“The Face Of The McConnell Campaign”: Should Chuck Todd Be ‘Disqualified’ For Saying The Midterm Elections Don’t Matter?
A few developments today in the all-important Kentucky Senate race: Bill Clinton is expected to draw large, enthusiastic crowds for Alison Lundergan Grimes in Owensboro and Paducah; Mitch McConnell is on day two of his three-day fake-enthusiasm bus tour (the state GOP party is giving all-expenses-paid trips to volunteers as long as they “contribute to an enthusiastic atmosphere” at his events, according to an e-mail obtained by The Hill); and Chuck Todd continues to defend his now-infamous declaration that Grimes “disqualified herself” by refusing to say whether she voted for Obama.
As you’ve probably seen by now, McConnell put footage of Todd in a heavily rotated TV ad, and, from what I could tell after spending two days in Kentucky, Chuck Todd has become the face of the McConnell campaign.
Now, I don’t know if this exactly disqualifies Todd from moderating the New Hampshire debate tonight between Jeanne Shaheen and Scott Brown, but the host of the storied Meet the Press and a self-described political junkie has said that it really doesn’t matter which political party wins the Senate. He made that case in an interview with President Obama on his debut MTP last month, saying, A couple more extra red or a couple more blue seats, what’s the diff? Three billion dollars, he said, is being spent merely “to see if it’s Harry Reid or Mitch McConnell that’s in charge of gridlock in the Senate.”
Todd then turned to panelist John Stanton, from Buzzfeed, to pooh-pooh Obama’s argument that party control of the Senate is actually, uh, important:
TODD: You know, Stanton, he was trying to make the rationale for why the midterms matter. And when you have to say, “I know some people don’t think, but they really do matter.”
JOHN STANTON: You’ve already lost…..
in terms of legislation passing. If Democrats keep the Senate, and they have, what, a two-seat or a one-seat majority, or if Republicans take it and have a two-seat or one-seat majority, you still are left with essentially the same dynamic in Washington.
But surely Todd, if not also Stanton, knows that even if no legislation passes (presumably the Dems would filibuster and Obama would veto GOP bills), a McConnell-led Senate would still affect the lives of millions of people. A one- or two-seat majority would give Republicans all the committee chairmanships, and that, as Norm Ornstein writes, “would undoubtedly stop confirmation on virtually all Obama-nominated judges, and probably on most of his executive nominees. And we would see a sharp ramp-up of investigations of alleged wrongdoing, with Benghazi and IRS redux. If you like Darrell Issa, you will love having his reinforcements and doppelgängers in the other chamber.”
Even Politico says, “No one should underestimate the significance if the GOP captures the Senate in November…”
Mitch McConnell, who would become majority leader if the Senate changes hands, is already promising to load up the appropriations bills with policy restrictions that could raise the risk of another government shutdown if Obama doesn’t sign them.
With both the Senate and the House in their hands, Republicans could put Obama on defense on everything from Obamacare to the administration’s greenhouse gas regulations, the Keystone XL pipeline, education policy and spending priorities.
And even with gridlock, McConnell could reach his dream of repealing Obamacare “root and branch.” Robert Reich warns in a MoveOn video that the R’s could use the Senate maneuver of “reconciliation,” which requires “only 51 votes to pass major tax and budget legislation instead of the 60 votes usually required.” That means, he says, that Republicans could win tax cuts for the wealthy and loopholes for Wall Street and pay for them with cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and education. (The Dems used reconciliation to pass the Affordable Care Act in the first place.)
But issues that matter to real people often evaporate in the heat generated by horse-race pundits like Todd. Grimes is “disqualified” for not answering a question (“By dodging the question, did she cast a spell on herself that reverse-aged her to be ineligible for service in the U.S. Senate?” Jim Newell at Salon asks. “Did her incantation strike names from her ballot petitions, putting her below the threshold to qualify for ballot placement?”). But McConnell lies by claiming he can repeal Obamacare while letting Kentuckians keep their Kynect—without acknowledging that Kynect is Obamacare.
