Author: DavidNYC

From our new-and-already-good friends down at the Alabama Democratic Party comes word of a Rudy gaffe that showcases how spectacularly out-of-touch the man is. Via the AP:

But when asked about more mundane matters – like the price of some basic staples – Giuliani had trouble with a reporter’s question.

“A gallon of milk is probably about a $1.50, a loaf of bread about a $1.25, $1.30,” he said.

A check of the Web site for D’Agostino supermarket on Manhattan’s Upper East Side showed a gallon of milk priced at $4.19 and a loaf of white bread at $2.99 to $3.39. In Montgomery, Ala., a gallon of milk goes for about $3.39 and bread is about $2.

And this isn’t tucked away at the bottom of the story – the headline is “Republican candidate off the mark on cost of milk, bread.” Ouch. They even bring up one of my favorite all-time gaffes: that wonderful time when George Bush père was mesmerized by a supermarket checkout scanner. Ah, those were the days.

Of course, to us New Yorkers, this comes as no surprise. Rudy Giuliani doesn’t even know how long it takes to wait for a streetlight to turn green – his body men would stop traffic at every corner so that His Highness could stroll by without having to tarry like the rest of us plebes, on those rare occasions he deigned to dirty the soles of his shoes on city sidewalks. Let’s just put it this way: Rudy is no man of the people.

And turning back to that classic Bush-41 moment, there’s no question it helped cement his image as a clueless, distant old man who wasn’t in tune with America. I still remember him trying to connect with a college crowd once, declaring that Al Gore was “way out, far out, man”  – and of course managing to sound like the world’s oldest, uncoolest hippie. Even fifteen years later, it still makes me cringe.

Now, with GHWB, the checkout scanner incident fit neatly, almost perfectly, into a pre-existing narrative about the guy. That narrative doesn’t exist yet with Giuliani, but even if a gaffe like this doesn’t serve as a “defining moment,” it can certainly help in the creation of a new narrative.  And when it comes to Giuliani, branding him as out-of-touch would indeed be accurate to a T.

From a New York 1 poll:

In the General Election, New York remains a blue state with either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee. Hillary beats Rudy Giuliani by 14 points and John McCain by 16 points. Barack Obama beats Rudy Giuliani statewide by 6 points and defeats John McCain by 15 points.

Obama beating Giuliani is the most interesting thing to me. This deflates the notion that Rudy might carry New York State, especially when you consider that Hillary beats Obama 49-17 in a primary matchup. In other words, a Dem with low support among Dems (Obama) can still beat Saint Rudy.

There’s also this bit:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is considered unlikely to enter the presidential race if the other formidable New Yorkers are the eventual nominees of their parties, and at 14% he hardly makes a dent in the support of either Hillary Clinton (46%) or Rudy Giuliani (32%) in a 3-way contest, and takes equally from both.

It’s that last line which jumps out at me, seeing as some recent polls have been touted showing Bloomberg pulling almost entirely from the GOP. However, there may be a local effect here, given that many NYC Democrats have gotten accustomed to pulling the lever for Bloomberg. Dems elsewhere might not be so inclined.

METHODOLOGY

This poll was conducted from April 4 through April 7, 2007, among 1,013 New York State registered voters, including 496 registered Democratic voters (with a margin of error of +/-4.5%); 274 registered Republicans (with a margin of error of +/-6%) and 500 New York City registered voters (with a margin of error of +/-4.5%).

(Bumped. – promoted by James L.)

Q: How bad do you think it’s gonna be?

A: Pretty goddamn bad. Probably all the other Families will line up against us. That’s alright – this thing’s gotta happen every five years or so – ten years – helps to get rid of the bad blood. Been ten years since the last one. You know you got to stop them at the beginning, like they should have stopped Hitler at Munich, They should never’ve let him get away with that. They were just asking for big trouble.

