“Maine, The Way Life Should Not Be”: Senate Candidate Has Been “Jailed Repeatedly”
The last few election cycles have offered campaign watchers quite a motley crew of far-right Senate candidates. The cast of characters – Angle, Mourdock, Akin, Buck, O’Donnell, et al – doesn’t include any winners, but it does feature some candidates who are tough to forget.
Will the 2014 cycle offer similarly memorable conservatives? It’s too soon to say, though Erick Bennett, who’s taking on Sen. Susan Collins in a Republican primary in Maine, appears well worth watching. Amanda Marcotte explained why.
Bennett was convicted of domestic violence in 2003 after attacking his wife, who has since divorced him. While this sort of thing traditionally turns voters off, Bennett is employing an unusual strategy by wielding his conviction as evidence that you should vote for him in Maine’s Republican primary.
“The fact that I have been jailed repeatedly for not agreeing to admit to something I didn’t do should speak to the fact of how much guts and integrity I have,” he exclaimed to the press, trying to convince them that his lying ex-wife set him up for reasons unknown. “If I go to D.C., I’m going to have that same integrity in doing what I say, and saying what I do, when it comes to protecting people’s rights, as well as their pocketbooks.”
According to a report in the Bangor Daily News, Bennett also told reporters this week that his domestic-violence conviction has helped encourage him to pursue a “pro-family” agenda.
I’ve met many campaign aides over the years who’ve boasted that just about anything in a candidate’s background is survivable with the right spin. But this Republican Senate candidate appears to be testing the limits of this thesis.
When was the last time anyone saw a credible statewide candidate argue that being “jailed repeatedly” is proof of his “integrity”?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 3, 2014
“An Utterly Irrelevant Man”: NYT Mag Offers Inexplicable 2006 John McCain Cover Profile In 2013
In the last couple of years, every time something John McCain says makes “news,” my immediate reaction—sometimes on Twitter, sometimes just in my head—is, “Remind me again why anybody should give a crap what John McCain thinks about anything?” I’ve never been able to get a satisfactory answer to this question. And here comes star reporter Mark Leibovich, author of the well-received This Town, with a 6,634-word cover profile of McCain for next week’s New York Times Magazine. Do we need another one of these? I would have answered “no” before reading, but after, I’m even more sure.
If you’re doing this kind of profile, the first thing you have to do is answer, “Why?” Why do we care what McCain is up to? Did you learn anything important or interesting by following him around for a few days? Leibovich gives a shot to answering this question, and fails completely. He acknowledges all the clichés that have been attached to McCain over the years (maverick!), but then, without acknowledging it, indulges in the cliché that undergirds all the others: that whatever is happening now, John McCain is at the center of it:
McCain has another favorite Teddy Roosevelt phrase, “the crowded hour,” which I have heard him invoke several times over the years. It comes from a poem by the English writer Thomas Mordaunt, and T. R. used it to famously describe his charge on San Juan Hill. In McCain’s philosophy, “the crowded hour” refers to a moment of character testing. “The ‘crowded hour’ is as appropriate for me right now as any in a long time,” McCain told me as we walked through the Capitol. In some respects, this is just a function of public figures’ tendency to overdramatize the current moment and their role in it. But five years after losing to Barack Obama, after enduring the recriminations between his splintered campaign staff and rogue running mate, Sarah Palin, and after returning to the Senate and falling into a prolonged funk, McCain finds himself in the midst of another crowded hour, maybe his last as an elected leader.
And just how is John McCain in this ‘crowded hour,’ shaping critical events? How is his character being tested? Well let’s see. In the next paragraph, Leibovich tells us that McCain thinks Barack Obama is a foreign policy disaster. An opinion shared by most Republicans (Obama hasn’t even started any new wars, for pete’s sake!), but holding that opinion doesn’t constitute doing anything. Next, Leibovich tells us, “McCain also finds himself in the thick of the latest ‘fight for the soul of the G.O.P.’ against the Tea Party right.” “In the thick” of it, is he? And what does that mean? Will McCain have some large influence over that fight for the party’s soul? Of course not. Every once in a while he’ll give a surly comment, like when he referred to Tea Partiers as “wacko birds,” but he won’t be organizing any faction, or leading anybody, or doing anything at all that will determine the outcome of that fight. Nevertheless, Leibovich assures us, McCain does go on TV a lot. You might argue that makes him relevant (“I think the biggest fear John has is not being relevant,” says his little buddy Lindsey Graham), but spending a lot of time chatting with Wolf Blitzer is not the same thing as having an impact on developing events.