As The Nation’s Reed Richardson writes: “When confronted about his specious reasoning in a subsequent Facebook Q & A, Todd backed off his judgment a bit (‘disqualifying for some voters’ was his new formulation), but still defended his over-the-top analysis as reflecting ‘political reality.’ But for all his cynicism, Todd still tries to have it both ways. For, later in the same Facebook chat he said he was ‘sick’ over the fact the McConnell camp had already stuck his Grimes-bashing soundbite into a campaign ad.”
Todd goes into still longer explanations with Media Matters, saying his wording was “sloppy.” It seems like his judgment that it doesn’t matter who runs the Senate was, at best, sloppy, too.
By: Leslie Savan, The Nation, October 21, 2014
“A Stand-Up Guy?”: And Now Mitch McConnell Is The ‘Pro-Woman’ Candidate!
Facing a spirited challenge from a woman half his age who is determined to turn out female voters to defeat him, Kentucky Republican Senator Mitch McConnell is portraying his role in resolving a sexual harassment scandal in the 1990s as evidence of his feminist bona fides. “I think I demonstrated 19 years ago, in the toughest possible position, how this ought to be handled,” he says, referring to his vote to oust Republican Bob Packwood from the U.S. Senate over allegations of sexual harassment and assault.
In a video distributed by the McConnell campaign, he explains, “I was chairman of the Ethics Committee charged with the responsibility of dealing with a member of my own party as chairman [of] the most important committee in the Senate. After investigating the case and bringing together all of the evidence I moved to expel him from the Senate. And the Senate on the verge of expelling him, he decided to resign.”
Most voters today barely remember Packwood, the good, the bad, and the ugly. It was a long time ago, back when Congress functioned, and bipartisanship was real. McConnell tells only part of the story, the part that’s favorable to him, where he looks like a stand-up guy for women. He leaves out the nearly three years he and his colleagues spent protecting Packwood, and his sparring with newly elected Senator Barbara Boxer, who wanted public hearings into Packwood’s behavior. He dismissed her efforts as “frolic and detour,” and warned if she didn’t back off, the GOP, which controlled the Senate, would retaliate with public hearings into any and all Democratic indiscretions.
Packwood chaired the Senate Finance Committee and as McConnell notes in the quote above, was one of the most powerful men on Capitol Hill. He had a reputation as a womanizer, which wasn’t uncommon for men of his generation in the Senate at the time. He was also having an affair with his chief of staff, who would later become his wife, and that wasn’t unusual either. “There were plenty of members having relationships with senior women, but they weren’t doing it with multiples of people all the time,” recalls a woman who held key staff jobs for several Republicans during this era and spoke to the Beast on condition of anonymity. “There were senators in the early 1990’s who fired women who wouldn’t have sex with them,” she said, “and because he (Packwood) knew other senators were doing these things, he couldn’t understand, ‘Why are they coming after me?’”
Sexual mores were changing. The all-male Judiciary Committee’s brutish grilling of Anita Hill over her accusation of sexual harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas blew the lid off the frat-club behavior on Capitol Hill and helped elect a record number of women to Congress in 1992, including Boxer. Her push for public hearings on Packwood irritated her Democratic male colleagues along with the Republicans. The humiliation of the Hill-Thomas hearings was still too fresh for them.
Two weeks after the 1992 “year of the woman” election, The Washington Post published a front-page story documenting ten women who’d had unwelcome approaches from Packwood. A women’s group put up an 800 number, and 27 more women responded. Many had worked for him over the years; he had been in the senate since 1969. “Until the women’s groups turned on him, which they did after that article came out, he’d been a champion of women,” says the former GOP staffer. She recalls lawyers poring over definitions of sexual harassment, a relatively new term, educating members and staff about power relationships in the workplace.
“The concept of a hostile work environment was being discussed, it was a new thing,” she says.
The Republican leadership circled the wagons, wanting to believe partisanship played a role. Asked about McConnell’s threat to hold hearings about Democrats, even dredging up Senator Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick, Majority Leader Bob Dole said that wasn’t too long ago, “It was ’69, the same year as the first allegation against Packwood.”
