“Senator Cheney?”: Just When You Thought The Senate Couldn’t Get Any Worse, Up Pops The Devil’s Daughter
If we were to make a list of competitive Senate races to watch in 2014, Wyoming wouldn’t make the cut. Sen. Mike Enzi is a popular Republican incumbent in a deep-red state — he won re-election in 2008 with more than 75% of the vote — and at age 69, the senator is not yet in a position where he needs to think about retirement. Enzi’s fourth term looks like one of the cycle’s safest bets.
At least, it did. In an era in which even conservative Republican incumbents have to worry about fierce primary challenges, Enzi will apparently have a high-profile foe next year.
A young Dick Cheney began his first campaign for the House in this tiny village [Lusk, Wyoming] — population 1,600 — after the state’s sole Congressional seat finally opened up. But nowadays, his daughter Liz does not seem inclined to wait patiently for such an opening.
Ms. Cheney, 46, is showing up everywhere in the state, from chicken dinners to cattle growers’ meetings, sometimes with her parents in tow. She has made it clear that she wants to run for the Senate seat now held by Michael B. Enzi, a soft-spoken Republican and onetime fly-fishing partner of her father.
It’s not just idle speculation. Liz Cheney, despite having no meaningful background in the state whatsoever, moved with her family to Wyoming just last year and quickly became a ubiquitous political player. Indeed, the right-wing media personality even called Enzi directly, letting him know she’s likely to run against him in a GOP primary.
The result would probably be an ugly fight within the state Republican Party, pitting a popular three-term incumbent against a powerful family with deep roots in the state.
It’s not altogether clear why Cheney would bother. Her brief tenure in public office — she worked in the Bush/Cheney State Department — didn’t go well, but she remains a fixture in political media, routinely publishing “stark raving mad” pieces and making Sunday show appearances. Cheney’s megaphone is formidable, even if she uses it towards ridiculous ends.
But whatever her motivations, this will probably be one of the cycle’s more noteworthy primary fights. Enzi, assuming he doesn’t retire, would almost certainly have the edge, though he has not yet faced a rival as fierce and unburdened by propriety as Cheney.
On Twitter, @pourmecoffee added, “If ‘Liz Cheney’ is the answer, the question must be ‘How could the U.S. Senate possibly get any worse?'”
Postscript: The NYT piece noted that the former vice president, eager to help his daughter, has also begun traveling more regularly to the state he used to represent. That said, Liz Cheney “has told associates that if she runs, she wants to do so in her own right.”
It was the only sentence in the article that literally made me laugh. Cheney wants to run against a popular incumbent from her own party in a state she’s lived in for a year, and she thinks her candidacy should be unrelated to her last name? C’mon.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 8, 2013
“The Moment Of Conception For Texas”: Rick Perry Announces He Will Not Seek A Fourth Term As Governor
In a campaign-like event, Governor Rick Perry (R-TX) has announced that he will not seek another term as governor of Texas.
“The time has come to pass on the mantle of leadership,” he said, speaking at San Antonio’s Holt Cat Caterpillar dealership.
The governor was introduced by his wife Anita, who reminisced about how the native son of Paint Creek, Texas “wore her down” into marriage.
Perry’s speech focused on summarizing the success of Texas’ economy — which he said leads the nation in job creation, even though it technically doesn’t — and congratulating himself for defending the “freedom” from the federal government that he insists made it possible. He took office in 2001 after George W. Bush was elected president, and then won his own terms in 2002, 2006 and 2010.
The governor also nodded several times to the ongoing crisis surrounding Republican efforts to impose more abortion restrictions in the state. He vowed that he would call for another special session if the current one designed to enact a 20-week ban on abortions and new restrictions on clinics that offer abortions does not succeed.
Perry has waged a war on family planning and Planned Parenthood in Texas, which has created a dire situation for poor women seeking basic health care.
State senator Wendy Davis (D-Fort Worth), the woman whose filibuster led to the special session, has expressed an interest in seeking statewide office. A recent poll showed Perry leading her by double digits.
The Texas Tribune reports that Attorney General Greg Abbott is the “instant favorite” to replace Perry.
The governor made no announcements about what he would do after his term ends, but he did leave the door open to another presidential run, saying his decision on that would come in “due time.”
Perry’s “oops” moment in a 2011 debate, when for nearly a minute he couldn’t name the third cabinet-level department he would eliminate, will go down in history as one of the greatest flubs by a major-party candidate ever.
Perry said he was leaving his office with a “deep sense of humility and appreciation.”
By: Jason Sattler, The National Review, July 8, 2013
“Not That Anyone Really Cares”: Whatever Happened To Little Bobby Jindal?
