Tag: MD-01

• IL-14: Novak claims that “important Illinois Republicans are urging” Jim Oberweis to drop out of the general election battle for Dennis Hastert’s old seat.  While not surprising, given Oberweis’ disastrous showing last week, such pleas are not likely to have any effect on the stubborn Oberweis, other than further damaging his credibility.

  It doesn’t help when other GOP candidates in Illinois, such as state Rep. Aaron Schock in IL-18, are giving quips such as this one:

  “Anybody in Illinois who knows Jim Oberweis knows that was not a referendum on the Republican Party; it was a referendum on Jim Oberweis,” Schock said. “The Republicans didn’t lose that race; Jim Oberweis lost that race.

  “The people that knew him best, liked him least.”

• MN-03: In what is shaping to be a surprising upset, Ashwin Madia, a young attorney and Iraq veteran, is closing in on the DFL endorsement for the nomination to contest the open seat of retiring GOP Rep. Jim Ramstad.  At conventions across the district yesterday, Madia won many more delegates than his rival, state Senator and once-presumptive front runner Terri Bonoff.  Both Madia and Bonoff have pledged to abide by the DFL endorsement, but the math is looking very bleak for Bonoff; Madia is less than 10 delegates away from the 95 he needs to clinch the endorsement.

  An internal poll commissioned by the Bonoff campaign showed Bonoff beating GOP state Rep. Eric Paulsen by a 44%-40% margin in a hypothetical general election match-up, while Madia trails by 43%-40%.  In any event, this will be a top tier contest.

• New Mexico: In a slate of “preprimary” nominating conventions, candidates for federal office in both parties had to cross a 20% threshold to make it onto the primary ballot.  As a result, some of the House primaries are a bit clearer.
  • NM-01: Martin Heinrich won 56% of the preprimary vote to Michelle Lujan-Grisham’s 28%.

    On the GOP side of the aisle, Bernalillo County Sheriff Darren White won 85% of the vote, leaving him unopposed on the primary ballot.

  • NM-02: Democrat Bill McCamley won 48.8% of the vote to Harry Teague’s 36.5%.  No other candidates qualified for the primary ballot.

    Rancher and businessman Aubrey Dunn, Jr. won the GOP vote with the support of 30% of delegates.  Businessmen C. Earl Greer and Ed Tinsley both also qualified for the ballot with 24% each.

  • NM-03: Ben R. Luján won 40% of delegates, and will face off against former Senate candidate Don Wiviott, who qualified for the primary ballot with 30% of the vote.
• MI-09: Jack Kevorkian is running for Congress as an independent against Republican incumbent Joe Knollenberg and Democratic challenger Gary Peters.  Oy.
• MD-01: The biggest joke of all?  The so-called “moderate” Republican Main Street Partnership is planning on endorsing Andy Harris, the Club For Growth nutcase who successfully dislodged anti-war GOP Rep. Wayne Gilchrest last month.  Gilchrest, on the other hand, plans to administer a written exam to any candidate seeking his endorsement:
  

  Included in that test would be questions about the history of the Middle East over the past 200 years, the economic and ecological history of the Chesapeake Bay, the importance of paying attention to unemployment and various other subjects, Gilchrest said.

  “I will endorse someone that has knowledge, integrity, is competent and sees the world in a panoramic manner in all its complexities and not through a bent straw,” Gilchrest said.

  Citing a retired Marine Corps general who has been highly critical of the Bush administration’s decision to go to Iraq, Gilchrest went on to say that “we must stop promoting incompetence in return for party loyalty.”

• IN-07: Andre Carson may be the newest kid on the block in Washington, but he still has a potentially raucous primary contest to clear in May before he gets too comfortable:
  

  State Rep. David Orentlicher officially launched his campaign Wednesday alongside Martin Luther King Jr.’s nephew, Derek King, while former health commissioner Woody Myers was set to launch television advertisements.

  State Rep. Carolene Mays will also pose a tough challenge to the newest congressman.

• AZ-03: This looks like fun.  Former state Rep. Steve May has filed to run against John Shadegg in the Republican primary.  May has previously pledged to spend $1 million on the bid.

(Cross-posted at MyDD.)

Back in April, in the face of massive public support for a clear timeline to end the war in Iraq, only two Republicans in the House and two in the Senate dared to buck the White House’s pressure tactics and vote for the Iraq Accountability Act. The four were Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR), Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE), Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), and Rep. Wayne Gilchrest (R-MD).

Coincidentally, all four are now facing potential primary challenges from the right.

In Nebraska, Sen. Hagel, the most noted opponent of Bush’s Iraq policy in his party, is facing a very real challenge from Attorney General Jon Bruning (who even led Hagel in a recent primary poll):

“It’s pretty clear Nebraska voters understand Sen. Hagel is voting with the Democratic Party on the issue that they feel is most important at this time, which is the Iraq war, and that’s troubling to them”

Meanwhile, in Oregon, Sen. Smith is facing the current wrath and potential candidacy of anti-tax activist Bill Sizemore for his perceived lack of partisan loyalty:

“At the national level, Democrats are licking their chops at the prospect of defeating Gordon Smith. After all he has done for liberals in Oregon, they still want to take him out, simply because he is a Republican. To them, a Republican in name only is still a Republican. Smith’s political vulnerability is no secret.”