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Saturday Night Discussion Items (James):

• Florida: Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, with a single stroke, made his state more politically competitive for Democrats by restoring the voting rights of an estimated 515,000 felons who have committed “less serious” (nonviolent) crimes.  Salon’s Farhad Manjoo gives the implications:

  The ex-cons belong to traditionally Democratic demographics — many are African-American, and many are poor. If they’re allowed to vote, they’ll likely go to the polls at lower rates than everyone else; Uggen and Manza’s work suggests felons turn out to vote at about the half the general turnout rate in any given election. But in a state as closely divided politically as Florida, that could still make all the difference. In the past several decades, say Uggen and Manza, at least two Senate races in Florida would have gone to Democrats instead of Republicans had felons had the right to vote. Buddy McKay would have beaten Connie Mack in 1988, and Betty Castor would have beaten Mel Martinez in 2004. And, of course, the 2000 presidential election would have gone to Al Gore. Uggen and Manza’s research suggests Gore might have picked up 60,000 votes from felons.

• NY-25: Dan Maffei rides again.
• OR-Sen: Will he or won’t he?  The Draft DeFazio for Senate campaign kicks into high gear.
• CT-05: Freshman Rep. Chris Murphy is hitting the ground running, raising $420,000 in the first quarter of 2007, according to a DCCC e-mail.  Numbers like those this early in the cycle should make his potential Republican challengers pause.
• NM-02: New Mexico FBIHOP takes a look at the potential challengers to Republican Rep. Steve Pearce in this R+5.7 district.

(Bumped – promoted by DavidNYC)

Campaigns, as we all know, start earlier and earlier every cycle. But I thought it might be helpful to take a look back at when some of last year’s Senate challengers formally filed statements of candidacy with the FEC, as something of a benchmark for what we might expect this year:

Candidate	Party	State	Date
Bob Corker	R	TN	10/14/2004
Matt Brown	D	RI	2/16/2005
Mark Kennedy	R	MN	2/22/2005
Amy Klobuchar	D	MN	3/1/2005
Bob Casey	D	PA	3/11/2005
Patty Wetterling	D	MN	3/14/2005
Tom Kean, Jr.	R	NJ	3/15/2005
Kweisi Mfume	D	MD	3/17/2005
Sheldon Whitehouse	D	RI	3/31/2005
John Morrison	D	MT	4/16/2005
Bernie Sanders	I	VT	5/2/2005
Ben Cardin	D	MD	5/6/2005
Harold Ford	D	TN	5/25/2005
Jon Tester	D	MT	5/27/2005
Katherine Harris	R	FL	6/20/2005
Michael Steele	R	MD	6/24/2005
Richard Tarrant	R	VT	7/6/2005
Mike McGavick	R	WA	7/26/2005
Pete Ricketts	R	NE	8/15/2005
Jim Pederson	D	AZ	9/2/2005
Claire McCaskill	D	MO	9/13/2005
Paul Hackett	D	OH	10/11/2005
Mike Bouchard	R	MI	10/15/2005
Sherrod Brown	D	OH	10/18/2005
Jack Carter	D	NV	11/1/2005
Harris Miller	D	VA	1/9/2006
Jim Webb	D	VA	2/9/2006
Ned Lamont	D	CT	2/10/2006

So this table tells me two things. First, that running for Senate is an incredibly hard two-year slog for most people. Alright, we already knew that, but seeing all these dates puts this fact into stark relief. This business ain’t for the weak of heart – or body.

Second, this also tells me that if this cycle is anything like the last one, we may have to wait almost a year to see the field get hammered down. However, given general trends, plus the presidential race (with its super-early primaries) sucking up so much oxygen, I’d expect to see most serious candidates filings take place well before February 2007. I don’t think we’ll have too many – if any – Lamonts or Webbs this time. I wouldn’t be surprised if just about every contender files by Labor Day of this year.

Bottom line: We’ve still got plenty of waiting left to do on the Senate recruitment front, but probably not as much as last time. And you can be sure Chuck Schumer isn’t wasting even a moment. Neither, of course, are we.

(One small caveat about this list: As I say, it reflects candidate filing dates with the FEC. Actual announcements – ie, the kind with all the hoopla and press coverage – might have taken place at different times than listed in this chart. But in most cases, they should probably be pretty close.)

Check out this list of states:

Arkansas: 9.76%
Arizona: 10.47%
California: 9.95%
New Mexico: 0.79%
Nevada: 2.59%
Michigan: 3.42%
Washington: 7.18%

The number following each state is the presidential voting margin in 2004. All of them are around 10% or less, in some cases a lot less. So the first-cut answer to the question posted in the title is that all of these states are swing states, or something like it.

