“An Active Republican Insider”: Not So ‘Fresh’; Political Careerist Scott Walker Has Been Running For A Quarter Century
When Mitt Romney, who is anything but a fresh face in the Republican hierarchy decided to forego a third run for the presidency, he announced that, “I believe that one of our next generation of Republican leaders — one who may not be as well-known as I am today, one who has not yet taken their message across the country, one who is just getting started — may well emerge as being better able to defeat the Democrat nominee. In fact, I expect and hope that to be the case.”
Full-on Republican presidential contender Scott Walker just presumed that the man who Republican primary voters rejected in 2008, and who the rest of the American electorate rejected in 2012, was talking about a certain governor of Wisconsin.
Never mind that, in his book, Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge, Walker ripped the party’s 2012 campaign – and, by extension, its nominee – for doing a “lousy job of presenting a positive vision of free market solutions to our nation’s problems in a way that is relevant to people’s lives.” Never mind that Walker griped just days before Romney quit the race that a 2016 run by the 2012 loser would be “pretty hard” to justify. Never mind that Walker, one of the most relentlessly negative campaigners in contemporary American politics, was more than ready to beat up on Romney if that has been necessary to advance his own 2016 run. With Romney’s decision to sideline himself, Walker chirped, “I would love to have his endorsement.”
Walker actually went a step further, going on Twitter to suggest that he was precisely the sort of “next generation” leader Romney was referring to. “Had a great conversation w/ @MittRomney,” Walker announced. “He’s a good man. Thanked him for his interest in opening the door for fresh leadership in America.”
There’s only one problem with this calculus.
Scott Walker isn’t fresh.
The governor is a political careerist who has sought office – as a winner and loser – more times that Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz combined.
In a permanent campaign that began a quarter century ago – when he quit college and launched a losing state legislative campaign against future U.S. Congresswoman Gwen Moore – Walker has run 24 primary and general election races. That doesn’t include a 2006 bid for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Wisconsin, which he scrapped after national party officials elbowed him aside in favor of another candidate, or his all-but announced 2016 presidential run.
Hyper-ambitious yet strikingly disciplined, Walker has used every office he has ever held as a platform from which to run for the next. Even when scandals have led to the arrests, indictments and convictions of campaign donors, campaign aides and official staffers, Walker has maintained a steady focus on climbing the political ladder that is perhaps most comparable to that of former President Bill Clinton.
As a state legislator, Walker backed an effort to recall the sitting Milwaukee County Executive and then jumped into the race for that job. After winning his first full term as county executive in 2004, Walker immediately began running for the 2006 Republican gubernatorial nomination.
When that run was scuttled, Walker sought and secured a second term as county executive in 2008, only to immediately begin running for the 2010 Republican gubernatorial nomination. After securing the governorship, Walker quickly began positioning himself on the national stage – not just by picking high-profile fights with Wisconsin unions that would, ultimately, lead to a rare gubernatorial recall challenge but by jetting around the country to court the wealthiest campaign donors and to appear in the first caucus state of Iowa and the first primary state of New Hampshire.
Before his 2014 reelection race was complete, Walker was already visiting Las Vegas with other 2016 Republican presidential prospects seeking the favor of billionaire campaign donor Sheldon Adelson. Despite the fact that he said during that 2014 race that he intended to serve the full term he was seeking — “I want to be governor and that’s the only thing I’ve been focused on,” “My plan — if the voters approve — is to serve as governor for the next four years” – Walker was already actively preparing a 2016 run. He even wrote (well, sort of wrote, with the help of a politically-connected DC insider who had worked as a speechwriter for George W. Bush) an autobiography/manifesto that was so transparent in its ambition that Glenn Beck’s The Blaze described as “the archetype of a book for a future Presidential candidate (written) without ever so much as hinting as to any intent to run for President.”
Walker is now well beyond the hinting stage. And the run is going well, so far, with the governor beginning to climb in the polls. One survey even puts him in first place among Iowa Republicans, one point ahead of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and further ahead of prominent prospects such as Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. No surprise there: Walker has a lot more experience contending for public office than most of the other Republicans who are preparing to run in 2016.
Walker ran his first campaign for elective office four years before Jeb Bush and eight years before Rubio. Walker was an elected official in Wisconsin seventeen years before Rand Paul was elected in Kentucky and nineteen years before Ted Cruz was elected in Texas. Walker was running even before party elders such as Mike Huckabee, who won his first election in Arkansas in the summer of 1993 – a month after Walker was first elected to the Wisconsin legislature.