A month before the Ethics Committee vote that McConnell boasts about today, he and Dole were publicly defending Packwood. “It’s hilarious to think these are his feminist bona fides,” says a Democratic Senate aide, who doesn’t want to be quoted by name so close to an election that could return McConnell to office for another six-year term, this time perhaps as majority leader. “It’s so long ago, he thinks he can get away with it,” says the aide. The legislative maneuvering once so vivid blurs with the passage of time, and all that McConnell wants voters to know is that he finally did the right thing after all else had been exhausted.
“For McConnell it actually was a vote of conscience against his party and against his friend,” says the GOP staffer. She remembers that minutes before the full Senate was scheduled to vote on whether to accept the Ethics Committee recommendation to expel Packwood, he resigned. Additional revelations about how he altered his diaries, which had been subpoenaed, plus an additional underage woman stepping forward made it likely that the senate would reach the necessary two-thirds majority.
McConnell is an institutionalist; he likes to keep things secret. He is described as having been “appalled” by Packwood’s behavior, but he dragged his feet so long on bringing this scandal to a close that the statute of limitations long ago ran out. “I’m not sure anybody gets credit for a vote that passes with a majority,” says Jennifer Duffy with the Cook Political Report. “Even if he was ahead of his time on this, I’m more interested in what he’s done since.”
The Kentucky Senate race is rated a toss-up, but most insiders think McConnell has it. “He’s not likeable; she’s likeable,” says Duffy. “But that’s not what it’s about. It’s about who do you trust, and they (voters) know he will go to the mat for them on coal. They have questions about her.”
Refusing to say who she voted for in 2008 and 2012 has hurt Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes. The coming days will test whether her campaign has the smarts to counter McConnell’s dubious claim that a single vote in September 1995 should inoculate him from all the anti-woman votes he’s taken since then.
By: Eleanor Cliff, The Daily Beast, October 20, 2014
“Complicated Lies?”: The Amazingly Two-Faced Mitch McConnell
Alison Lundergan Grimes has been getting a lot of grief lately, not least from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which pulled the plug on her campaign yesterday. Her team quickly sent out a press release noting that she has $4.4 million in cash on hand, which the release said was “more than any Democrat in a competitive U.S. Senate race.” So she probably has enough to see her through to the end, but obviously, the DSCC move isn’t exactly a vote of confidence.
Even so, I’d like to pay her a compliment: I can’t conceive of how she managed to sit there next to Mitch McConnell at that debate Monday night and hear him say some of the things he said without her head exploding. That took admirable self-control.
I’m not sure which suffix to add to “shame” to better describe McConnell’s performance: Was it –less, or was it –ful? Remember Mitt Romney during the first debate of 2012, how he routinely said “my position is X” (invariably a more centrist posture) when for the preceding umpteen months his position had been the much more right-wing Not X? Well, McConnell made Romney look like an ironman of forthright constancy. So this is how, with a 30-year Senate record that you’d think you might be able to boast about, you win reelection: By completely misrepresenting who you’ve been for the last six years, and by saying “Obama” every 45 seconds.
Misrepresentations were numerous, but let’s just zero in on student loans. Grimes raised the issue and noted the rising costs of the loans, which Congress hasn’t addressed. McConnell responded that the Senate had taken care of the issue in a bipartisan fashion. But it didn’t. The Elizabeth Warren-sponsored bill failed in the Senate by four votes, getting only 56 yeas but needing 60 to end debate and make it to the floor. Two Republicans voted with the Democrats, but McConnell wasn’t one of them. And McConnell said publicly at the time that he was against Warren’s plan because it was “designed to fail” since it would raise taxes on rich people.
McConnell similarly talked out of both sides of his mouth on the minimum wage, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and other issues. And he, too, dodged a question, and it was one that’s rather more important than the one Grimes dodged about whether she had voted for President Obama. McConnell wouldn’t say whether climate change is real and whether humans contribute to it, so if he wins, Kentuckians will have the pleasure of knowing who their senator voted for in 2012 while he spends the next six years positioning himself to the right of Exxon-Mobil (which at least supports a carbon tax) and blocking any attempt to do anything about global warming.
