The Shaheen campaign pounced, spending part of the next day hitting the hustings in Sullivan County.
“The key is that Brown said what he—and probably a lot of other people—think,” wrote a columnist for the Boston Globe. “That ‘anyplace past Concord’ faces the exact same set of issues.”
Brown tried to counter this narrative by focusing on national issues, describing a nation and hence a state that was left insecure and unstable thanks to President Obama’s leadership, and of course, by Shaheen’s support of that leadership. He combined a number of crises facing the president, including the threats of Ebola and ISIS, mismanagement in the Secret Service and child migrants coming over the border, to argue for a change in direction.
Those attacks though fell flat among charges that Brown was an interloper who would vote to limit the reproductive choices of women in the U.S. Senate.
Things took an especially awkward turn for Brown in the race’s final hours, when the former senator was asked by an MSNBC reporter if he planned to move back to Massachusetts if he lost.
Brown did not answer.
By: David Freedlander, The Daily Beast, November 4, 2014
“Where’s The Accountability?”: In Michigan, Public Records Could Very Well Be Gone Forever
Whether you’re a conservative, liberal, moderate, tea partier or progressive, there is one thing we can all agree on: We all want government to be accountable to the public.
One of the best ways to understand the inner workings of government and hold elected and public officials accountable is through open records laws. The Freedom of Information Act or FOIA allows watchdog groups, citizens and reporters to request and access public documents.
That’s why we were shocked on Wednesday to find out that the Michigan Department of Community Health had illegally deleted all email communications from its director despite the fact that state law requires them to remain on file for two years.
Here’s a little background: In Michigan, lawmakers and the governor are exempt from FOIA. In order to help the public see how government is working for them, we decided to request all email communications between department heads and the Governor and his chief of staff. It’s a roundabout way of doing it, but it is one of the only ways to get around the exemption in Michigan law.
Through this process we’ve discovered a number of things and have posted all of the documents for the public to view. One of our biggest findings was the fact that the Snyder administration quietly cancelled a $98,000 fine against the Aramark Corporation, an out-of-state company that has a prison food service contract with the state, after a series of contractual blunders.
Our latest FOIA request revealed another bombshell of information, but this time it’s the lack of information that was damning.
On Wednesday, after a month of waiting for the Department of Community Health to respond to our FOIA request, our attorney was informed that the emails didn’t exist because they had been deleted upon the director’s retirement.
That’s illegal. Under Michigan law, the emails that we were requesting must be kept on file for at least two years. In some of our other FOIA requests we’ve received emails dating back even further than that two-year timeframe. Deleting them before that time expires is a misdemeanor.
As a former journalist, I feel sick thinking about the fact that public records could very well be gone forever. We don’t know what was in those emails. We don’t know if there was anything nefarious or illegal going on in those conversations. That’s not the point. The point is public records were illegally destroyed.
The question that needs to be asked is, why? Why were these records destroyed? Who ordered their deletion? Those are questions that are burning in our mind and we’re determined to find out.
The department might as well have set a filing cabinet of public records on fire or shoved hundreds of pages of communications through a paper shredder. In this case, someone pressed delete and the public’s right to know went completely out the window.
By: Sam Inglot, The Huffington Post Blog, November 4, 2014
“A ‘True National Election’? Not Really”: A Shrunken U.S. Map There The Electorate Is Far More Republican Than The Country Overall
During the White House press briefing yesterday, Press Secretary Josh Earnest suggested to the media that many conclusions will be drawn from this year’s elections, but these lessons should be different from “a true national election.”
The right balked. If there are elections nationwide, how can it not be a true national election?
The answer has everything to do with who’s voting where. Obviously, all U.S. House races are up every other year, but they’re hardly a great barometer of a national race – in 2012, Democratic House candidates earned 1 million more votes than Republican House candidates, but Dems still ended up in the minority.
But the Senate is a different story. You may have heard about “structural” considerations that give Republicans a natural, built-in advantage in 2014, but it’s worth appreciating exactly what that means. Jonathan Cohn had a good piece on this overnight.
Senators serve staggered, six-year terms. And it so happens that the states with Senate elections this year are disproportionately conservative.