It’s worth noting that, even when he was running in 1993, Walker was not considered “fresh.” When it endorsed him that year, the conservative Milwaukee Sentinel referred to Walker not as a newcomer but as what he already was decades ago: “an active Republican insider.”
By: John Nichols, The Nation, February 1, 2015
“The Likud Lobby”: Let’s Stop Pretending Israel Isn’t A Partisan Issue
When House Speaker John Boehner invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress without bothering to let the White House know, as is normal practice when dealing with foreign leaders, he no doubt thought he was getting a little sauce for the gander. You want to find ways to get Republicans mad, President Obama? Okay, how about if I invite the leader of one of our closest allies here to basically lobby against your position on Iran? How do you like that?
Boehner was right on that score: President Obama doesn’t like it very much. Neither did Nancy Pelosi, who blasted Boehner’s move this morning as “inappropriate,” adding: “It’s out of the ordinary that the Speaker would decide that he would be inviting people to a joint session without any bipartisan consultation.”
But maybe this skirmish over diplomatic protocol is a good thing for everyone. Maybe we can stop pretending that Americans and Israelis are nothing more than loving and committed allies offering unwavering support to one another, when the truth is that parties in both countries are active participants in each other’s partisan politics.
The current disagreement is about negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. There’s a bill in the Senate, sponsored by Republican Mark Kirk and Democrat Bob Menendez, to impose new sanctions on Iran if a deal isn’t struck by June 30. The administration says that passing such legislation now, while the negotiations are at a sensitive point, would guarantee failure: the Iranians would pull out, then ramp up their nuclear program.
Republicans, and some Democrats like Menendez, don’t think so. They seem to believe that the only thing that produces results is being “tough,” and that even in diplomacy there are no carrots, only sticks. This also happens to be the position of the Netanyahu administration, which supports the sanctions bill. But not all in the Israeli government agree. Josh Rogin and Eli Lake report that the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, has been telling both the Obama administration and whatever American senators will listen that “if legislation that imposed a trigger leading to future sanctions on Iran was signed into law, it would cause the talks to collapse.”
So the Republicans have asked Netanyahu to come join them in this debate, and he is more than willing. Which shouldn’t be much of a surprise. For years we’ve had one party (the Republicans) that is fervently committed to the right-wing Likud’s vision for Israel, and another party (the Democrats) that is much more committed to the Israeli Labor party’s vision. When each holds the White House, they put those beliefs into policy. But both will say only that we all have a bipartisan commitment to “support” the Jewish state, as though what “support” means is always simple and clear.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu has done what he can to help Republicans. In 2012, his all-but-explicit advocacy for Mitt Romney ended up getting him in trouble back home. The current Israeli ambassador to the U.S. is American-born political operative Ron Dermer; as Josh Marshall says: “His relationship with Netanyahu has been compared to Karl Rove’s with George W. Bush. And a main reason for his being Ambassador is his ties to DC Republicans.”
And here’s a colorful illustration of the symbiotic relationship between the GOP and Netanyahu’s Likud. The Republican Party’s greatest patron is casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who spent somewhere between $100 and $150 million trying to unseat Barack Obama in 2012. And who is Benjamin Netanyahu’s greatest patron? None other than Sheldon Adelson, who a few years ago created a free daily newspaper, Israel Hayom, whose primary purpose is to blanket the country with news favorable to Netanyahu.
It has long been true that the debate about what Israel should do — with regard to the Palestinians or anything else — is infinitely more varied and robust in Israel itself than here in the United States, where the only allowable public position for a politician to take is that we support whatever the Israeli government wants to do. This unanimity is maintained by a variety of forces, most notably the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which calls itself “America’s Pro-Israel Lobby,” but in practice has for decades been not the Israel lobby but the Likud lobby, representing one particular faction in Israeli politics.
Benjamin Netanyahu is the leader of his country, but he’s also the leader of that faction, and at the moment he’s in the midst of an election campaign (one the Obama administration would be all too happy to see him lose). If Congressional Republicans want him to come be a spokesperson for the Republican position in the debate over Iran, that’s fine. But we should use the occasion to allow ourselves a little honestly. Yes, the United States and Israel are close allies whose core interests are aligned. But in neither country is there agreement about how to serve those interests. There’s no such thing as a “pro-Israel” position on this issue, because Israelis themselves have a profound dispute about it, just as there’s no such thing as one “pro-America” position on anything we argue about.