Rep. Walter “Freedom Fries” Jones’ marked turn away from supporting Bush’s Iraq policy has been the “single issue” encouraging Joseph McLaughlin, an obscure country commissioner, to challenge the seven-term Congressman from a “safe seat” in North Carolina:

“A number of us have become very concerned about his drift to the left, espousing ideas that we don’t think reflect the views of the conservative base back in the district,” McLaughlin said. “Virtually every major vote on the war on terror, he has lined up with the liberals.”

And in Maryland, Rep. Gilchrest is facing a well-organized primary challenge from right-wing State Senator Andy Harris:

“People across the country desire to return to the Reagan values that brought the Republican Party to power – fiscal responsibility, a strong national defense, traditional values and an optimistic view of this country and its role as a world leader,” Harris said.

Primary challenges are wonderful things. In our two-party, big-money system with engineered super-safe districts for incumbents, it’s where the real small-d democracy gets done these days. The more choices for voters, the better. These four potential primaries, as well as the presidential primaries in the early states, will have the added benefit of providing an early look for the entire nation at the direction GOP activists want the Republican party to take on Iraq.

However, this pro-democracy opinion of primaries (especially those where Iraq is a major issue) was certainly not one shared by right-wing and “centrist” politicians, “civil” pro-war pundits, and other members of the “reasonable” traditional media establishment, all of whom happily took part in last summer’s Rove-inspired media orgy demonizing the year’s most significant primary challenge and grassroots movement as nothing but an attempted party “purge.” (Nevermind that the incumbent in question actually promised to quit the party himself before the primary, and then swiftly followed up on it after losing).

So, a question: How many of the following figures who were so quick to see Stalinism in Stamford last August will be denouncing pro-war Republicans for their attempted quadruple “purge” this cycle? Don’t hold your breath:

It’s no wonder that so much time is being given to the Democratic primary in Connecticut, and that so many voices are being heard. The ideological triumphalists proclaim it a great renewal in the Democratic Party, beginning with the glorious purge of Sen. Joseph Lieberman.

– William F. Buckley, August 12, 2006

It should be noted that both Cheney and Mehlman pointedly referred to the Lamont win as a “purge,” echoing the seminal anti-Lamont editorial by the Democratic Leadership Council from two months ago which used the term eight times. They were joined in that effort last week by virtually the entire conservative punditry establishment, with everyone from Cal Thomas (“Purge by Taliban Democrats” was his clever innovation) to American Conservative Union chief Patrick Keene (“The purge that began with the McGovernite seizure of the party . . . “) to Foundation for Defense of Democracies president Clifford May (“The August Purge of Lieberman,” a funny historical malapropism; May was trying to echo Soviet Russia, which had an August putsch, not a purge) to Fox’s John McIntyre to a whole host of others decrying Lamont’s supporters as rich, elitist, neo-commie liberals bent on softening us all up for a terrorist attack, apparently just for the pure, America-hating thrill of it.

– Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, August 15, 2006

Meanwhile, the New York Times’s David Brooks lashed out at the “liberal inquisition” unfolding in Connecticut, the type of phenomenon that could be understood “only [by] experts in moral manias and mob psychology.” ABC’s Cokie Roberts sang from the choir sheet this Sunday morning, announcing a Lamont win would mean “a disaster for the Democratic Party.”

Roberts’s ABC colleague Jake Tapper labeled Lieberman’s challenge as a “a party purge of a moderate Democrat”; a cliché repeated constantly among the talking heads. Los Angeles Times columnist Jonathan Chait ridiculed grassroots Lamont activists by suggesting “their technique of victory-via-purge is on display in Connecticut.” Martin Peretz, editor in chief of The New Republic, who in a recent radio interview refused to say whether he actually wanted Democrats to gain control of Congress in November, denounced the “thought-enforcers of the left” supporting Lamont, whom Peretz mocked as “Karl Rove’s dream come true.”

Earlier in the campaign, Washington Post columnist David Broder dismissed Connecticut’s progressives as “elitist insurgents.” Over at the Rothenberg Political Report, Beltway mainstay Stuart Rothenberg was in a tizzy that Lamont’s win would “only embolden the crazies in the [Democratic] party,” the “bomb-throwers.” (Like Broder, Rothenberg opted for terror terminology to describe the democratic process unfolding in Connecticut.)

– Eric Boehlert, The Nation, August 11, 2006

“And as I look at what happened yesterday, it strikes me that it’s a perhaps unfortunate and significant development from the standpoint of the Democratic Party, that what it says about the direction the party appears to be heading in when they, in effect, purge a man like Joe Lieberman, who was just six years ago their nominee for Vice President, is of concern, especially over the issue of Joe’s support with respect to national efforts in the global war on terror.”

– Vice President Cheney, August 9, 2006