Tag: Pat Tiberi

• DE-Sen: Here’s an ominous possibility: it’s been taken on faith that Beau Biden will still run for the Senate even with Mike Castle’s entry… but what if he doesn’t? The rumor mill is suddenly wondering if Biden has developed cold feet, especially keeping in mind that he’s only 40 and can pretty much waltz into the job in four years, rather running the risk of damaging his brand by losing an election in 2010.

• FL-Sen: Former Miami mayor Maurice Ferre, who just re-appeared on the scene this week, has already moved quickly to get into the race, announcing his candidacy for the Democratic nod today. Ferre is 74, a bit old to be launching a Senate bid, but he should have a lot of appeal in the Hispanic communities (although it’s worth noting he’s not Cuban, but Puerto Rican). On the other side of the aisle, Republican underdog Marco Rubio seems on the precipice of a big score that will help him tap into a nationwide base of donors (although his recent fundraising numbers suggests he’s already gone nationwide): the Club for Growth is feeling sufficiently confident to get involved on his behalf.

• NV-Sen: I’ve lost count of who’s in the lead, Mark Sanford or John Ensign, in terms of how many times he’s had to tell the press that he won’t resign. Anyway, it was Ensign’s turn again yesterday, as he faces a ramped-up Senate Ethics investigation.

• VT-Sen: A primary challenge to Pat Leahy from the left? This seems unlikely to go anywhere, but Daniel Frielich, a military doctor from Wilmington, VT, will announce his candidacy today. His bid seems to focus mostly on health care (he’s a single-payer backer and not a fan of the Dems’ watered-down approach).

• OR-Gov: Couple minor tidbits from the Beaver State: one, Steve Novick (who fared well in the 2008 Dem Senate primary) had been occasionally rumored to be interested in running for Governor, but makes his Shermanesque ‘no’ statement in a Blue Oregon piece detailing his road map for the next guv. Also, as Republicans cast about for a palatable candidate, the fickle finger is now pointing at state Sen. Frank Morse, who says he may get in. Morse has a moderate or at least pleasant reputation within the Senate, but has no statewide profile.

• VA-Gov: Reading between the lines, it sounds like Creigh Deeds might be looking for excuses for his increasingly probable defeat in November. He blames some of his travails on the “spending” and “noise coming out of Washington D.C.”

• FL-08: With Orange County Mayor Rich Crotty out, former state Sen. Daniel Webster is still a maybe (although his registering “danielwebsterforcongress.com” may tip his hand). Regardless of what Webster is doing, at least one other Republican is wading into the fray: wealthy businessman Jerry Pierce, who says he’ll run with or without GOP backing. (Pierce has given $15K to the Club for Growth over the last decade, so maybe he’s hoping they’ll return the favor.)

• NH-02: Jennifer Horn, who lost to Rep. Paul Hodes in 2008, isn’t getting out of the way for ex-Rep. Charlie Bass’s possible comeback. Horn is expected to publicly announce her candidacy today.

• VA-05: As had been expected, state Sen. Rob Hurt filed his paperwork yesterday to run against Rep. Tom Perriello in the 5th. Hurt is from near Danville at the district’s south end, setting up a battle of the regional bases with the Charlottesville-based Perriello.

• Mayors: Here’s an ignominious end of the road for three-term Albuquerque mayor Martin Chavez (who, Bloomberg-style, overturned a term limits ordinance in order to run again): he got bounced from office in a primary. Somewhat surprisingly, Republican state Rep. Richard Berry cleared the 40% mark in the three-way primary, which means that he wins without the trouble of a general election. Berry got 44% to Chavez’s 35% and 21% for Democratic state Sen. Richard Romero. (UPDATE: This technically was a general election, not a primary, under local law; had no one broken 40%, the top-two November election would have been considered a runoff.)

• NRCC: The NRCC announced which five of its Patriots (the vulnerable incumbents, akin to the Dems’ Frontline program) will get the first infusion of cash. The beneficiaries are Mary Bono Mack, Charlie Dent, Pat Tiberi, Lee Terry, and Tom Rooney, all of whom have drawn high-profile challengers.

It looks like pesky GOP Rep. Pat Tiberi is about to face his most legit challenger in years. From the Columbus Dispatch:

Democratic Franklin County Commissioner Paula Brooks said today she will challenge Rep. Pat Tiberi of Genoa Township in next year’s congressional election.

Brooks’ decision to run for Congress sets up what could be the toughest race Tiberi has faced since his 2000 election in the 12th Congressional District. Brooks, 56, has twice won voter approval across Franklin County, including an easy re-election last year.

In a Dispatch telephone interview today, Brooks said she has a “burning desire” to get the country “through these tough times. Frankly, people in the district say they are disappointed in the current member and they want a fresh approach to tackling these tough problems.”

