Entries for August 2009

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

The ongoing economic crisis has states scrambling for new sources of revenue to fill the holes in their annual budgets. Spending cuts, while popular in the abstract, are almost always unpopular among the constituents and interests groups whose spending it is that is being cut. Many state legislators are equally unwilling to propose tax increases, especially in recessionary times.

Nevertheless, state governments must have the money to run, leaving governors and legislators the responsibility to find creative ways to pay for things. Enter William Howell, speaker of Virginia's House of Delegates, who is asking the Obama administration to open an area miles off Virginia's coastline to oil and natural gas exploration by 2011.

More than half the U.S. electorate would, given the chance, fire every sitting member of Congress and start all over again, a new survey from pollster Scott Rasmussen finds.

In a stinging rebuke to the leadership of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., 57 percent of the 1,000 likely voters queried by Rasmussen said their dissatisfaction with the way the current Congress is performing would push them to hit the reset button.

The new numbers, Rasmussen says, reflect a partisan shift since last fall. Therefore it is not surprising to find that Republicans have grown less satisfied with Congress. The number of Democrats who endorsed the current Congress has nearly doubled over the same period, rising from 25 percent in October of 2008 to 43 percent in August of 2009. But even with the 18 percent increase in support among Democrats, only a quarter of the total number of people surveyed (25 percent) said they would vote to keep the entire Congress.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

A doctors' group and an organization that advocates for the interest of the inner-city poor have joined forced to sue the Obama administration, charging that its abortive effort to collect criticisms made by those opposed to President Obama's plan to change the U.S. health care system infringed on their First Amendment rights.

In a complaint filed Thursday in U.S. District Court, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and the Coalition for Urban Renewal and Education said the White House had attempted to "unlawfully" collect information on protected political speech when it asked Obamacare supporters to report any negative comments about the proposal to a U.S. government email address, flag@whitehouse.gov.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Though it may be hard to see at first, the passing of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts may have a profound impact on 2012's race for the GOP presidential nomination.

Back when Sen. John F. Kerry was his party's presidential nominee, the Massachusetts Legislature—which is overwhelmingly dominated by Democrats—changed the law to require that a special election be held after a vacancy occurs in one of its U.S. Senate seats rather than allow Republican Gov. Mitt Romney to make an appointment if Kerry had won.

The law is still that way today. (As he lay dying, Kennedy asked the state's political leaders, now that a Democrat was the commonwealth's chief executive, to revert to the previous method of picking a replacement.) And that means voters in Massachusetts will go to the polls, unless the law is changed soon, sometime in the next few months to pick a replacement for Kennedy.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Feeding the perception that corrupt public officials were running rampant in the halls of Congress was an important part of the Democrats' plan to retake control of the federal government in 2006 and 2008. The Jack Abramoff scandal, the resignation of Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, and the embarrassing but apparently not criminal conduct of former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., all helped to convince voters that the GOP had grown fat and happy during its years in the majority and needed to be replaced.

It's a powerful argument but it also cuts both ways, something the Democrats are now going to have to deal with going into the next election.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

If the pre-election polls told us anything negative about Barack Obama, it was that the electorate harbored concerns about his experience in foreign policy and national security. After only four years in the U.S. Senate, Obama could not match—or even come close to—the public's perception of John McCain on these issues.

McCain, the voters said, possessed a level of experience commensurate with what they viewed as the demands of the job, far and away superior to his opponent's.

Obama's team dealt with this in two ways. First, it downplayed the importance of foreign policy and national security by playing up domestic and economic issues. In 2008's version of "It's the economy, stupid," Obama talked about healthcare and global warming and the economic crisis, when he talked about anything specific, that is. Mostly, he—or more correctly, his surrogates—just attacked the Republicans for attacking him for being inexperienced.

Second, and this was how Delaware Sen. Joe Biden got to be vice president instead of Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, Obama surrounded himself with people knowledgeable about foreign policy and national security to whom he could point whenever an issue arose.

Coming into office, he beefed up his team even further with heavyweights like New York Sen. Hillary Clinton at the State Department and former Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Jones, whom he picked to be his national security adviser. He tapped former White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta to run the CIA and he asked former CIA director Robert Gates, whom George W. Bush had made U.S. secretary of defense, to stay on at the Pentagon.

So far, so good. But now that the president is out of town on vacation, well...

When the cat's away...

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

As the liberals are finding everywhere they turn, governing is hard.

Case in point, the Rocky Mountains, where a group of multimillionaires backed a top-to-bottom effort called the "Colorado model," a well-funded effort to turn a red state blue. This included the funding of candidates for governor, for statewide office, and the legislature, but also the creation of think tanks, political advocacy efforts, and other astroturf operations with one goal in mind: sweep as many Republicans as possible out of office and replace them with Democrats.

The donors, people like Tim Gill, Rutt Bridges, Jared Polis, and Pat Stryker, must have been thrilled with the results. Because of their support, Colorado now has a Democratic governor, the Democrats are the majority party in both chambers in the state legislature, the Democratic Party has picked up one U.S. Senate seat and two U.S. House seats from the GOP, and the state went for Barack Obama over John McCain by 9 points in 2008.