SSP Daily Digest: 6/28 (Afternoon Edition)

CO-Sen: Politico’s Dave Catanese has an interesting profile on Ken Buck, who’s looking likelier and likelier to wind up as the GOP’s nominee in the Colorado Senate race. With a litany of fringy comments on eliminating Social Security, student loans, and the Dept. of Education, and on supporting “birther” legislation, the question is whether he’s poised to complete the troika of candidates (along with Rand Paul and Sharron Angle) whose very over-the-topness allows the GOP to pull defeat from the jaws of victory. Buck tells Politico that he “doesn’t recall” making some of those statements, and is seeking to walk back some of the most controversial. Not coincidentally, the US Chamber of Commerce just announced today that it’s backing Jane Norton in the primary, specifically citing electability and even taking an ad hominem swipe at Buck backer Jim DeMint.

IA-Sen: Roxanne Conlin got the support of EMILY’s List last Friday. Conlin has her own money, but to make any headway against Chuck Grassley, she’ll need every penny she can round up.

IL-Sen: Alexi Giannoulias has been subpoenaed to testify in Rod Blagojevich’s corruption trial (although it’s unclear whether he’ll actually ever have to take the stand). While there isn’t any suggestion that Giannoulias has done anything wrong, any mass-mediated association at all with the toxic Blagojevich isn’t good for Giannoulias; if nothing else, it might remove the local media’s target off Mark Kirk’s back, where it’s been squarely located for the last few weeks. The Sun-Times’ Lynn Sweet is still keeping the pressure on Kirk, though, at least for now; her latest column excoriates Kirk for his non-disclosure and secretiveness, which has been a constant throughout his campaign even before his house of cards started falling down.

MO-Sen: Even if I were a Republican I can’t imagine wanting to be seen in the same place as Karl Rove, but Roy Blunt — about as transparently power-hungry a member of the GOP Beltway establishment as can be — has always seemed strangely unconcerned about the optics of what all he does. Rove is hosting two fundraisers today for Blunt in the Show Me State, in St. Charles and Springfield.

SC-Sen: Although it was looking like the Alvin Greene story was starting to go away, with the state Democrats’ decision not to challenge his primary victory and the state election board’s decision not to investigate, the story may get a few more chapters. The state ethics and disclosure commission and the state’s 5th circuit solicitor, instead, will get involved; they’re going to look into whether any laws were broken in his financial disclosures, and they may subpoena bank records to find out. At issue, of course, is where Greene came up with the $10K to pay his filing fee; if nothing else, if he had $10K sitting around, he shouldn’t have qualified for a public defender because of indigence. Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s been announced that Greene is no longer being represented by the 5th circuit’s public defender in his upcoming trial on obscenity charges.

WA-Sen: Dino Rossi won’t be doing any more get-rich-quick real estate seminars in the midst of his Senate campaign. And here’s the weird part… it wasn’t because of his own decision, because of the terrible PR that’s likely to result. Instead, it was the decision of the seminar’s organizers, who called off the last seminar in the series this week. They were worried about how Rossi’s presence made them look bad, in terms of politicizing their ostensibly agenda-free program.

FL-Gov: Does some sort of critical mass result when two of the most unlikeable Republicans — not in terms of policy, just in terms of purely personal characteristics — get together in one place? Newt Gingrich just endorsed Bill McCollum. Meanwhile, Bud Chiles has been enduring a lot of pressure from Democratic friends and well-wishers to get the heck out of his indie bid and not risk being a spoiler, but he’s standing pat for now.

GA-Gov: Here’s some bad news for Dems in Georgia: weirdo teabagging millionaire Ray Boyd says he won’t follow through on his plans to run a $2 million independent campaign for governor. He was having trouble gathering the requisite signatures, and decided not to throw good money after bad. (Recall that he spent a few days in the GOP primary field before storming out, unwilling to sign the party’s “loyalty oath.”) With Boyd poised to draw a few percent off the electorate’s right flank, his presence would have been a big boost to Roy Barnes in his gubernatorial comeback attempt.

MA-Gov: The Boston Globe, via Univ. of New Hampshire, has a new poll of the Governor’s race; while Deval Patrick has a significant lead, the poll seems to be good news for Republican Charlie Baker, and moreover the RGA, as it seems to vindicate their strategy of hitting out first at independent candidate Tim Cahill to try to make it a two-man race. The GOP’s ad blitz designed at wiping out Cahill seems to have taken him down a few pegs, as UNH sees the race at 38 Patrick, 31 Baker, 9 for Cahill, and 2 for Green candidate Jill Stein. (The previous UNH poll, from January against the backdrop of the MA-Sen election, was 30 Patrick, 23 Cahill, 19 Baker.) One other intriguing tidbit that’s gotten a lot of play today: for now, Scott Brown is the most popular political figure in the state, with a 52/18 approval, suggesting that unseating His Accidency in 2012 won’t be the slam dunk that many are predicting.

MD-Gov: It was the last day for Bob Ehrlich’s talk radio show on Saturday. Ehrlich will be officially filing to run for Governor before the July 6 deadline. Of course, he’s been saying he’s a candidate for months now, but has held off on the official filing to keep on the air as long as possible to avoid prohibitions against that sort of illegal in-kind contribution to his campaign.

