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Could an Undecided Coleman-Franken Race in Minnesota Help Chambliss in Georgia?
Tweet Share on Facebook November 21, 2008 Comment (6)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson St. blog
Interesting numbers from Scott Rasmussen. The generic vote for Congress since the election shows much smaller margins for the Democrats than they enjoyed before the election. Are voters saying, "Hey, now that we see how many Democrats there are in Congress, we're not sure we want any more"? If so, that buttresses a finding in Rasmussen's poll on the Georgia Senate runoff between incumbent Republican Saxby Chambliss and Democrat Jim Martin. Rasmussen shows Chambliss ahead by 50 percent to 46 percent (which was actually the rounded off percentages in the November 4 election, with Chambliss barely under the 50 percent mark). In addition, 52 percent (including 9 percent of Martin voters) say they're less likely to vote for Martin if it will give Democrats 60 seats in the Senate. Only 38 percent say they are more likely. This suggests that Chambliss stands to do better (a) if the Minnesota race is decided for Democrat Al Franken on or before December 2 or (b) if the Minnesota winner is undetermined December 2 than (c) if Republican Norm Coleman is declared the winner by that time. Since it seems like the Minnesota race will not be decided until well after December 2, it looks like the don't-let-them-get-60 argument will help Chambliss.
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Hillary Clinton to State or to Senate Leadership?
Tweet Share on Facebook November 21, 2008 Comment (13)By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street Blog.
If the MSM is to be believed, Sen. Hillary Clinton will accept President-Elect Obama's offer to become Secretary of State, sometime after Thanksgiving. Meanwhile, Democratic leaders in the Senate are finally paying attention to her vote-getting ability for the party, and are wooing her to stay in the Senate with promises of new leadership posts.
Should she stay or should she go? I think she will go but I wish she would stay.
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A Visit From My Dead
Tweet Share on Facebook November 21, 2008 Comment (1)I had a visit from my dead yesterday.
It is, perhaps, an occupational hazard for biographers. The dead come by and haunt you.
You show up at an archive, open a box of documents and meet them, in the graceful, hopeful handwriting of their youth; follow them through the tempests of their love affairs and their personal and professional triumphs, and meet their end with them, as they recount, in shaky scrawls, the terrors of old age and onrushing death.
Then you pack up their letters and crumbling photographs, send the box back to storage, and try to get back to your life. And most days you can. And some days you can't. Some days the dead won't go.
Yesterday it was Mary Field, a young woman who, in the earliest years of the 20th century, left a stifling, dull Midwestern home and a tyrannical father and went to Chicago to work as a social activist and join the ranks of early feminists. They called themselves "new women." She fell in love with Clarence Darrow, had an affair, broke it off, married another man, ruined her daughter's life, and died, well into my lifetime, old and lonely and terrified, calling Darrow's name.
Mary was in my thoughts yesterday, conveying the chill of mortality.
I fled work and hiked some miles in the last hours of daylight.
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Penny Pritzker’s Out of the Running for Commerce Secretary, Napolitano Looks Good for Homeland Security
Tweet Share on Facebook November 20, 2008 Comment (9)Well, there WERE three women prominently mentioned as Obama cabinet appointees until today. In one of the more bizarre episodes surrounding President-elect Obama's picks, one of his closest aides and top confidantes from way back, Penny Pritzker, pulled her own name out of the running for Commerce Secretary before the position had been officially offered:
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Jeanne Shaheen or No, We’re Not in a Post-Gender Political World
Tweet Share on Facebook November 20, 2008 Comment (5)By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
Have we arrived at the point where we are gender-blind as well as race-neutral in American politics? This morning I had the pleasure of interviewing Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire who earlier this month unseated incumbent Sen. John Sununu (R-NH) whom she ran against and lost to six years ago.
Although I Googled her name and accomplishments, I could find no mention of the fact she's the first woman in U.S. history to be elected senator and governor—a major barrier broken, but overshadowed nonetheless by the euphoria surrounding President-elect Barack Obama's White House win.