So let’s ask: What are the standards we could use to judge whether a senator is an important figure, at least more important than most of his or her 99 colleagues? After all, nobody’s writing Times Magazine cover profiles of Mike Johanns or John Hoeven. How is it that they’re less important than John McCain? An important senator might be influencing critical legislation. No dice there: McCain never much cared about lawmaking (in his three decades in Congress, he authored exactly one important law, which was later eviscerated by the Supreme Court). He might later become a presidential candidate, which is why we pay attention to people like Rand Paul or Ted Cruz, even if they’re ridiculous. No dice there either; McCain won’t be running for the White House again. He might lead some important constituency, or exercise great influence over his colleagues. Nothing there either; McCain represents basically no one, and he has never been popular with other senators. He might be championing an issue that will grow in import in the near future. Nothing there either. He might have some truly profound ideas that will shape policy in years to come. Can you name an important idea John McCain is advocating for?
So all that’s left is that John McCain is important because he gets invited on Meet the Press a lot. If you’re looking for something beyond that, you won’t find it in this article.
Leibovich is a good reporter, which is why this piece is so puzzling. Not just in that he makes some of the same blunders so many other reporters profiling McCain have made, like credulously quoting McCain saying he never talks about his experience in Vietnam—not only completely false (he talks about it all the time*), but a transparent way of making sure that the reporter includes in his story both a tribute to McCain’s modesty and a lengthy description of his POW ordeal. But more critically, what boggles the mind is that Leibovich (not to mention his editors) thought there was something to be learned with yet another 6,600-word profile of John McCain that reads exactly like every other profile of McCain you’ve ever read, from the Vietnam tribute to the description of his full schedule to the admiring quotes from Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman to the awe at his mavericky maverickness. I’ll save you the trouble: there isn’t.
* I just want to add that it isn’t just Leibovich who says this, just like so many other reporters who have written about McCain. In another portion of the article, Liebovich discusses a luncheon Harry Reid organized to honor the anniversary of McCain’s captivity:
“John told a lot of little poignant stories,” Susan Collins of Maine told me. “When John was tied up in such a painful position, he talked about the one guard who would loosen the bonds. He told the story of being out in the yard on Easter, and how one of the guards drew a little cross in the sand, just to acknowledge the holiday, and then rubbed it out so no one would get in trouble.” Collins has spent more than a hundred hours on airplane trips with McCain, she says, and has never heard him tell these stories.
Really? Then Collins ought to pay more attention to the news, because I’ve seen McCain tell that story a dozen times. His 2008 campaign even made an ad telling the story. For the record, as I’ve said many times, McCain has every right to talk about Vietnam as much as he wants and get whatever political mileage he can out of it. But when he and other people claim he’s terribly reticent about ever bringing it up, they just aren’t telling the truth.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American prospect, December 18, 2013
“Was It Worth It?”: Republicans Are Now Competing With Shingles And Herpes For Popularity
Remember back when this government shutdown started and the Republicans had so many ambitions? They were going to defund ObamaCare, or at least delay the individual mandate for a year. They were going to introduce a “conscience clause” that would allow employers to deny their workers access to contraception. They were going to compel the administration to bypass the deliberative process at the State Department and preemptively license the Keystone XL pipeline. They were going to gut coal-ash regulations and expand offshore drilling. They were going to get fast track authority for tax reform legislation based on Rep. Paul Ryan’s principles. They were going to cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and rip apart the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms. They’d means-test Medicare and finally get tort reform. They had these dreams and many more besides.
But where are we now? All the various deals and negotiations have collapsed, and it’s down to a one-on-one between Reid and McConnell.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, spoke cordially by telephone but remained deadlocked. The stumbling block is over spending levels, the length of a debt ceiling increase and how long a temporary spending measure should keep the government open until a longer-term budget deal can be reached.