But take a look at this list as well:

Arkansas: Bud Cummins
Arizona: Paul Charlton
California: Carol Lam
New Mexico: David Iglesias
Nevada: Daniel Bogden
Michigan: Margaret Chiara
Washington: John McKay

I’m sure many of these names ring a bell. They’re all former US Attorneys who were fired for their refusal to subvert justice in the name of loyalty to the Bush administration. And funny enough, they all ran US Attorneys offices in swing states.

Now, correlation does not prove causation. But when it comes to the Bushies, you can put nothing past them. And we do know that one of the reasons John McKay was fired was because he wouldn’t pursue bogus allegations of voter fraud after the very close gubernatorial race in Washington state in 2004. So I could very easily believe that Bushco wanted loyalists in these states in particular so that the GOP could maintain their necessary fiction that Democrats are purveyors of rampant voter fraud.

Fortunately, with aggressive oversight, we can at least hope that the new lackeys Dick Cheney has installed will be scrutinized like hawks, especially when when get close to election day. I know I’ll be watching.

UPDATE: Others have made a similar observation on this correlation. (Hat tip to mcjoan.)

(Bumped. – promoted by DavidNYC)

You are… my density.

From Maura at My Left Nutmeg:

A few weeks after having dinner with local party chairs and less than a week after former Rangers goalie Mike Richter was introduced to the Democratic Congressional caucus in DC, Richter has made calls to key players in the the district today to say he has decided not to challenge Shays next year.

I’m disappointed that things didn’t pan out for Richter, but since he didn’t have ties to the district, I think it would have been hard to beat the carpetbagger rap. I’d like to see him return to an area where he has real roots, work the scene for a few years, and then run. I think he would make a huge splash.

But as for CT-04, Maura tells us about the great candidate we’ve got who actually is running:

Jim Himes has done an impressive job of beginning to lay the cornerstones of  his campaign against Shays.  In the past two weeks, Himes has published great op-ed pieces against Shays in the  Greenwich Citizen and two days ago in the The Advocate (Stamford and Norwalk) and Greenwich Time.

More biographical details in Maura’s post, plus some info on how Himes is already kickin’ the tires and lightin’ some fires. With Chris Shays running up a serious borrowed-time debt, I think this race could shape up to be the marquee challenge in the Northeast this cycle.

Race Tracker: CT-04

PC Load Letter? What the f*** does that mean?

(Bumped. – promoted by James L.)

Do a “hard refresh” in your browser. In Firefox and IE, it’s Ctrl-F5 (or Cmd-F5 on a Mac). Instructions for other browsers are here. (Paul from SoapBlox just installed some upgrades on our back-end, but they might make the front-end look temporarily out-of-whack – hence the hard refresh.)

Poor Atrios must be beating his head against the wall dealing with a mental midget like Joe Klein. To recap: Klein is one of those beltway asshats who thinks that primary challenges to incumbents are (to use his reference) something to delight the likes of Robespierre. In other words, anyone who supported Ned Lamont is a  bloodthirsty tyrant and, presumably, deserves to be guillotined. Just call me St. Just.

Anyhow, the immediate context for this non-debate is the possibility of a primary challenge to Rep. Ellen Tauscher (CA-10), who sits in a district that went for Kerry 59-40. Suffice it to say, I’m not worried that, even if Tauscher were to lose a primary, a Republican would win the general. I say that in no small part because the bluest seat currently held by a Republican is DE-AL, which went 53-46 Kerry – and as many of you know, there are only eight GOP-held Kerry districts overall. In short, the GOP no longer plays very well in districts where voters like to pull the Dem lever at the top of the ticket.

But that’s not to say that “lethal” primaries never happen (as in, lethal to the party in which the primary upset took place). Indeed, they occasionally do. One relatively recent example: Party-switcher Michael Forbes (R to D) narrowly lost his primary in 2000, and the woman who beat him, Regina Seltzer, went on to lose to Republican Felix Grucci that fall.

So, going back to, say, 1980 (just to pick an arbitrary limit), what other lethal primaries for Senate and House seats are you aware of? And, so that we have a basis of comparison, how many incumbents lost primaries overall?