How do we know this? One way is by looking at how those states voted in 2012, the most recent presidential election year. In the actual election that took place, with all 50 states plus the District of Columbia voting, Obama won handily over Mitt Romney. Obama got 332 electoral votes, while Romney got just 206. But if the electorate in 2012 had consisted only of voters living in states participating in this year’s Senate elections, Romney would have won comfortably, with 165 electoral votes to Obama’s 130.
This is no small detail. It’s not a true national election because we’re dealing with a shrunken U.S. map – one where the electorate is far more Republican than the country overall.
Patrick Egan did a terrific job digging into the data, concluding:
Taken together, the rules on seat allotments and classes have yielded a Senate election cycle in 2014 that is profoundly unrepresentative of the nation as whole – and particularly tough for Democrats. […]
Simply put, this year’s Senate elections are unrepresentative of the nation to an extent that is unprecedented in elections held in the post-war era. So when we begin to sift through the results on Election Night, the number of Senate seats won and lost will tell us less than we might like about where the two parties stand in the minds of American voters.
Just so we’re clear, this is not to say geography alone is determinative. President Obama won Colorado twice, and voters there appear likely to elect their most far-right senator in state history. President Obama won Iowa twice, and Hawkeye State voters apparently intend to elect the most radical senator Capitol Hill has seen in many years.
The point, though, is that geography has given the GOP an edge it would otherwise lack. The structural considerations have tilted the playing field in ways that put Democrats at a disadvantage before a single ballot was cast.
In September 2012 – 26 months ago – the Washington Post ran a piece with this headline: “A GOP Senate majority? Just wait for 2014.” Aaron Blake reported at the time that the map would be “murderous” for Democrats in 2014 and Republicans would have “a great chance” to take control of the chamber after the midterms.
It’s not because Blake has a crystal ball; it’s because he could see these obvious structural advantages. Throw in some key retirements, dark money from the far-right, and the public blaming Obama for congressional Republicans’ refusal to govern, and we’re left with a recipe for Democratic failure.
As a practical matter, most of the country won’t know or care about any of this, but Earnest’s assessment about this not being “a true national election” has the benefit of being true.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 4, 2014
“Same Old Issues”: Why The Media Are Ignoring The Dangerous Ideas of Joni Ernst And Other Extremists Now On The Cusp Of Power
Joni Ernst, who may become Iowa’s next senator, denies climate change, supports a personhood amendment and says she’d use her “beautiful little Smith & Wesson” to defend herself “from the government, should they decide that my rights are no longer important.” She’s also seriously flirted with a John Birch Society–backed conspiracy theory about an evil plot called Agenda 21.
But all you’d know from the corporate media is that Ernst made a really catchy ad about castrating pigs and that she is supposedly (but not really) the victim of a sexist remark made by outgoing Democratic senator Tom Harkin.
Norman Ornstein, the pundit who was once quoted all over until he dared to say that Republicans are the real obstructionists, explains such grand omissions brilliantly:
The most common press narrative for elections this year is to contrast them with the 2010 and 2012 campaigns. Back then, the GOP “establishment” lost control of its nominating process, ended up with a group of extreme Senate candidates who said wacky things—Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock, Sharron Angle—and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in races that should have been slam dunks. Now the opposite has happened: The establishment has fought back and won, vanquishing the Tea Party and picking top-flight candidates who are disciplined and mainstream, dramatically unlike Akin and Angle.
It is a great narrative, a wonderful organizing theme. But any evidence that contradicts or clouds the narrative devalues it, which is perhaps why evidence to the contrary tends to be downplayed or ignored. Meantime, stories that show personal gaffes or bonehead moves by the opponents of these new, attractive mainstream candidates, fit that narrative and are highlighted.
Of course, this does not mean that the press has a Republican bias, any more than it had an inherent Democratic bias in 2012 when Akin, Angle, and Mourdock led the coverage. What it suggests is how deeply the eagerness to pick a narrative and stick with it, and to resist stories that contradict the narrative, is embedded in the culture of campaign journalism. [My italics] The alternative theory, that the Republican establishment won by surrendering its ground to its more ideologically extreme faction, picking candidates who are folksy and have great resumes but whose issue stances are much the same as their radical Tea Party rivals, goes mostly ignored. Meanwhile, there was plenty of coverage of the admittedly bonehead refusal by Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes to say she had voted for Obama—dozens of press references to NBC’s Chuck Todd saying it was “disqualifying”—but no stories saying that references to Agenda 21 or talking about terrorists and drug lords out to kill Arkansans [as Republican senatorial candidate Tom Cotton does] were disqualifying.