McConnell’s real howler, of course, had to do with Obamacare. As you may know by now, he said yes, sure, keep Kynect, the state’s roaringly successful health-insurance exchange set up under the health-care law. After all, it’s “just a website.”
This was the moment when I was wondering how Grimes’s head could possibly stay in one piece. As McConnell well knows, Kynect is not just a website. It’s a state health-care program that citizens happen to be able to access through a website. Kentuckians go on to the Kynect website to see what types of insurance coverage are available to them under the Kynect program, which exists solely because of Obamacare. So if you repeal Obamacare “root and branch,” which is still McConnell’s position, you can leave the Kynect website up, but those coverage options people find via the site will no longer exist. Saying keep the website but kill the program is like saying that someone can keep that nice-looking home page that says “Google,” but it just won’t perform searches anymore.
It’s amazing, the audacity of it. If what Grimes did on the Obama-vote question is “disqualifying,” as Chuck Todd put it, then what is an incumbent senator telling a whopper like this? Given that half a million Kentuckians have signed up for insurance through Kynect, isn’t this just a little more important? What’s worse is that he knows he can get away with saying something like that because he is well aware that the explanation of why he’s lying is a little complicated for the average voter to take in. The media just aren’t set up to correct the record very well on things like this. I read a handful of write-ups of the debate from within Kentucky yesterday, and none among the few I read actually burrowed into an explanation of McConnell’s lie. It just gets summarized as a “testy exchange” or some such.
There was one event during this campaign season when McConnell did tell his audience the truth. But that didn’t happen in Kentucky in front of voters. It happened over the summer in California, at the St. Regis Monarch Bay Resort, where rooms run upwards of $500 a night, at a gathering put together by the Koch brothers. McConnell has been saying on the trail that if he wins and the GOP takes the Senate, he’ll open up the amendment process, implying that he’d permit votes on issues Democrats wanted to push—notably, of course, raising the minimum wage.
But behind closed doors at the Koch event, McConnell said the opposite, promising the 1 percenters that, should they win, his Republicans are “not going to be debating all these gosh darn proposals. That’s all we do in the Senate is vote on things like raising the minimum wage [inaudible]—cost the country 500,000 new jobs; extending unemployment—that’s a great message for retirees; uh, the student-loan package the other day, that’s just going to make things worse, uh.”
That was—speaking of comparisons to Mitt Romney—McConnell’s 47 percent moment. The sentiment is not as clearly put, so it wasn’t as usable for the opposition. But that was the probable (let’s face it) future majority leader saying to his real base: Don’t worry, boys, I got you covered.
That is how he will operate if he becomes majority leader. An inspiring campaign, all right.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 15, 2014
“Creating Winners And Losers”: Are The Beltway Media Helping Mitch McConnell Stay In Power?
The Beltway media are at it again, creating winners and losers long before Election Day. Yesterday I wrote that Alison Lundergan Grimes beat Mitch McConnell in Kentucky’s one and only Senate debate, and if you watched the debate, you might agree.
But if you had only followed the media coverage, you might well believe that Grimes is a goner, that her refusal to say whether she voted for Obama was of such import that it rightly overshadowed all other issues the candidates fought over—minimum wage, jobs, climate change, student loans, healthcare—and that her demurral was far more worthy of coverage than McConnell’ s actual lies and deceptions about the healthcare of 500,000 Kentuckians.
And if Grimes’s non-answer wasn’t a pretend disaster enough for the media to hyperventilate over, they got more confirmation later yesterday when the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee announced it wasn’t going to spend more to run ads in Kentucky. Well, surely that showed that Big Dems agreed with Big Media that Grimes was out. Money speaks. She’s over. Or so it seems.
But the media have it wrong. First, on the debate: Columbia Journalism Review did a large round-up of the political media responses to Monday’s debate and found that the coverage was “imbalanced” and that it “calls into question the national media’s role in one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country.”