Brooks said that Gov. Ted Strickland and Mayor Michael B. Coleman have both pledged to support her effort to unseat Tiberi. She said the major issues would be “jobs, health care, and our military families and security.”

Brooks, as you may recall, briefly ran for Franklin County’s other congressional seat (OH-15) last cycle, before deferring to Mary Jo Kilroy. Now she’s back for a crack at the 12th, a district that was hand-carved for the GOP during redistricting, but has since shifted in the Dem direction. Bush won this CD by 52-46 in 2000, but that margin tightened to 51-49 four years later. Obama finally blew the doors open last year, by winning the district by a 53-46 spread according to SSP’s analysis of the precinct returns.

However, Tiberi has been a tough candidate to beat; octogenarian and ex-Rep. Bob Shamansky put up a valiant effort in 2006, but Tiberi smashed the old man with a 16-point romp. Even as Obama turned this district blue last year, Tiberi cruised to a 55-42 victory over underfunded Democrat Mike Robinson. Still, Brooks will definitely bring a stronger profile to this race than either Shamansky or Robinson could offer. Her most glaring weakness? She lives just “eight minutes” outside of the 12th CD’s border.

RaceTracker Wiki: OH-12

• AR-Sen: Here’s a tea leaf that state Sen. Gilbert Baker may be interested after all in getting into the Senate race: he issued a press release today going after Democratic health care reform and Blanche Lincoln in particular. He’d probably be the favorite to win the GOP nomination if he got in, if only by virtue of the rest of the field being gaffe-prone wackos.

• CT-Sen: Best wishes to Chris Dodd, who has been diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer and will undergo surgery over the August recess. He said he’ll be back at work after several weeks of recuperation at home, and that he still plans to run for re-election in 2010.

• IL-Sen: Add one more GOP Twitter fail to the increasingly long-list. Rep. Mark Kirk, who is also a Naval Reservist, tweeted his location (the National Military Command Center) while on duty. The DoD is now investigating, as it’s a problem on two fronts: one, the prohibition against using the media to give away your position, and two, the prohibition against, while on military service, updating a website established prior to the beginning of service. Complicating the legal question even further: it may have been a staffer tweeting on Kirk’s behalf. Because, y’know, it’s so hard to think up 140 characters of content on your own.

• NY-Sen-B: The confusion over the Carolyn Maloney campaign has reached epic proportions. Yesterday, CQ reported that Maloney had no fixed timeline for officially getting into the Senate primary, but that early August seemed likely. But today, Politico’s Glenn Thrush is reporting that Maloney is “leaning heavily against” making the race at all, according to several prominent Dems.

• ND-Sen: The NRSC is flogging a new internal poll which claims Gov. John Hoeven has a 53-36 lead over Sen. Byron Dorgan. Both men are very popular, with Hoeven with an 86% approval and Dorgan with a 69% approval. A public poll from R2K in February found the numbers almost exactly reversed, with Dorgan beating Hoeven 57-35… but Hoeven hasn’t taken any public steps to get into the race, so we may never find out who’s right.

• AK-Gov: Local pollster Hays Research looked at in-state approvals for Alaska’s incoming and outgoing governors, and found Sarah Palin leaving in net negative territory: 47/48. Sean Parnell looks bulletproof for the moment, at 67/8, but, having been in office for less than a week, hasn’t had the chance to screw anything up yet.

• TX-Gov: A bit more egg on the Kay Bailey Hutchison campaign’s face today, as the Austin American-Statesman found that her website had over 2,200 hidden phrases on it designed to steer traffic, including “rick perry gay.” (This wasn’t mere meta-tagging, but blind keywords invisibly put into the site’s code, something of a search engine-optimization no-no.) A spokesperson said they’d remove “rick perry gay,” although it sounds like the other 2,199 phrases stay.

• KS-04: Businessman Jim Anderson got into the overflowing GOP field in KS-04 to replace retiring Rep. Todd Tiahrt. He seems like he might get a little lost in the shuffle, in a field that already includes local GOP heavyweights RNC committeman Mike Pompeo and state Sen. Dick Kelsey, along with state Sen. Jean Schodorf, who recently began exploring the race.

• MO-04: Ike Skelton, who’s held down the fort for Dems in dark-red central Missouri since time immemorial, has drawn a more serious opponent than usual (not hard, since his usual opponents are nobodies or no one at all). Vicky Hartzler is a former state Rep. who has also written a book called “Running God’s Way,” apparently a how-to guide to campaigning for Christian right candidates. CQ also mentions several other still-in-office legislators who could also take on the 77-year-old Skelton (especially if he hears the siren song of retirement): state Rep. Tom Self and state Sen. Bill Stouffer.

