Businessman Jack McDonald (D) will drop out of the race against Rep. Mike McCaul (R-TX) today, robbing Dems of a wealthy recruit in the race against what could be a vulnerable GOPer.
McDonald, the former CEO of information technology firm Perficient Inc., will cite business reasons in a statement. The Nasdaq-listed company reported last month that its profits had plummeted by some 95% during the economic downturn.
McDonald stepped down as CEO in Sept. but remained on board as the company’s chair while he began his run for Congress.
It is a blow to Dems who had hoped to give McCaul a top-notch challenger. McDonald had raised a stunning $932K through the end of Sept., ending the quarter with $805K in the bank. McDonald is wealthy, but he lent his campaign just $26K, indicating he had real fundraising prowess.
This is both a surprise (McDonald only made his campaign official last week after months of “exploring”) and some pretty bad news to boot — it would have been good to keep the pressure up on McCaul, whose district tightened up to a 55-44 McCain district from a 67% Bush fiefdom in 2000.
Perhaps McDonald will hang on to his war chest for another run in 2012, but by then this district might be carved up in six different ways.
That’s an absolutely stunning lead for Paul, and some major egg-on-face for Mitch McConnell and the NRSC brain trust. We haven’t seen a lot of public polling of the GOP primary, but warning signs emerged in August for Grayson, Kentucky’s Secretary of State, when SurveyUSA released a poll showing him leading Paul by only 37-26. Research 2000 followed that up a couple of weeks later with a 40-25 Grayson lead. Just last month, SUSA followed up on the race and found that Paul had actually eked into a narrow 35-32 lead. Given the amount of heat that Grayson has been directing Paul’s way in the past week over his ex-campaign spokesman’s questionable association with white supremacists on MySpace, you know that Grayson realizes that he’ll need to fight his way out of this one in a desperate fashion.
Now, you might think that a Paul primary win would be good news for Democrats, but check out what PPP is teasing about the still-to-be-released general election numbers:
the Kentucky general election numbers we’ll release Wednesday show Rand Paul doing only one point worse than Trey Grayson against Jack Conway and three points worse against Dan Mongiardo.
That said, Paul definitely represents a weirder strain of Republican conservatism that could end up being a liability in a general election. His questionable inner circle is one thing, but consider also Ron Paul’s non-position on 9/11 Trutherism. As an outsider, Paul is riding on a high against the establishment’s hand-picked candidate, but his freak-wing politics will be ripe for clobbering if he makes it through a primary.
And for the Democrats…
Jack Conway (D): 37
Dan Mongiardo (D): 33
Undecided: 30
(MoE: ±4.2%)
This is the first poll we’ve seen of Conway leading Mongiardo all year. SUSA gave Mongiardo an 11-point lead in November (up from 8 in August), while R2K found Conway trailing by 37-30 in September. In any case, Mongiardo enjoys broader name recognition, so Conway has some room for growth here.
As effective as Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth was in awakening a complacent America to the climate crisis we face, many among us were not sufficiently convinced by his presentation because of three reasons. The first is that Gore is a politician. The second is that Gore is not a climate scientist. And the third is that the complexities of climate change are too great to present in a one-time documentary.
As you know, the most authoritative body on climate change is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is comprised of over 3,000 scientists from 154 countries and whose conclusions require the 100 percent consensus of all countries that comprise it. My suggestion is for someone within our Democratic Party to persuade the IPCC to EVERY YEAR produce and premiere an updated documentary for worldwide public movie theatre distribution.
This documentary would remind the public about the dangers we face and apprise them of the steady stream of important developments, like James Hansen’s 2008 paper concluding that the threshold CO2 number is no longer 450ppm, but 350ppm.
Gore made his movie with a budget of just $1 million, and it earned $49 million in gross receipts at the box office. If the IPCC were to spend as much as $10 million each year to produce and distribute each documentary, and earn only $10-$20 million dollars in gross revenue, each documentary would be a major success.
Ideally our Federal Government and the governments of other countries could mandate that for a period of three weeks each years, movie theatres in all regions of the country would show the film. If we called upon several hundred thousand soldiers to make the sacrifice of going to Iraq and Afghanistan to fight for us, surely we can call upon public movie theatres to show this IPCC climate change documentary for a few weeks each year.