So we can call this speech what it is: an effort by one conservative politician to help a bunch of other conservative politicians achieve their preferred policy. Maybe afterward, John Boehner can return the favor and cut some ads advocating Netanyahu’s reelection. Though I’m not sure how well that would go over in Israel.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, January 22, 2015
“What Donors Want”: They Helped Elect A New Class Of Congress Members; Now What?
When the 114th Congress convenes on Tuesday, lawmakers won’t merely be thinking of the voters who put them in office. They’ll also be mindful of the donors who helped them reach those voters in the first place.
The 2014 midterm elections cost some $3.7 billion, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. That’s a lot of moneyed interests to consider, and sometimes they aren’t pulling lawmakers in the same direction. What’s a senator to do, for example, if the small-government Koch groups see a federal spending plan as too lavish while the U.S. Chamber of Commerce thinks of it as a win for business?
Scott Reed, a top political adviser for the Chamber, had this take on donor expectations: “We don’t expect the candidates we endorsed to line up 100 percent with us, but we’d like to get them in the 80 percent range.”
Here’s a look at what’s on some donor wish lists—and how they intersect and conflict with each other.
The Koch brothers want an authentic spending fight
Billionaire energy executives Charles and David Koch have a network of advocacy groups that sunk at least $150 million into last year’s elections. They want their senators to be soldiers for less government spending.
“What I want these candidates to do is to support a balanced budget,” David Koch told Barbara Walters in an ABC interview in December. “I’m very worried that if the budget is not balanced that inflation could occur and the economy of our country could suffer terribly.”
Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, the most active nonprofit in the Koch alliance, said his group won’t be shy about calling out lawmakers who take their eye off this spending ball. Phillips predicted chafing between deficit hawks like his group and others that might be willing to sacrifice purity if it means getting their preferred projects funded.
The Chamber of Commerce wants the government to invest in infrastructure
That makes the Chamber, which put up $35 million to usher into office more business-minded Republicans, a potential foe to the Kochs’ top objective. The group spent most of its money on primary contests and notched a win rate of 14 out of 15 candidates, Reed said. The goal was to elect Republicans who are “committed to governing,” he said.
“What we did not want,” he said, “are the candidates who say, ‘Let’s get to D.C. so we can shut the damn place down.'”
The Chamber thinks Republicans should be prepared to fund infrastructure, even featuring that message in some of its candidate advertisements last year. “The key ingredients to thriving free enterprise are roads, bridges and tunnels,” Reed said.
Crossroads wants to avoid messy clashes that could ding the GOP image ahead of 2016
The Chamber can probably count on Karl Rove’s powerful Crossroads political groups as an ally. They’re driven far less by ideology than by party politics. That makes sense: Rove was former President George W. Bush’s top strategist, earning the nickname “Bush’s brain.” The Crossroads enterprise spent $100 million on the 2014 races, according to American Crossroads President Steven Law, and wants more than anything to put the party in a good position for the 2016 presidential election.
“Voters expect constructive action, not obstructionism. They want Washington to work and lawmakers to get things done,” Rove wrote in his post-election column in the Wall Street Journal. “Their expectations are low because their distrust of politicians is high. So surprise them. The rewards will be great if the GOP shows it has a governing agenda.”
Translation: Crossroads wants to keep senators from doing politically damaging things that might cost seats or, worse, the presidency in 2016. To that end, Crossroads will spend much of 2015 providing Republican leaders with research to advise them how to broaden the party’s appeal and what kinds of legislation voters would like to see. “There’s an appetite for constructive change, not reflexive opposition,” Law said.
As for any looming fiscal battles, “we strongly support spending restraint,” Law said. “But where we differ with some of the other groups is in tactics.” He said shutting down the government in protest of Obama’s health care law is a prime example of the kind of “colossal failure” he hopes Republican lawmakers will avoid. “You have to think through what you’re going to get for it. We’d be concerned about shutdown gambits that would tarnish the brand.”
Law, like many representatives of the political money groups, will make the rounds on Tuesday, congratulating the new members and attending various parties in their honor. “Everyone we were helpful to has been very kind about letting us know they appreciated our role,” he said.