Translation: the talks are about how much new spending will be added to the sequester, how much the borrowing limit will be expanded, and how much time will be covered under the continuing resolution.
Further translation: the Republicans aren’t even asking for anything on their wish-list anymore.
Which is as it should be, because they never offered the Democrats a damn thing in return.
Republicans reacted with frustration over what they saw as the shifting demands of a Democratic leadership intent on inflicting maximum damage on adversaries sinking in the polls and increasingly isolated.
“The Democrats keep moving the goal posts,” Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and a lead negotiator, said Sunday. “Decisions within the Democratic conference are constantly changing.”
But Democratic aides said a deal taking shape among a bipartisan group of senators offered Democrats nothing beyond a reopening of the government and temporary assurances that the government will not default in the coming days. Those should be seen not as concessions but as basic obligations of Congress, they say.
How many times have I heard this president be criticized for giving the store away? I think all that talk is almost as delusional as the ambitions the Republicans took into this showdown. Back in 2011, during the last debt ceiling fiasco, the Republicans had the ability and the motivation to cripple the economy to such a degree that the president probably could not have been reelected. Would they have actually done it?
I guess we’ll never know, but who can blame the president for being unwilling to hand that decision to his political opponents? All he ever asked was for a balanced approach that included some new tax revenue, and his opponents have not yet ever come close to taking ‘yes’ for an answer if it required violating their pledge to Grover Norquist. What we got instead was sequestration. That was the only way the Republicans could keep some of the president’s concessions without making any of their own. In order to get the president to give away the store, they had to eschew most of what they said they really wanted and appropriate with a sledgehammer that removed all discretion, wisdom, and values from the system.
And where has it gotten them?
Now they are competing with shingles and herpes for popularity. Now they are hopelessly divided and business leaders are furious with them. And they’re back to square one, facing budget negotiations that will no longer allow them to pocket gains without making concessions. They will have to spell out what they want, which appears to be to diminish the value of their base’s earned benefits in return for agreeing to raise their base’s taxes.
Good luck with that.
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Ploitical Animal, October 13, 2013
“How About The ‘Congress Does It’s Job’ Plan”: In The Midst Of Crises, Chaos Grips Congress
I’d thought about creating some kind of flow chart to capture ongoing developments in Capitol Hill, but quickly gave up. As Jonathan Cohn noted, it would have simply been too messy.
By my count, no less than four separate conversations are taking place right now: The White House is talking to House Republicans and, separately, it to Senate Republicans. In the Senate, moderate Republicans are talking to the Democratic leadership. In the House, Republicans from the party’s extreme wing are talking to Republicans from the not-so-extreme wing, all under the watchful eye of the caucus leaders.
And that’s just the official dialogue. Staff and outside interest groups are talking amongst themselves. The subject of these talks include myriad variations on how to write a bill reopening the government and giving it new borrowing authority, for different durations of time and under different conditions — or no conditions at all.
That ought to clear things up, right?
It’s been nearly two weeks since congressional Republicans shut down the government, and we’re just days from a debt-ceiling calamity, suggesting policymakers should theoretically be working towards some kind of resolution. But while there was a flurry of activity yesterday, it was largely a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.
House Republicans, for example, thought they’d presented the White House with a credible offer: Congress would temporarily raise the debt ceiling, the government would remain closed, Democrats would accept Medicare and/or Social Security cuts, and the severity of the sequestration cuts that neither party likes would be eased. President Obama declared this a joke, told House GOP leaders he could probably get a better offer from Senate Republicans, and so dejected House members promptly left Capitol Hill yesterday.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), meanwhile, thought she too had come up with a solution: Congress would reopen the government for six months and raise the debt limit for a year. Democrats would have to accept sequestration levels and throw in a two-year delay of the medical-device tax in the Affordable Care Act, and in exchange, Republicans would concede nothing. Yesterday, Democrats rejected this as wholly unacceptable, too.
And as a practical matter, it doesn’t much matter that Dems didn’t like it, since House Republicans said they’d refuse to even vote on the Collins plan — a plan in which Republicans give up nothing except temporary hold on some hostages — even if the Senate approved it and even if House GOP leaders could tolerate it.
So what happens now?
With House members having given up, at least for now, talks are now underway between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). What, if anything, they can expect to accomplish is unclear.