• DCCC: The DCCC has responded with its own ad offensive on the health care front, a day after the RNC targeted 60 districts. The DCCC’s radio buy and robo-call package is a bit more targeted, focusing on 8 GOPers (not coincidentally, maybe their 8 most vulnerable incumbents running in 2010): Michele Bachmann, Joseph Cao, Charlie Dent, Dan Lungren, Thad McCotter, Erik Paulsen, Dave Reichert, and Pat Tiberi.

• Where Are They Now?: Former GOP Rep. Anne Northup found her way into the Obama administration, as a commissioner on the Consumer Product Safety Commission. This initially seems very odd — she already lost KY-03, so there’s no sense in appointing her to facilitate a Dem pickup — but it’s because the Senate GOP leader has a say in picking a Republican for one of the five commissioners, and Mitch McConnell opted to give the job to his long-time protege, who, having lost three races in a row, is probably finished with electoral politics.

I favor Democrats working to field the best possible candidate in every Congressional district and to mount the strongest possible campaign in each.  Hand-in-glove with that effort, Democrats also need to think ahead to and visualize success next election day and in future elections and to plan backwards in time from those successes to assure that all that needs to happen to assure those successes does happen.

So I am thinking about less than a handful of Congressional districts where Democrats should make exceptional efforts to take out Republican incumbents in 2010, both because a challenger could imaginably win and because the districts consist of territory that is important to a Democratic future.  These are the Iowa Fourth, the Nebraska Second, and the Ohio Twelfth.  These districts are respectively represented by Republicans Tom Latham of Ames, Lee Terry of Omaha, and Pat Tiberi of Columbus.  Barack Obama carried all three districts, and each district played a constructive role in his Electoral College margin.

And Latham, Terry, and Tiberi need to go.  

Today I looked at how interest groups evaluated the three, and (while, because of my haste in checking, I acknowledge certain limitations vis a vis timeliness as well as some potential for mistake) I believe I have identified several broad themes that tie the three men to each other.

Abortion.

On abortion Latham, Terry, and Tiberi support Planned Parenthood (http://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/) zero percent of the time and the National Right to Life Committee (http://www.nrlc.org/) one hundred percent of the time.

Czars of Financial Institutions.

On financial institutions Latham, Terry, and Tiberi have been one hundred percent for Financial Executives International (http://www.financialexecutives.org/eweb/startpage.aspx?site=_fei).

Energy and the Environment.

Latham, Terry, and Tiberi have at best very spotty records on energy and the environment.  Those records are perhaps best illustrated by zero percent scores on energy legislation supported by the Campaign for America’s Future (http://www.ourfuture.org/) and for supporting continuing dependence on fossil fuels as evidenced by 100 percent scores from the American Coalition for Ethanol (http://www.ethanol.org/).

Families and Children.

On family and children’s issues Latham, Terry, and Tiberi scored 100 percent with the American Family Association (http://www.afa.net/), but zero percent with American Family Voices (http://www.americanfamilyvoices.org/).

Guns.

On gun issues Latham, Terry, and Tiberi are rated “A” by the National Rifle Association (http://www.nrapvf.org/), but all get zeros from the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (http://www.csgv.org/site/c.pmL5JnO7KzE/b.3509205/k.BDBC/Home.htm).

Health Care.

On health care Latham, Terry, and Tiberi get zeros from organizations like the American Public Health Association (http://www.apha.org/), the AIDS Action Council (http://www.aidsaction.org/), the American Nurses Association (http://www.nursingworld.org/), and the National Rural Health Association (http://www.ruralhealthweb.org/).

Justice.

On justice and the entire question of what kind of country we want to be, Latham, Terry, and Tiberi have scored zero with the ACLU (http://www.aclu.org/) and the Human Rights Campaign (http://www.hrc.org/), although I acknowledge that Latham recently moved up and delivered (for him) a very good year for peoples’ rights with eighteen percent from the ACLU and five percent from the Human Rights Campaign.

People Who Work for a Living.

As to labor, Latham, Terry, and Tiberi have received scores of one hundred percent from the Business-Industry Political Action Committee (http://www.bipac.org/page.asp?g=bipac_new&content=startpage) and of zero percent from organizations like the Communications Workers of America (http://www.cwa-union.org/), the United Food and Commercial Workers (http://www.ufcw.org/), and Workplace Fairness (http://www.workplacefairness.org/).  

Us v. Them.

On matters of us v. them Latham, Terry, and Tiberi scored zero with Citizens for Tax Justice (http://www.ctj.org/).

Conclusion.

I nominate the Iowa Fourth, the Nebraska Second, and the Ohio Twelfth for very early consideration by bloggers and internet activists thinking about 2010.