“ What has been said about Newt is pretty much true. He had to step down because Republicans, conservative Republicans, wouldn’t vote for him again as Speaker. Because he’s not really a conservative. I mean, he’ll tell you what you want to hear. He has an uncanny ability, sort of like Clinton, to feel your pain and know his audience and speak to his audience and fire them up. But when he was speaker, he was erratic, undisciplined.”
— Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (so this could be true)
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“ So I’ve had the experience of leadership. Now Speaker Gingrich has also been a leader. He was a leader for four years as speaker of the House. And at the end of four years it was proven he was a failed leader. And he had to resign in disgrace. I don’t know if you knew that. He actually resigned after four years in disgrace. He was investigated under an ethics panel and had to make a payment associated with that and then his fellow Republicans, 88 percent of Republicans, voted to reprimand Speaker Gingrich. He has not had a record of successful leadership.”
— Mitt Romney
“ In reality, Americans are disgusted with only one party: the one they don’t belong to. As for their own party, well, the Kool-Aid tastes pretty good.”
— John Sides
The (Un)Intended Consequences of Super PACs
An update on candidate-centered elections, circa 2011. The Citizens United ruling has led to the creation of Super PACs with very few legal restrictions. Several of these PACs are each operating for the presumed interest of single candidates while being led by one of that candidate’s old allies and/or staffers. From Nicholas Confessore for the New York Times:
“There’s not a big difference between these candidate-specific Super PACs and candidate campaign committees,” said Paul S. Ryan, associate legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center. “I think it’s a joke. What they are doing is abiding by the very meager restrictions on coordinations on expenditures and solicitations. But that leaves a wide swath of activities that can be fully coordinated under present law.”
Expanded party? More like the expanding party.
“ For the first time in the history of Wisconsin politics - and you can print this - candidates are now almost irrelevant to campaigns. … They have hijacked these elections - both sides. And the candidates have nothing to do with it.”
— Wisconsin State Senate President Mike Ellis on the money pouring into the Senate recall elections
Fake Democrats Lose
No one can accuse the Journal Sentinel of mincing words on this one.
“ I bet most Republicans care more about taxes than they do about deficits, just as most Democrats care more about health and welfare programs more than they do about deficits. Debt limits force the parties to consider a second-order priority, which, I agree, is a worthy purpose. That they can be forced to make serious concessions on the first-order priorities to agree to a plan on a second-order priority is yet to be seen.”
— Steve Smith (presumably) in the comments at the Monkey Cage
Brand Me with a Spoon
Republicans are running as Democratic candidates in the primaries for the recall elections of Republican state senators.
I guess fake candidates are here to stay.
Grand Old Party indeed.
UPDATE 6/10/2011: Democrats get in on the action. Can you say circus?
UPDATE II: So why run fake candidates?
Stephan Thompson, Executive Director of the Wisconsin Republican Party:
The Republican Party of Wisconsin has advocated that protest candidates run in Democratic primaries to ensure that Republican legislators have ample time to communicate with voters throughout their districts after the state budget is approved.
They want more time. It’s not obvious to me that a longer campaign benefits the incumbent in this case.
UPDATE 6/17/2011: Democrats regain their dignity and won’t run fake candidates.
Responsible Implies a Predicable Partisanship
Seth Masket on ideological extremity in congressional policy making:
The fact that we have parties that actually seek to deliver on campaign promises is something we should be celebrating.
The Democrats Misallocated Resources
Ezra Klein on Peter Orzag and the Obama administration’s shuffling of the troops:
But the Obama administration did a lot of that kind of thing when they took office. Although you could’ve made a case for Orszag at OMB, as there was obvious value in having a budget director who understood CBO, it was harder to explain why the White House named Iowa’s Tom Vilsack, Arizona’s Janet Napolitano, Colorado’s Ken Salazar and Kansas’s Kathleen Sebelius to Cabinet posts given that they were the most popular Democrats in states where a Senate seat was in-cycle in 2010. The Obama administration tried to hire “the best people for the job,” but it gave short shrift to the consequences of taking those people out of the jobs they were already holding and races they were considering/could be cajoled into entering.