And even if they reached some sort of resolution, it may not matter, since House Republicans still appear to be in a sociopathic mood, and may simply reject anything that emerges from the upper chamber, no matter the consequences.
The anxiety levels are exceedingly high.
For what it’s worth, I remain fond of the “Congress does its job” plan. It goes like this: the government needs to be funded, and since the parties already agree on funding levels, Congress should do its job and reopen the government — neither side makes demands, neither side takes a hostage, neither side asks for concessions from the other, and neither side relies on extortion.
Similarly, the nation needs to pay its bills, and since the parties already agree that default would be catastrophic, Congress should do its job and extend the Treasury’s borrowing authority — neither side makes demands, neither side takes a hostage, neither side asks for concessions from the other, and neither side relies on extortion.
For reasons that only make sense to them, Republicans consider the “Congress does its job” plan to be wildly offensive and a proposal so outrageous, they’d rather hurt Americans on purpose than vote for it.
Tick tock.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 13, 2013
“We Did Something Constructive Today”: The New Republican Definition Of Constructive Is What You Can Block And Destroy
We talked at length yesterday about the failure of the Transportation and Housing and Urban Development (or “THUD”) appropriations bill in the House — a move that sent the Republican budget process into chaos — so it’s only fair to note what happened to the Senate version of the same bill.
In short, nothing good.
Early on Thursday afternoon, a few hours before the start of a month-long summer recess, the U.S. Senate held a doomed vote on a $44 billion package of transportation and housing funds. The vote was 54-43, six short of cloture, most Republicans making sure that the bill with the accidentally perfect name of THUD (Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development) went down in flames for now.
Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, whose work on a gun control amendment this year gave him the temporary glow of a centrist, walked from the Senate to a special, open live-streamed meeting of the Republican Study Committee, all about the Obama administration’s scandals. Anyone watching the Tea Party Patriots-sponsored feed could hear Toomey tell a colleague that “we did something constructive today” in the Senate.
“We denied cloture on the THUD bill,” said Toomey. “I told you we’d kill it, and we did.”
We talk from time to time about the post-policy nihilism that’s come to define so much of Republican politics, and this is rather striking example.
The Senate’s THUD bill was expected to pass with relative ease. It had bipartisan support; it was pulled together responsibly; and it sailed through the committee process as non-controversial bills should. As Joan McCarter explained, “The transportation funding bill has always been a non-controversial, reliable bipartisan effort, because there was something tangible in it for every member of Congress to take home: jobs, infrastructure improvements, a display of federal dollars at work for their constituents. That’s all changed.”
And not for the better.
After the House Republicans killed their own version of the bill, GOP leaders feared a moderate, bipartisan THUD package would give Senate Dems the upper hand in a conference committee. What’s more, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was eager to prove how right-wing he is to conservatives back home, so he lobbied Republicans who supported the bill to change their mind.
The result? A bill that was supposed to be approved easily was killed with a filibuster — which in Pat Toomey’s mind, is evidence of doing “something constructive.”
The larger point, of course, is that policymakers used to have a less ridiculous definition of what “constructive” means. Not too long ago, members of Congress used to think they did “something constructive” when they, you know, passed a bill. Or maybe reached a compromise. Or perhaps struck some sort of deal.
The hallmark of post-policy nihilism is the belief that policy outcomes and substantive governing are largely irrelevant. Officials have begun defining themselves solely by what they can block and destroy, rather than what they can accomplish, even if that means opposing what they support.
And that’s not good.
What’s more, as McConnell panics about his re-election bid, this dynamic is likely to become more common. Yesterday, for example, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) hoped to see the Senate pass the bipartisan bill, but quickly found herself on the losing side of a McConnell broadside.
Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the top Republican on the panel that wrote the $54 billion transportation bill, appeared to grope for an explanation for why Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) worked so hard to kill her legislation.
Asked if McConnell’s upcoming primary fight with a tea party challenger might have something to do with the pressure, Collins told POLITICO: “I can’t speculate on why. All I can tell you is he has never worked harder against a member of his own party than he did against me today.”
For context, note that Collins and McConnell have worked together for 16 years — and she’s “never” seem him work this hard to beat another Republican.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 2, 2013
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