Sheldon Adelson seeks the death of online gambling
A billionaire casino executive, Adelson wants to stop what he sees as the scourge of online gambling. He argues it’s not about the bottom line for his international gambling empire, but rather it’s an issue of morality because kids can get hooked on betting. Three states have already legalized online gambling, but Congress could step in with a federal ban. That’s what Adelson has pushed for through a Washington advocacy group he started in 2014.
Although some have argued that it’s too late for action, Adelson isn’t just anyone—he’s a megadonor. In addition to pumping more than $90 million into the 2012 presidential election, he spent $5 million last year to elect Republican House members. Politico reports he may have funneled tens of millions more through nonprofit groups that don’t disclose their donors.
Coal Country wants a return to power
The coal industry demonstrated last year that it can still fuel election turnout. Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used a pro-coal message to pad his win in Kentucky. More than one-third of McConnell’s TV ads in his race against Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes invoked his pro-coal stance, and voter turnout showed the message hit home: He improved his vote totals throughout the state’s coal counties.
The pro-coal theme also played well in West Virginia, where Republican Shelley Moore Capito defeated a Democratic opponent. The American Chemistry Council, American Energy Alliance and United Mine Workers of America Power PAC all weighed in with campaign money and election-time advertising. They’ll be after lawmakers to push back on President Barack Obama’s new regulations limiting smog, which were seen as a direct hit on the coal industry.
Black pastors bought themselves an unlikely friend
Weighing in at just $183,340 in contributions, All Citizens for Mississippi certainly wasn’t the election cycle’s biggest super-PAC. But it packed an important punch. The group worked to motivate African Americans to head to the polls in support of Republican Senator Thad Cochran, who was facing a surprisingly tough primary challenge from the right. The super-PAC, led by a black minister, put out radio ads warning that Cochran opponent Chris McDaniel would be bad for race relations.
Bishop Ronnie Crudup of the New Horizon Church International, who started the super-PAC, said its work on behalf of Cochran erased any doubt about the importance of Mississippi’s African American voters. Crudup said he’s had post-election conversations with Cochran. “The senator knows that African Americans stepped up for him, and I can’t put words in his mouth, but he has made good, affirmative statements that he appreciates the support.”
On Crudup’s wish list: better funding for historically black colleges and universities, policies that bring jobs to Mississippi and federal funding for workforce development. And there’s the issue of Obamacare. Crudup said he’d be very disappointed if Cochran tries to obliterate what he sees as a law that has been particularly helpful in getting African Americans health insurance coverage. “I think that our senator understands his constituents, black and white, depend on that service,” Crudup said.
By: Julie Bykowicz, Thank You Notes, Bloomberg Politics, January 5, 2015
“The Changing Role Of Money In Politics”: An Electoral Landscape In Which Financial Balance Has Tilted Dramatically To The Ultra-Rich
The 2012 presidential election was the first to be held in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United. Too many of us have forgotten that the results of that election were the opposite of what the megadonors had hoped for.
Can’t buy me gov.
That line neatly sums up the dismal showing on Election Day for the fundraisers, super-PAC strategists, and big-dollar donors of the Republican Party. Outside groups spent north of $1 billion this campaign season—bankrolled mostly by a small cadre of wealthy contributors—and yet they and their funders, especially on the Republican side, were left with little to show for it when the sun rose Wednesday morning. The GOP’s flagship super-PAC, Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, had an abysmal 1 percent return on its $104 million investment. Megadonor Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, invested $57 million in 2012 races; only 42 percent of the candidates who received Adelson support won. Other big donors—say, Romney super-PAC backers—got nothing for their money.
Perhaps we forgot about all of that because the 2014 midterms turned a lot of it around (with a few exceptions, i.e., Eric Cantor).
The 100 biggest campaign donors gave $323 million in 2014 — almost as much as the $356 million given by the estimated 4.75 million people who gave $200 or less…
And the balance almost certainly would tip far in favor of the mega-donors were the analysis to include nonprofit groups that spent at least $219 million — and likely much more — but aren’t required to reveal their donors’ identities.
The numbers — gleaned from reports filed with the Federal Election Commission and the Internal Revenue Service — paint the most comprehensive picture to date of an electoral landscape in which the financial balance has tilted dramatically to the ultra-rich. They have taken advantage of a spate of recent federal court rulings, regulatory decisions and feeble or bumbling oversight to spend ever-greater sums in politics — sometimes raising questions about whether their bounty is being well spent…
Taken together, the trend lines reflect a new political reality in which a handful of superaffluent partisans can exert more sway over the campaign landscape than millions of donors of more average means.
