SSP Daily Digest: 6/10 (Morning Edition)

  • AR-Sen: Mark Blumenthal has a detailed post-mortem of the polling in the Arkansas senate runoff, including some off-the-record claims that both Halter’s and Lincoln’s internal polling showed Lincoln ahead. I sort of wonder why Lincoln didn’t put out these numbers, if true.
  • CT-Sen: Several big-name Republican fundraisers are hosting an event for none other than Joe Lieberman, to benefit his 2012 re-election campaign. Some of the hosts include Robbie Aiken, Wayne Berman, Rachel Pearson, and Kathryn Rand. Obviously an outright party switch is always possible with this fuckin’ guy.
  • FL-Sen: Wow, so there really is a Democrat who wants death panels (more or less). Maurice Ferre, himself 75 years old, said in a meeting with the Palm Beach Post editorial board:

    • “Well, you know what, when you get to be 85 or 90 years old, you’re going to die. And I’m sorry, you call it, Sarah Palin, what you want, but the fact is that it is absurd for us to be spending the types of money we’re spending to extend life three months.”

    Asked what he’d do as a Senator to control such costs, Ferre said: “I would absolutely say that this is the cap on how much is available for you to spend at age 90, 87, with a heart condition of this sort, with diabetes of this sort, two legs missing and, you know, this is how much is available for you to spend. And you spend it any way you want.”

    There are other ways to lose races in Florida, but this is the simplest and most direct.

  • KY-Sen: Mitch McConnell’s sticking in his bite-guard and gritting his teeth hard to do a fundraiser for Roark Rand Paul later this month. Believe it or not, we happened to get the advance text of Paul’s prepared remarks for the event:

    • Throughout the ages, the finger painter, the Play-Doh sculptor, the Lincoln Logger stood alone against the daycare teacher of her time. She did not live to earn approval stamps. She lived for herself, that she might achieve things that are the glory of all humanity. These are my terms; I do not care to play by any others. And now, if the court will allow me, it’s naptime.

  • NV-Sen: The Big Dog is coming to the Silver State to do a campaign rally for Handsome Harry Reid next week – who won’t actually be there because the Senate will be in session. No word on whether a fundraiser is also on tap.
  • PA-Sen: Pat Toomey is taking some heat for a long-ago resume item: He used to work on Wall Street – in derivatives trading, no less.
  • SC-Sen: Alvin Greene, the mysterious Dem senate nominee in South Carolina, says he won’t drop out of the race, in spite of the state party’s call for him to bail in the wake of revelations that he was arrested on an obscenity charge last fall. Then again, Scott Lee Cohen said he wouldn’t bow out, either.
  • KS-Gov: Dem gubernatorial hopeful Tom Holland picked fellow state Sen. Kelly Kultala, considered something of a rising star in KS politics, as his running mate. The two formally kicked off their campaign yesterday.
  • NM-Gov, WI-07: In NM-Gov, we mentioned a little while back that Dem LG Diane Denish is hitting GOP nominee Susana Martinez’s record as a prosecutor in TV ads, specifically targeting her conviction rate. A related issue is coming up in WI-07, where Dems are charging ex-prosecutor Sean Duffy with misusing his (very recently) former office to compile conviction statistics helpful to his political campaign.
  • SC-Gov: Mitt Romney, who endorsed Nikki Haley back in March, is heading back down to the Palmetto state to campaign for her once more. Haley faces a runoff against Rep. Gresham Barrett on June 22nd.
  • AK-AL: Former communications exec Sheldon Fisher is running ads against his primary opponent, GOP Rep. Don Young, portraying himself as the “new conservative choice.” Kudos to the AP for reporting that the ad buy is $40,000 in size – not much by conventional standards, perhaps, but that money ought to go a lot further in Alaska.
  • IN-03: So this is pretty bizarre. Ex-Rep. Mark Souder, who recently resigned on account of having an extra-marital affair with a staffer, sent an odd message on Facebook concerning his likely successor, state Sen. Marlin Stutzman. On the one hand, he says Stutzman is “probably best qualified” to fill his spot. But then, explains the AP:

    • In one paragraph, he says Stutzman knew nothing of the affair and therefore couldn’t have tipped off the media. In another, he mentions that Stutzman or a political consulting firm leaked word of the affair to Fox News after getting information from the staffer’s husband, Brad Jackson a Kosciusko County commissioner.