In any event, I interviewed her for my PBS program, To the Contrary, and asked her about the historicity of her victory. She said:
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Is the Immigration Wave Ebbing?
Tweet Share on Facebook November 20, 2008 Comment (5)By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.
Blogger extraordinaire Mickey Kaus collects information that suggests that we are seeing a reversal of immigration, a gran salida of immigrants, surely many illegal, back to their countries of origin. Follow the links for the fascinating details. He sees a connection between tougher enforcement of immigration laws (including state laws) and the rejection of comprehensive immigration bills in 2006 and 2007 and an out-migration of immigrants. And a connection between that and the collapse of the housing bubble. All of this makes a lot of sense to me. We've seen a long trend of heavy Latino immigration, but trend lines don't go on forever. There's a break point somewhere. I'm going to be interested in seeing whether the Census Bureau's population estimates for June 30, 2008 (due out in December, I believe), show some concrete and significant evidence of this apparent trend. Here's a link to the relevant website.
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Reporters as Consultants Is a Bad Idea
Tweet Share on Facebook November 19, 2008 Comment (3)Let's think of ways to make journalists even less credible than they already are. Hire them out to give advice to corporate brass in trouble with the media. This proposal is the brainchild of former MSNBC chief Dan Abrams, who lost his show to the more popular host, Rachel Maddow, and has now left the cable news network.
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Paulson, Bernanke, and Congress on the Bailout: Incompetence All Around
Tweet Share on Facebook November 19, 2008 Comment (29)Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke got beaten up pretty badly in the House Financial Services Committee yesterday. And on at least one point, I think, justifiably so. In his opening statement, Paulson acknowledged that at the time the Senate passed its version of the financial rescue package October 1 and the House passed the same version October 3, he had already decided that the Treasury Department would not embark on the program of acquiring toxic securitized mortgage and other paper from financial institutions, as he was telling Congress it would, and that it would instead use powers in the bill to inject capital into banks and other financial institutions. I think members of Congress have standing to complain when they are asked to approve a piece of legislation on the grounds that the administration will do A, but in fact the administration has already decided to use the broad powers in the bill to do B—and hasn't told Congress about its change of mind. Paulson in his opening statement hit back at that by noting that in the two weeks Congress had been considering the legislation—from September 19, when Paulson and Bernanke presented their three-page rescue package outline to members of Congress, until October 3, when Congress passed the bill—the stock market fell 9 percent. In effect, he's blaming Congress for dithering while $2 trillion of wealth was being destroyed. He's got an argument, too.
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Team of Rivals? No, Team of Superstars. Why Obama Tapping Clinton for Secretary of State Makes Sense
Tweet Share on Facebook November 19, 2008 Comment (2)Tom Friedman's thoughts on Hillary Clinton's prospective appointment as Barack Obama's secretary of state are typically provocative.
And, in other times, I might agree with him. There is no denying the benefits of a close partnership between a president and a secretary of state, nor the dangers of a flawed or distant relationship.
But these are not other times. Obama is inheriting one stupendous mess, and an American government—from State to Homeland Security to FEMA to Interior to Social Security to Energy and on and on down the list—in dire need of reform.
Obama doesn't need a team of rivals in his cabinet so that, with Machiavellian guile, he can keep his enemies close.
What he needs is a team of political and corporate superstars who, whatever their status—rivals, friends, or strangers—can immediately start fixing stuff.
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The Obama Cabinet Needs More Women
Tweet Share on Facebook November 19, 2008 Comment (21)I spoke with a former member of Congress yesterday about the paucity of women on the list of rumored Obama cabinet and White House staff appointments (I blogged about it earlier) and she pointed me in the direction of Ellen Malcolm's quote below, from a blurb by the Washington Post's Al Kamen headlined "Let's Talk About Sex" (I think the writer meant "gender"):
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