MI-Gov: Rep. Peter Hoekstra has been seemingly losing a lot of endorsement battles in the last few weeks, but he pocketed a few helpful nods. One is from right-wing kingmaker Jim DeMint, who stumped with Hoekstra on Friday. The other is from the Grand Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce, which gave a split endorsement to local boy Hoekstra and Mike Bouchard. (The statewide Chamber has already endorsed Mike Cox in the GOP primary.) GRACC also endorsed Steve Heacock in the GOP primary in Vern Ehlers’ MI-03, and Bill Huizenga in the GOP primary in Hoekstra’s MI-02.

AL-02: Rick Barber seems to be reveling in his viral video celebrity, rolling out an even more feverish ad involving his hallucinations about the Founding Fathers and various other liberty-related heroes. Today’s ad includes a conversation with Zombie Lincoln, who compares health care reform to slavery.

ID-01: Here’s more evidence that the ID-01 Republican primary really was a win-win situation for Democrats. State Rep. Raul Labrador is backing down from his withering critiques of his possible-future-boss John Boehner, upon the realization that he’ll need the NRCC’s financial help to get to Congress in the first place (seeing as how he currently has $35K to work with). Labrador had previously criticized Boehner by name for helping drive the Republican party into the ditch and letting the Dems take over in 2006.

MS-01: Could Rep. Travis Childers rack up enough right-wing endorsements to save his bacon against Alan Nunnelee this cycle? Fresh off his NRA endorsement last week, now he’s gotten the endorsement of the National Right to Life.

Polltopia: Daily Kos’s Steve Singiser is putting his freakishly comprehensive personal database of poll data to good use. He finds that there is, indeed, a wide disparity in internal polls released by the two parties compared with the previous few cycles, when Dems released more internals as they seemed to have more good news to report. (This cycle has a 3-to-1 GOP advantage; even in the fairly neutral year of 2004, it was about even between Dems and the GOP.) The caveat, however: most internals were released in a flurry in the last few months before the general elections, and this kind of early flooding-of-the-zone with internals is pretty unprecedented, so it’s still hard to interpret what it means.

56 thoughts on “SSP Daily Digest: 6/28 (Afternoon Edition)”

  1. CO-Sen:  this is golden that there’s this material on Buck.  I hope Bennet learns from Reid and puts it to good use starting soon.  I hope also Romanoff fades away quietly.  His primary challenge is proving only a headache for Dems, rather than an opportunity to nominate a better candidate than Bennet.

    MO-Sen:  nobody cares about Karl Rove except for political junkies.  Those fundraisers are a no-lose no-brainer for Blunt.  “Bad optics” require truly controversial public figures who most voters know and dislike, like Gingrich or Palin.  Blunt isn’t hurt at all by having Rove help him raise money.

    VA-10:  I live here, and Frank Wolf is the safe incumbent.  Still, I gave $250 to Democrat Jeff Barnett and of course will vote for him in November.  The news here is that I got polled on this race recently, a live caller poll where the call center staffer said they were purposely not told who the client was.  But based on the questions, I’m guessing it was the Barnett campaign.  There was an up-front horse race trial heat query, then some positive message-testing questions for both, and after another trial heat query there was the giveaway that it was a poll on behalf of Barnett:  negative message-testing questions on Wolf.  There was no comparable negative message-testing on Barnett.  I’m glad Barnett is running a serious enough campaign to pay for a poll.  Hats off to him for taking on a tremendous challenge.

  2. “Not coincidentally, the US Chamber of Commerce just announced today that it’s backing Jane Norton  in the primary, specifically citing electability and even taking an ad hominem swipe at Buck backer Jim DeMint. ”

    /me grabs the can opener

  3. if anyone is interested.  Right-winger proclaims this, is willing to bet $100 per person:

    I’ll take it on the Senate side that no seat held by Republicans today, there will be a Democrat there at the start of the next session. 1:1 there too.

    Any takers?  Let me know, and I’ll let him know about it.  🙂

    But beware, the guy is two-faced enough that he’ll probably weasel out of Florida because Crist isn’t a Democrat.

  4. Oops, heh.  Should’ve posted these earlier.  It’s from last week’s trivia questions in the weekly open thread.

    1. Charles Goodell (R-NY)

    2. Simon Fraser University, Division II

    3. Keith Olbermann

    4. Pam Ferris

    5. Rep. Jack Brooks (D)

    6. C. Montgomery Burns

    7. “Miami John” Cernuto

    8. 1

    9. UC Berkeley School of Law

    10. Vermont, Republican, 27 times (1856 – 1960); Alabama & Mississippi voted Democratic from 1876 – 1948

    11. John Wooden, 134

    12.

    a-7

    b-3

    c-8

    d-2

    e-6

    f-1

    g-10

    h-9

    i-4

    j-5

  5. It’s probably really bad news about Boyd dropping out.  There would be a runoff if no one gets 50%+1, so Boyd wouldn’t have been the spoiler anyways.

  6. I thought his first one was nutty enough, but this one was way over the top. Healthcare may be costing the government and taxpayers ridiculously amounts of money when it comes to effect, but it is not comparable to slavery. Is this guy looking to be the next Glenn Beck when Beck runs with Palin in 2012?

    I also saw Dale Peterson, the guy running for Ag. Comm, in the ad. Too bad, I thought his quirky ads were entertaining, but being associated with this Barber guy really doesn’t lessen the idea that he is also indulged in crazy ideas. Peterson is starting to remind me of a cartoon character, like Yosemite Sam.

  7. According to this book, as an Assistant State Attorney General, Conlin was responsible for writing Iowa’s state version of the Equal Rights Amendment, which is now law.  Great to see an early feminist leader going up for big office here.

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