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is renowned for his policy wonkery and strict Catholicism, not a cutting sense of humor. So when he took the stage a few months ago at Washington’s annual Gridiron dinner, one jab stood out in particular. “The Menendez scandal is disturbing,” Jindal said, referring to reports (later proved untrue) that Senator Robert Menendez had paid for sex in the Dominican Republic. “Soliciting prostitution is completely unacceptable. We would never put up with that in Louisiana.”
The butt of the joke was obvious to everyone in the room. Six years earlier, Louisiana’s junior senator, David Vitter, confessed to “a very serious sin” when his name appeared in the call records of a large D.C. prostitution ring. His political career survived, but not everyone has been as forgiving as Louisiana voters. Jindal’s joke acknowledged what has become an open secret in Louisiana Republican circles: He and Vitter loathe each other.
“You have two teams, two tribes,” one longtime Louisiana political consultant explained. “If you’re not on team Jindal, you want to be on team Vitter.”
Neither Jindal nor Vitter’s offices would discuss their relationship on the record, and few bayou politicos wanted to attach their names to details of the tension between the two most powerful Republicans in their state. But Baton Rouge insiders use a few key euphemisms to characterize the relationship. Sometimes they say that the two men “won’t have a beer together”; other times, that they’re fighting a “cold war.” Occasionally they slip versions of both into the same quote: “It’s kind of a cold war between Vitter and Jindal. They respect each other, but they aren’t having any beers together, I’ll tell you that much,” a Vitter ally who worked on one of his early campaigns told me.
What makes their rivalry particularly noteworthy is that Vitter—who has been the butt of many more and much better jokes than Jindal’s—may now be more popular and influential in the Louisiana Republican Party. This doesn’t just testify to Vitter’s underrated political skills; it also pulls back the curtain on Jindal’s overrated ones. While Jindal was traveling the country, giving speeches on fixing the Republican Party and stoking presidential and vice presidential speculation, Vitter, who once seemed so isolated and politically vulnerable, was quietly and carefully courting influence in the state GOP.
Now, it’s Jindal who is isolated and vulnerable. His approval rating has plummeted after voters revolted against his handling of the state’s budget crisis. Other Republicans in Louisiana describe a governor so cut off from his party that he and his team operate “like a cult.”
Making matters worse, Jindal is term-limited as governor in 2015—and Vitter could be the candidate to replace him. If Jindal’s off-putting style has driven Louisiana Republicans into the arms of a man more famous for his personal peccadilloes than his legislative record, then just imagine what he’ll do for Marco Rubio or Chris Christie as a presidential candidate in 2016.
Most Louisiana politicos date the start of Jindal and Vitter’s contretemps to July 16, 2007, when Vitter called a press conference to fess up to his role in the D.C. madam scandal. It was the same afternoon that Jindal, then a member of Congress, kicked off his second bid for governor.
“I got the sense that every reporter in town was covering Vitter and not Jindal,” says Robert Mann, who worked as communications director for Democratic Governor Kathleen Blanco, Jindal’s predecessor. While the rest of the Louisiana congressional delegation rushed to Vitter’s defense, Jindal—who represented Vitter’s old district—waited a day longer and said only: “While we are disappointed by Senator Vitter’s actions, [my wife] Supriya and I continue to keep David and his family in our prayers. This is a matter for the senator to address, and it is our hope that this is not used by others for their own political gain.”
Jindal was elected to the governor’s mansion later that year, while the national press excoriated Vitter. But Vitter had already begun laying the groundwork for his ascendance in his home state. In his days as a state legislator, he had successfully pushed for term limits for legislators, forcing many of the lawmakers he had served alongside to give up their seats in 2007. Vitter began recruiting conservative candidates to replace them and helped fund campaigns through the Louisiana Committee for a Republican Majority (LCRM), a PAC he had co-founded a couple years earlier. He also personally reached out to Democrats in conservative districts, encouraging them to get ahead of the state’s rightward turn.
The Louisiana legislature didn’t go red in 2007, but, thanks to a successful election cycle and a few high-profile Democratic defections, the House flipped in 2010. A year later, the state Senate followed suit. It was the first time Republicans controlled the legislature since Reconstruction. Scott Hobbs, a Louisiana-based political consultant, estimated that Vitter helped “at least sixty to seventy percent [of Republicans in the legislature] in some way” between 2007 and 2011. Now Baton Rouge is filled with Vitter-friendly pols, sometimes referred to as the “fiscal hawks.” They’ve made Jindal’s life a lot harder, attacking him for using accounting gimmicks to balance the state budget. Vitter has gotten in on the action too, castigating the governor for “kicking the can down the road—the sort of bad spending policy I’m constantly fighting in Washington.”