Democratic candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes made national headlines during the debate for again declining to share how she voted in previous presidential elections. At the same time, however, the Washington press corps barely covered a claim by incumbent Sen. Mitch McConnell that Obamacare, unpopular in Kentucky, could be repealed without dismantling Kynect, the popular statewide healthcare exchange funded through the law. McConnell’s argument is not only factually questionable, at best, but also seems to be of much more potential consequence to the state’s voters. Monday’s debate was the only televised face-off scheduled before the November election, and the imbalanced coverage calls into question the national media’s role in one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country.
Grimes’ non-answer received headline treatment on web stories at CBS, NBC ABC, and CNN. The Washington Post devoted an entire piece to the refusal, which led the Associated Press’ story , and Politico and National Journal both listed it as their top takeaway of the debate. Such stories either omitted McConnell’s claim or played it down relative to Grimes’ comment. FoxNews.com mentioned only the latter, meanwhile, and The Wall Street Journal left McConnell’s statement as its story’s kicker, unchallenged.
It’s not as if the media was hearing Mitch’s lie for the first time and simply lacked the time to study up on it. It had all been reported on before:
Liberalmedia and a few national outlets, such as the AP, challenged the five-term senator’s claim back [in May]. Indeed, an Obamacare repeal would have huge consequences for the Bluegrass State, as an estimated half-million residents have signed up for health coverage through its Kynect exchange. A Washington Post Fact Checker column soon after concluded, “the history of individual state exchanges shows it is not credible for McConnell to suggest that the state exchange would survive without the broad health-care system constructed by the Affordable Care Act, such as an individual mandate and subsidies to buy insurance.”
Given the availability of such reporting, not to mention McConnell’s hazy logic in a race in which Obamacare has been a central theme, it’s unclear why the national media didn’t pounce on his answer Monday. What’s more, local coverage of the debate suggests that Grimes’ voting history—a sign of her allegiance to President Barack Obama—is merely one of many concerns or Kentucky voters.
It is true that the DSCC stopped running ads in Kentucky in order to redirect funds to other state races. But the Democratic Senate campaign arm is still funding Grimes’s get-out-the-vote drive, and is “monitoring the race for future investments,” according to a DSCC official. In any case, Grimes is very well-funded herself, having just announced a record breaking nearly $5 million haul for the third quarter.
But the national media were quick to jump to the most melodramatic conclusion. As Daily Kos pointed out:
Today a rumor was spread throughout national media by irresponsible nationally-known media (Chris Cillizza, Jon Heilemann, Mark Halpirin, MSNBC, CNN) that “Democrats have abandoned Grimes”.
Heilemann and Halperin agreed on their program that “Her campaign is dead”.
This rumor was based upon the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) not having pre-purchased ad buys in KY market for last 3 weeks of campaign. The DSCC has been very active in the Kentucky market, with great ads playing. The DSCC acknowledged this was true, but that they were open to purchases if necessary.
Guy Cecil, the Executive Director of Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, posted at about 8:00pm eastern Tuesday night 10/14, on Twitter:
Guy Cecil @guycecil 3h 3 hours ago
Just signed a $300,000 wire for the KY Get Out The Vote operation for @AlisonForKY. That’s an interesting view of “pulling out of the race”
And for all this, you’d never know that as of Wednesday afternoon, Alison Grimes is only three points behind Mitch McConnell in the RealClearPolitics average.
By: Leslie Savin, The Nation, October 15, 2014
“For GOP, Crickets From The Pundits”: The Kentucky Senate Race And The Media’s Double Standard For Disqualifying Candidates
Last week, in the tightly contested Senate race in Kentucky, both Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell and his Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes gave newsworthy interviews in which they seemed to stumble over basic questions. But only one of the awkward missteps was treated as big news–treated even as a campaign-ending debacle–by some in the Beltway press: the Grimes interview.
Pundits pounced after Grimes refused, during an interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal editorial board, to say whether she voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. (McConnell has spent most of his campaign trying to tie Grimes to Obama, who is unpopular in Kentucky.)
After a Republican opposition group posted the clip of Grimes’ answer, the Washington Post immediately linked to it and mocked the candidate’s performance as “painful.” On MSNBC, morning host Joe Scarborough bellowed, “What a rookie mistake!” CNN commentators criticized Grimes for being “too scripted” and “evasive.”