    Hmm, I thought it was Mike Pence who dimed out Souder?

  • MD-01: Businessman Rob Fisher is going up with an ad presenting himself as an outsider in the GOP primary. He faces the better-known state Sen. Andy Harris (the 2008 loser). BIG props to Ben Pershing at the Washington Post for nailing down these details: “The spot is running on cable stations in the Baltimore and Salisbury markets, with an initial buy of more than $70,000.”
  • MI-07, MI-09: President Obama did some fundraisers in Michigan earlier this week – one for the DNC, and another joint event for Reps. Gary Peters and Mark Schauer.
  • OH-18: Zack Space is doin’ it right: He’s launching a “six-figure” buy for an ad attacking GOP opponent Bob Gibbs as a tax-hiker and self-pay-raiser. Why do I like this move? Because Space is using his use cash edge ($1.3 mil to $0.1mil) to define Gibbs, at a time when Gibbs has only just emerged from the uncertainty of a primary recount (which he won with an absurdly pathetic 20.9%). For his part, Gibbs fired back with a popgun press release, the poor man’s television ad – very poor man’s.
  • VA-05: True to his word, Some Dude Jeff Clark is going ahead with his plans to run as a teabagging independent, since Rob Hurt won the GOP primary to take on Tom Perriello. In fact, Clark filed petitions with the board of elections last week. Note, though, something he hasn’t yet filed: an FEC report. Meanwhile, second-place finisher Jim McKelvey, who swore he wouldn’t support Hurt if he became the nominee, is still playing coy. Election night remarks suggested he was prepared to fall in line, but he hasn’t officially endorsed. (The other four also-rans have in fact done so.)
  • Polltopia: Taegan Goddard relays some blind non-quotes from random “pollsters” complaining about the alleged lack of transparency in Nate Silver’s pollster ratings – in particular, the fact that he hasn’t published his database of polls. Leaving aside the delicious irony that anonymous pollsters are complaining about transparency, I think this is a red herring. As Nate points out in a post of his own, anyone can recreate his work (with a lot of time and a little money) – and his main concern is the legal issues involved in making public a database that in part relies on information drawn from for-pay services.

    • 83 thoughts on “SSP Daily Digest: 6/10 (Morning Edition)”

    1. The value of a human life is not infinite in a policy sense, for the simple fact that costs for saving or extending lives have to be traded off against other policy options that could also save or extend lives (not limited to health care in the strict sense). And that assumes that all we care about is maximising our life expectancy, which is patently not true. (Why isn’t the speed limit 20mph?)

      Unfortunately, I can’t hope for public debate to rise beyond soundbites.  

    3. This was never a done deal.  The media and others (intrade had Halter at 85%) convinced progressives that it was.  Even the polls showing Halter ahead showed he was barely ahead.  

    5. It’s really interesting to see how it developed.

      Maybe Lincoln didn’t put out the numbers showing her ahead, because they needed to convince her voters not to be complacent and not show up.  Perhaps, and this is wild speculation, had Halter not been thought to be in the lead, a few more of his voters would have turned out.  Probably not enough to make a difference, but still.

    7. http://www.politico.com/playbo…

      Top Arkansas sources tell us the state’s political establishment expects Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) to LOSE her primary runoff tonight by at least 5 points — and perhaps 7 to 10, since insurgents have been outperforming their polls this year.

      The unions were predicting victory already. The media piled on and everyone was ready to bury Lincoln’s political career. Then people of Arkansas voted.

      I think Lincoln (with the help of Bill Clinton) was successful enough in turning the election as an us vs. the outside forces coming into Arkansas to tell us what to do. I hope she can get a bounce from this.  

    8. I really hope that he can win, as he has sided with Democrats on a lot of issues and I have always seen as a moderate who is happy to vote on a progressive bill if his vote is needed. And I ultimately believe that he switched on health care, as his vote was no longer needed. Unfortunately, it did not seem to go over well in his district anyway and this will likely be a close race in November.

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