Politically, these yearly films would make it far easier for President Obama and our Democratic Congress to pass whatever climate legislation will be needed during the coming years. Also, young “Millennial Generation” voters who opted for President Obama over John McCain by a margin of 66 to 32 points, and who are every year adding an additional 4.5 million voters to the electorate, would be far more motivated to vote and become more politically active because of these yearly films.
As you may know, a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that the percentage of Americans who believe that global warming is happening has fallen over the last year from 80 percent to 72 percent. Clearly, current outreach and public education efforts on climate change are not having their intended effect.
Rep. Parker Griffith, a freshman Democrat from Alabama, will announce today that he’s switching parties to become a Republican. […]
While the timing of his announcement was unexpected, Griffith’s party switch will not come as a surprise to those familiar with his voting record, which is one of the most conservative among Democrats.
He has bucked the Democratic leadership on nearly all of its major domestic initiatives, including the stimulus package, health care legislation, the cap-and trade energy bill and financial regulatory reform.
He was one of only 11 House Democrats to vote against the stimulus.
Yep, it’s finally going to happen. A lot of people probably suspected this for some time given his complete lack of respect towards Speaker Pelosi and general dissing of the Democratic Party, but I honestly didn’t think it would be so soon. With all luck this won’t be too much of a distraction as Democrats seek to finish up passing health reform.
Naturally it would be amazing if the Democrats could slap this traitor across the face in 2010 but of course this is an extremely unfriendly district. It would be great if someone who’s in the know about Alabama politics could tell us what we could do, if anything, about this backstabbing jerk.
Most politics buffs probably watched this ad at one time or another. And after it was over, they may have wondered – how in the world was the daisy ad so effective?
By modern standards, it seems both outdated and completely transparent. The implication is most unsubtle: voting for Senator Barry Goldwater will bring nuclear war. Today’s viewer might find it somewhat ridiculous, even laughable. It would be as if Senator Barack Obama cut an ad implying that Senator John McCain would start World War Three.
Yet the Daisy Ad worked. Mr. Goldwater went on to lose the election by a landslide, partly as a result of said ad.
This was because in 1964, believe it or not, many Americans actually worried that Mr. Goldwater might use nuclear weapons.
More below.
Several events contributed to this perception. Firstly, Senator Goldwater publicly “proposed that NATO field commanders be able to initiate nuclear strikes in Europe without explicit permission from the White House.” This caused considerable controversy; most Americans criticized the proposal – rightly – as incredibly reckless, something that left humanity’s fate in the hands of one short-sighted general.
Mr. Goldwater also had a reputation for making careless statements – much like a modern-day Vice President Joe Biden, except far worse. Not all of these involved nuclear weapons (for example, the senator publicly supported shutting down the Tennessee Valley Authority, which was why he lost the state of Tennessee), but several unfortunately did. In one such instance, the candidate mused, “Let’s lob one (nuclear weapon) into the men’s room of the Kremlin.” In another, reporter Howard S. Smith asked about disrupting supply lines in Vietnam. Mr. Goldwater answered,
…There have been several suggestions made. I don’t think we would use any of them. But defoliation of the forests by low-yield atomic weapons could well be done. When you remove the foliage, you remove the cover…”
Even with the qualification, it is still disconcerting to hear Mr. Goldwater immediately suggest using nuclear weapons. Most Americans, however, heard something far worse: Republican candidate Barry Goldwater wanted to nuke Vietnam. The media generally left out the part where Goldwater said, “I don’t think we would use any of them.”
Mr. Goldwater did not do himself any favors in pointing out this fact. His clarification went:
I would never use a nuclear weapon when a conventional weapon would do. I would leave it up to the commanders.
Since this opened gigantic loopholes (if conventional weapons wouldn’t do, for instance), Mr. Goldwater still appeared quite reckless.
All these missteps gradually cemented a very negative perception: Barry Goldwater was a hawkish extremist, irresponsible and unfit to wield the presidency’s vast powers. “In your gut, you know he’s nuts,” went the Democratic refrain, and the majority of voters came to believe this statement.
The Daisy ad focused on this perception and shifted the national conversation to Goldwater’s recklessness. It worked not because it persuaded Americans that Senator Barry Goldwater would start nuclear war (not even the most effective negative ad can do that), but because it reminded them that he just might do so.
Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani is expected to announce Tuesday he is not running for U.S. Senate or anything else in 2010, effectively ending his storied – and often stormy – electoral career, The Daily News has learned.