With sweeping victories for the Republicans these megadonors financed, it appears as though that success overshadows their previous failure in 2012 to influence the election outcome.
But it does raise a couple of questions: Are megadonors more effective at influencing midterms than presidential elections? And if so, why? One possible answer to those questions comes from turning our gaze away from who gives the money in order to focus for a moment on how it is spent.
Over the last few decades, as the amount of money in politics has exploded, the vast majority of those dollars have been spent on media – particularly television advertisements. Recently we’ve been learning more about what audience those ads reach. Derek Thompson reported it this way: Half of Broadcast TV Viewers Are 54 and Older – Yikes. As Cecilia Kang pointed out, younger viewers are trending away from traditional television in favor of subscription-based channels and streaming options.
And so it should probably not come as a surprise that a midterm election focused on turning out older voters in local elections is more fertile ground for expensive television advertising.
It will be interesting to see how all this plays out in the 2016 presidential election. I would simply note that all of Karl Rove’s millions of dollars in TV advertising were no match in 2012 to a simple recording by a catering staff at Mitt Romney’s famous 47% event. In the meantime, the Democrat’s largest megadonor – George Soros – has “shifted his giving away from pure politics, preferring to fund causes devoted to building up progressive infrastructure.”
At least until the laws are changed, megadonors are legally able to use their millions of dollars in an attempt to influence elections. The question will increasingly be…what do they spend it on?
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, January 3, 2015
“The Inmates Are Now In Charge”: In Arkansas, The House That Bubba Built Crumbles
The House that Bubba Built, namely the Arkansas Democratic Party, crumbled to the ground Tuesday night as freshman GOP Rep. Tom Cotton knocked off Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor and former GOP Rep. Asa Hutchinson, who helped lead the charge to impeach President Clinton, won the race to become Arkansas’ next governor. Hutchinson defeated Mike Ross, a former congressman whose first job in politics was serving as Bill Clinton’s driver, to win the governor’s mansion where Bill and Hillary once lived.
Despite Clinton’s seven trips to the state to campaign for the 2014 Democratic ticket, nothing he did could hold off the Republican wave that swept the state. The Democratic ticket was ultimately drowned out by the tide of anti-Obama sentiment in Arkansas, where the president has a 30 percent approval rating.
The Associated Press declared Cotton the winner two minutes after the polls closed, as Cotton swamped Pryor 56 percent to 40 percent, while Ross lost to Hutchinson 55 percent to 42 percent.
In his victory speech Tuesday night, Cotton declared, “The people of Arkansas have made their choice.”
The shift in political power completes the partisan realignment of the state that began in 2010, when Republicans defeated incumbent Sen. Blanche Lincoln by more than 20 points, took control of the state legislature in 2012 for the first time in more than 100 years, and eventually swept all four House seats.
Cotton, a lanky Harvard-educated lawyer and Army combat veteran, burst onto the political scene in 2012 when he easily won his Arkansas House seat and became the “anti-Rand,” vocally defending the Iraq War as “just and noble” and rejecting his party’s growing libertarian inclinations on global affairs.
That unapologetically hawkish posture won over the likes of former President George W. Bush, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Sen. John McCain, GOP mega donor Sheldon Adelson, former Rep. Allen West, and the John Bolton PAC, all of whom donated generously to Cotton’s Senate bid
Cotton was also heavily bankrolled by the securities industry, the largest sector to donate to Cotton’s campaign, and Elliott Management Corp., the hedge fund run by Paul Singer, a neocon defense hawk.
Although Sen. Pryor committed a number of unforced errors during the campaign, including stumbling when asked whether he believed President Obama had properly responded to the Ebola outbreak, the president’s unpopularity in Arkansas seemed to doom Pryor from the start.
At one debate, Cotton tied Pryor to Obama by saying the latter’s name more than 70 times. American Crossroads, another big funder for the pro-Cotton effort, plowed more than $500,000 into ads portraying the Pryor and the president as essentially the same person. In an ad called “Spelling Bee,” a young child spells “Pryor” as “O-B-A-M-A,” to which the judge says, “Close enough.”
On Tuesday night, Arkansas voters agreed that even sharing a party affiliation with President Obama, as Pryor and Ross did, was close enough for them, and officially completed Arkansas’ shift from blue to purple to — for now — solidly red.
By: Patricia Murphy, The Daily Beast, November 4, 2014
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