Vitter, in fact, has frequently questioned Jindal’s judgment. He vocally criticized Jindal’s handling of a high-profile fight between landowners and the oil and gas industry as “very counterproductive.” When Jindal backed a $1.2 billion teaching hospital in New Orleans, Vitter wrote to the secretary of Housing and Urban Development to ask that they reject the state’s application for federal loan insurance and joined forces with the state treasurer and House speaker to come up with their own, cheaper proposal. “That involvement and willingness to address policy issues kind of allowed his allies to rally around knowing there was another power center other than governor who would be supportive,” says one conservative activist involved with the state party.
Many observers of the state’s political scene believe that Vitter’s motivation, however principled, is also at least somewhat personal. In 2010, when Vitter was up for reelection against Democratic Representative Charlie Melancon, Jindal declined to endorse him—though he had traveled out of state to support other candidates. The following year, when Jindal was up for reelection, Vitter publicly endorsed him, but not without a note of passive aggression: Vitter said Louisiana needed a conservative legislature “[t]o help Bobby become as engaged and bold as possible in his second term.” Vitter’s official Twitter account then tweeted an article to his followers: “Gov. Bobby Jindal gets endorsement from senator he refused to endorse last year.”
Flack from Vitter and his allies, drastic cuts to schools and hospitals, and the impression that he cares more about his own political future than the state’s have cost Jindal dearly with Louisiana voters. Slightly over a year after he was reelected with two-thirds of the vote, his approval rating now sits at 38 percent. His stature with lawmakers is hardly better. In May, when The Lens, an investigative reporting outlet based in New Orleans, surveyed lawmakers in the capital about their relationships with the governor, they discovered that “no one in the Capitol can identify any friendships Jindal has developed among lawmakers.”
“He’s a victim of his own staff,” one conservative activist told me. “His own staff has overprotected him and created this Praetorian guard around him, and therefore he has not been able to engage enough, particularly with legislators and other politicians, and that I think has limited his effectiveness.”
“It’s really, really bad,” said another Louisiana Republican familiar with the relationship. “So essentially Vitter has stepped up to fill that void. Because everyone hates Bobby, David hates Bobby, and presto: The enemy of my enemy is a friend.”
Meanwhile, Vitter hasn’t announced his next move, but recent polls have him neck to neck with New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu to take Jindal’s job in 2015. That doesn’t mean he’ll waltz into the governor’s mansion. He still hasn’t faced serious criticism over the prostitution scandal, and some Republicans expect it’d be an issue in his run for governor. “It’s not that people haven’t forgiven Vitter. They have,” the Louisiana Republican told me. “But just because you’re there doesn’t mean people need to vote for you.”
Even if he doesn’t make his way to the governor’s mansion, he’s in line to become chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee if Republicans retake the Senate next year—a hugely important committee assignment for Louisiana lawmakers. “No other politician has momentum like he has right now,” said Republican State Representative Lance Harris. “He caught lightning in a bottle.”
Jindal’s future is less clear. “We can all see he’s running for president,” said Mann. “But there’s also the sense that no one thinks that he’s got a chance. Everybody thinks that it’s a fool’s errand. So what does he do once he flames out?” I put that question to my sources, and a few of them mentioned a kind of presidency Jindal might be better suited for, one that would require less strenuous politicking: a think tank presidency.
By: Marin Cogan, The New Republic, July 8, 2013
“A Tale Of Two Parties In Texas”: Republicans Are Tied In Knots, Democrats Seeing A Resurgence In Grassroots Enthusiasm
The fight over reproductive rights in Texas has reinvigorated progressive voices in the Lone Star State in ways unseen in many years, as evidenced by yesterday’s large, mid-day rally in Austin. The effort to turn back the Republican effort has also drawn the interest of Democrats at the national level — during state Sen. Wendy Davis’ (D) filibuster last week, none other than the president of the United States weighed in to offer his support.
But as David Nather reported, there’s a bit of a mismatch: while national Democrats are eager to use Texas as a rallying cry for activism, even for those nowhere near the state, national Republicans have sat on their hands.
The liberal side of the Texas abortion showdown has the two most powerful Democrats in Washington squarely in its corner: Barack Obama and Harry Reid — not to mention a Dixie Chick.
On the right: Rick Perry’s holding down the fort without much obvious help from national Republicans.