The announcement, at which he’ll also endorse Republican Rick Lazio for governor, marks the end of a year-long political dance by Giuliani, who mulled bids for governor and then Senate before backing away from both.
Well, that leaves John Cornyn holding a big bowl of nothing over at the NRSC. Will the Republicans manage to put forth a challenger to Gillibrand with a modicum of credibility, or will all their huffing and puffing add up to naught when it really counts next year?
You may be feeling a sense of déjà vu. Didn’t Rasmussen poll this race as recently as last week? Why yes, they did, but they happened to whiff that poll’s release by forgetting to test the name of former state AG Jim Ryan, who at this point is probably the front-runner for the GOP nomination. So here’s a do-over, with some unsurprisingly good results for the GOP.
And then there’s North Dakota (12/17, likely voters):
Byron Dorgan (D-inc): 36
John Hoeven (R): 58
Byron Dorgan (D-inc): 52
Duane Sand (R): 37
(MoE: ±4.5%)
Before now, we had seen exactly two polls of the hypothetical Dorgan v. Hoeven clash of the titans. In February, Research 2000 put out a poll showing Dorgan thumping Hoeven by 57-35 spread, while an NRSC internal poll released from July in the hopes of enticing Hoeven into the race had those numbers flipped at 53-36 in the GOP’s favor. I’m inclined to believe that Dorgan would have a difficult time beating Hoeven — if he ever decided to get off the pot and commit to running — but I’m not sure if the spread is what Rasmussen thinks it is. I have to suspect that Dorgan is ahead of a sadsack like Duane Sand by a little more than 15 points, for instance.
• NY-Sen-B: Will he or won’t he? The New York Daily News gets in touch with Rudy Giuliani’s friends and confidants to take the pulse of his ethereal Senatorial aspirations. The totally shocking consensus: Expect Rudy to quietly exit the electoral stage. Meanwhile, ex-NYC Comptroller Bill Thompson refuses to rule out a primary challenge to Kirsten Gillibrand.
• IA-Gov: Former GOP Gov. Terry Branstad will formally launch his campaign to topple Democrat Chet Culver in January. Branstad also recently gave Christian Fong, a Cedar Rapids insurance company exec who was briefly in the running for Governor himself earlier in the year, a thorough sniff test. Branstad is rumored to be interested in tapping Fong to be his running mate.
• IN-Gov/IN-09: It looks like we can close the book on one of the sillier NRCC-promoted retirement “rumors” of the holiday season, as Dem Rep. Baron Hill said on Saturday that he’s running for another term. However, Hill confirms that he’s giving a gubernatorial bid in 2012 a long look. That might not be a bad idea for him; with redistricting looming around the corner, there’s a very real possibility that state Republicans will skunk up his district beyond recognition.
• FL-08: Frosh Dem Rep. Alan Grayson, continuing his quest to bring great ideas back to Congress, has filed a request with the Department of Justice to investigate and jail Republican activist Angie Langley for setting up the Grayson-themed “mycongressmanisnuts.com” website. Apparently, Grayson is upset that Langley is implying that she’s one of his constituents. Somehow, I suspect that all that Grayson is accomplishing here is giving “mycongressmanisnuts.com” more opportunities to be plugged in the media.
• NC-05: Local radio host Billy Kennedy, a former member of the NC Democratic Party executive committee, is “seriously considering” challenging Teabagger Queen Virginia Foxx after being urged to look at the race by local activists.
• TN-06: While Democrats have yet to find a warm body to replace retiring Rep. Bart Gordon, the GOP primary between state Sens. Diane Black and Jim Tracy is producing some early friction. Black was forced to apologize on Friday for sending out a fundraising email under a government template that included her legislative contact information and an implied list of endorsements from GOP leaders — including Tracy himself. (Former Rutherford County GOP Chair Lou Ann Zelenik is also in the race, proudly reppin’ the lunatic wing of the GOP.)
• VA-02: Rep. Glenn Nye the Incumbent Guy, one of the ripest targets of the Democratic class of 2008, has shed a challenger, though it was one of his more inconsequential opponents. Attorney Chuck Smith, a former Marine, has dropped out of the race and endorsed automotive executive Scott Rigell in the GOP primary.
We’ve added a new column to the chart, “CoH Change.” This just shows how much each committee’s cash-on-hand moved from the prior month, whether positive or negative. As you can see, the RNC spent a ton.
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