Keep in mind; the issue itself is of no practical consequence to Kentucky voters — it doesn’t affect their day-to-day lives. But the story revolved around campaign “optics,” which Beltway commentators now thrive on, especially when it’s bad Democratic optics.
“Is she ever going to answer a tough question on anything? You want to be a U.S. senator?” demanded Meet The Press moderator, Chuck Todd. “I think she disqualified herself. I really do. I think she disqualified herself.”
Recall that query (“Is she ever going to answer a tough question on anything?”), and the way Todd described it as a disqualifying trait for a Senate candidate. Because the day before the Grimes interview, McConnell called into Kentucky Sports Radio to talk with host Matt Jones. Days earlier, the popular host had interviewed Grimes with the understanding the McConnell campaign had also agreed to an interview. But after Jones grilled Grimes on the air, McConnell’s campaign refused to answer Jones’ emails and phone calls with regards to finalizing an appearance.
After days of on-air pleas, McConnell, without advance notice, finally called into the show last Wednesday and spoke with Jones for 14 minutes. Among the actual topics covered (in the place of optics analysis) were climate change and gay marriage. McConnell basically refused to answer questions about either:
JONES: That’s a yes or no question. Do you believe in global warming?
McCONNELL: No it isn’t. It is not a yes or no question. I am not a scientist.
And here’s how McConnell danced around the issue of gay marriage:
When asked if he supports gay marriage, McConnell answered, “I believe that marriage should be between one man and one woman.” Asked why he believes that, McConnell again repeated he thinks marriage is “between one man and one woman.” Again asked “why?” McConnell repeated the same line. Jones tried one more time. Again, “It is my belief that marriage is between one man and one woman.”
To recap: If you’re a Kentucky Democrat and you don’t answer a straight-forward question, you may as well take your name off the ballot, according to Beltway journalists. But if you’re a Kentucky Republican and you do the same thing, it’s mostly crickets from the same pundits.
And again, Grimes’ election crime was to stumble over a tactical campaign question, while McConnell refused to answer questions about public policy that inform the decisions he makes as a lawmaker. So why does the Democrat get hit harder?
There’s something of a conventional wisdom among commentators that Republicans nominated much stronger candidates this election cycle. And specifically, GOP candidates aren’t out on the campaign trail making up strange and unsupported claims that could jeopardize Republican chances of reclaiming the Senate. This observation is usually made in contrast to 2010 and 2012, when untested Republican candidates such as Todd Akin, Christine O’Donnell, and Sharron Angle uncorked a series of verbal shockers and badly lost their campaigns.
Republican candidates this time around are so much more professional and focused and on-message. They’re so mainstream. Or so goes the narrative.
Keep in mind that the Republican candidate in North Carolina, Thom Tillis, says the government needs to “seal” the U.S.-Mexican border in order to protect America from the Ebola virus (via West Africa). The Republican candidate in Arkansas, Tom Cotton, thinks Mexican drug cartels are teaming up with Islamic State terrorists. And the Republican candidate in Iowa, Joni Ernst, suggested Obama be impeached because he’s “become a dictator.
All of that is complete nonsense. But Republicans don’t have to worry about candidates making crazy allegations this cycle, and Grimes is the one who flunked the competency test?
Meanwhile, Colorado Republican Senate candidate Cory Gardner repeatedly refuses to directly answer whether “humans are contributing significantly to climate change.”
That type of evasion has become a hallmark of the midterm election cycle: Faced with the very simple, yes-or-no question about whether candidates believe climate change is happening, lots of Republican in tight races now throw up their hands and suggest the topic’s just too complicated and confusing, and that once scientists stop arguing about it, they’ll be happy to address the issue.
Of course, 97 percent of scientists are in heated agreement about the topic, which makes the dodge so comical. But have we heard D.C. pundits condemning the conveyor belt of clunky dodges? Have who heard Sunday morning talk show hosts announce that any candidate who refuses to address a “tough question” about climate change (or gay marriage) has instantly disqualified him or herself?
We have not.
Question: Are there different media standards for Republicans and Democrats this election cycle?
By: Eric Boehlert, Media Matters For America, October 13, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 