The DNC is involved in Texas; the RNC is not. Democratic congressional leaders have weighed in; Republican congressional leaders have not. And as Politico‘s report added, a key party official in Texas “acknowledged there’s no behind-the-scenes help coming.”
Some of this is simply a matter of need, or in this case, the lack thereof — Republican policymakers in the state hold the reins of power, including majorities in both chambers of the state legislature and the governor’s office. Davis and her allies took advantage of procedural tactics to win a temporary reprieve, but GOP officials believe it’s only a matter of time before they approve the sweeping new restrictions that Gov. Rick Perry (R) wants.
But that’s not the only reason Republicans in D.C. are letting this story go by without comment. After all, it’s a national story and there’s nothing stopping prominent GOP leaders and/or the Republican National Committee from, at a minimum, offering Perry words of support and encouragement.
And yet, the party is biting its tongue, probably because it sees this as a political loser for Republicans at the national level.
The mismatch makes sense: Even abortion bills that poll well, like the one in Texas does, open the door to the kinds of comments that have hurt national Republicans repeatedly — from Rep. Trent Franks’s comments last month on the “very low” number of rape-related pregnancies to Todd Akin blowing his shot at a Senate seat over his “legitimate rape” remarks in 2012.
I understand the political calculus, but the GOP is playing a losing game. For one thing, it’s unlikely engaged voters are going to make much of a distinction — it’s not like Republican leaders on Capitol Hill are going to be shielded from criticism because their allies in Austin are pushing extreme measures on reproductive rights.
Indeed, it seems every time Republicans at the national level make a conscious effort to move away from the party’s “war on women,” efforts like this one in Texas remind the public of the GOP’s agenda all over again.
And then there’s the unfortunate flip side: by remaining silent, national Republican officials are angering the party’s far-right base, which expects them to speak up.
“You either fight and ask your leaders to fight on an issue that cuts your way or you just fold up and go home, which is what the national party wants to do,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List. “It really is fear. It really is simply, ‘We’re not going to go there.'”
“Now, you’ve got an issue that’s in your platform, that cuts your way with big margins. To be silent is a mistake,” Dannenfelser said.
The irony is, Perry and his allies are likely to win this fight in terms of legislative success, but it’s Republicans who are tied in knots and Democrats who are seeing a resurgence in grassroots enthusiasm and engagement.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 2, 2013
“The Fire In Mitt’s Belly”: New Book Reports That Romney Didn’t Want To Run For President In 2012
On an episode of The Office from a few years ago, the desperately insecure character of Andy Bernard (played by Ed Helms) hits upon a strategy to ingratiate himself with people, called “personality mirroring.” He begins not only repeating what people say to him, but adopting the precise manner and mood of whoever he’s talking to. This is pretty much how Mitt Romney went about running for president. A man deeply unsuited to the gladhanding required of a politician made himself into one, through a titanic act of will. And just like when Andy Bernard did it, it was incredibly awkward and off-putting. As the old saying has it, sincerity is the most important thing—if you can fake that, you’ve got it made. Trouble was, Mitt just couldn’t, hard though he might have tried.
And it turns out, Mitt didn’t even want to run for president a second time. Veteran reporter Dan Balz is coming out with a book about the 2012 campaign, and he learned of the internal Romney family deliberations. They took a vote, and ten out of twelve Romneys, including Mitt himself, said he shouldn’t run. Here’s an excerpt:
Mitt Romney had other reasons to think that not running might be the wiser choice. Winning as a moderate from Massachusetts who happened to be Mormon was always going to be difficult. “A lot of the thinking on the part of my brothers and dad was, ‘I’m not sure I can win a primary given those dynamics.'” Tagg Romney said. The prospective candidate also knew the sheer physical and family toll another campaign would take. “He’s a private person and, push comes to shove, he wants to spend time with his family and enjoy his time with them,” his son said. “Even up until the day before he made the announcement, he was looking for excuses to get out of it. If there had been someone who he thought would have made a better president than he, he would gladly have stepped aside.”
I guess the gentle voice of America, whispering to him on the wind that it needed his square jaw and concern for the ruling class, was enough to change Mitt’s mind. But I wonder what he thinks now? We all tend to absolve ourselves of guilt in situations like this, and I’m guessing Mitt now believes there’s nothing he could have done to win. What with Obama showering government goodies on a population of greedy takers, some strategic tinkering wouldn’t have made a difference. But if thinks that now, that would mean that he was wrong when he decided that he couldn’t leave the Republican nomination to the collection of clowns he ended up beating. It’s something of a conundrum. Perhaps late at night, when everyone else is asleep, he rides his car elevator up and down, up and down, replaying the whole campaign in his head.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 2, 2013
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