By: Leslie Savan, The Nation, November 3, 2014
“The Media Just Hasn’t Reported On It”: Why Republicans Have Gotten Away With Craziness This Year
We don’t know if Joni Ernst is going to be the next Senator from Iowa, but one thing we can say is that Democrats failed to paint her as a radical Tea Partier with dangerous ideas. (Actually, there’s another thing we can say: her replacing liberal lion Tom Harkin would have to be the widest ideological swing in a Senate seat from one Congress to the next in a long time.) The question is, why? And more broadly, why have they failed to do that with any of the GOP Senate candidates running this year? It’s not like this is a bunch of moderates. One explanation is that the establishment triumphed by weeding out the nutcases:
National Republicans managed this year to snuff out every bomb-throwing insurgent who tried to wrest a Senate nod away from one of their favored candidates. They spent millions against baggage-laden activists such as Matt Bevin, the Louisville investor who mounted a ham-fisted challenge to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel, the conservative upstart who imperiled a safe seat by nearly ousting longtime Sen. Thad Cochran.
The confrontational approach—by both party committees and outside super PACs—represented a sharp departure from the GOP’s cautious strategy in the 2010 and 2012 cycles, when cartoonishly inept nominees aligned with the tea party lost the party as many as five Senate seats.
All that’s true, but it’s not just that they kept crazy people from winning primaries, they also kept primary winners’ craziness from undoing their campaigns. Ernst has managed to skate away from accountability for her more disturbing ideas, like her embrace of the “Agenda 21” conspiracy theory or her statement that she might have to start shooting government officials if they trample her rights. That’s not to mention her beliefs that there should be no federal minimum wage and that weapons of mass destruction were actually found in Iraq.
And it isn’t like Democrats haven’t tried to convince voters that Ernst is a radical. So why hasn’t she, like Todd Akin and Sharron Angle before her, gotten all kinds of negative attention for her comments that ultimately drove her to defeat?
There are many factors, like the fact that the Republican party has stuck by her, that had an impact. But I think the biggest reason is that the media just haven’t reported on it very much. Ernst’s Agenda 21 conspiricizing may have gotten attention from liberal bloggers, but it didn’t get much notice in the Iowa media, or from national political reporters. In contrast, when Bruce Braley told attendees at a fundraiser that if Republicans took the Senate, the Judiciary Committee would be chaired by “a farmer from Iowa without a law degree,” meaning the state’s senior senator, Chuck Grassley, it was huge news. The Des Moines Register, the state’s largest paper (and one that Ernst complains is biased against her) did editorialize once against Ernst’s radical and constitutionally demented views on “nullification,” but that’s the only substantive article about the topic that comes up when you search the paper’s web site (though there are a few letters to the editor that mention it). On the other hand, when I searched for Braley’s statement about Grassley being a farmer in the DMR, I got 79 hits.
While I haven’t done a systematic analysis of the rest of Iowa or national media, that doesn’t seem unrepresentative—I’ve seen the Grassley farmer thing mentioned many, many times in mainstream sources, but not Ernst’s crazier beliefs. Perhaps it’s because reporters are just tired of writing the “Republican candidate says extreme things” story. But I think it’s also that the Braley “gaffes,” whether it’s implying that farmers are not necessarily the font of wisdom in all things, or being upset when his neighbor’s chickens crap on his lawn, are personal in a way Ernst’s statements aren’t. They supposedly imply that Braley might be a bit of a jerk, whereas you can be friendly and nice and also believe the UN is coming to kick you off your land.
The trouble is that when we’re talking about electing people to the nation’s legislature, this is completely backward. The personal stuff is of only the tiniest importance, if any at all, while beliefs about the world are very relevant. Joni Ernst’s ideas about the UN, about guns, and about the legal status of zygotes will actually make a difference in how she does her job, should she win. In contrast, unless Harry Reid has his chickens crap in Bruce Braley’s Capitol Hill office just before a critical budget vote, I don’t think that’s going to really be an issue. But that’s what the campaign coverage has focused on.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 3, 2014
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