Politico — White House official: ‘Organized labor just flushed $10 million down the toilet’
Blanche Lincoln is no Arlen Specter.
Lincoln was a convincing winner over challenger Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, an unctuous ideological shape-shifter who became a champion of cardcheck and the public option for Obamacare and convinced public employee unions and liberal activists groups to lavishly fund his primary campaign.
There aren’t even enough liberals in Arkansas to win a low-turnout runoff in the Democratic Party.
That should tell you something about the trend in the state.
It puts the White House in something of an odd position.
Lincoln is helped by her opposition to key parts of the president’s agenda and is running as someone who can keep President Obama’s most liberal impulses in check.
But at the same time, she was still officially the national party’s preferred candidate and the president’s team had discouraged the effort to unseat her by the Left as counterproductive, especially in increasingly conservative Arkansas.
Halter came up short – perhaps being able to spurn a White House job offer and allege corruption would have helped him win – but unions were the big losers.
Halter can reinvent himself for another run for office in two years, but having pushed huge sums into the race, cash-strapped groups like the SEIU walk away with nothing.
Barring a sea change, the GOP will pick up the seat this fall anyway, especially since the badly weakened Lincoln had to run left the fend off Halter.
This is a pivotal year for unions, which need legislative help to make another go at the private sector and are concerned that the public revulsion at federal spending will impinge on their only stronghold – government workers.
As writer Ben Smith tells us, the White House was quick to rub that in the faces of unionists who flouted their authority:
“‘Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members’ money down the toilet on a pointless exercise,’ the official said. ‘If even half that total had been well-targeted and applied in key House races across this country, that could have made a real difference in November.’
After the administration smack talk, union leaders protested that “labor isn’t an arm of the Democratic Party.”
Really? Then what’s the point of you?
Las Vegas Review-Journal — Angle wins, promises to ‘dump Harry Reid’ in November
Rep. Dean Heller and other prominent Republicans in Nevada politics are kicking themselves this morning.
Having passed on the chance to take on Harry Reid, the heavy hitters in the state GOP left the race to second tier candidates: two former state senators and the son of a famous former basketball coach who had already notched two losses, one in Clark County and one statewide.
While the GOP race between Sharon Angle, Sue Lowden, and Danny Tarkanian was polled like a clash of the titans, it was more like a battle of the also rans. The big players couldn’t foresee how far Reid would fall while he pushed the Obama agenda in Washington as unemployment in the Silver State rose to 14 percent and left the race to those with nothing to lose.
Now, like Bill Clinton in 1992, Angle finds herself the unlikely recipient of her party’s nomination against a surprisingly weak incumbent candidate.
In the low-turnout election, Angle’s Tea Party support made a big difference in a state with a tendency toward cussedness. It also helped her that the national GOP bet big on Lowden as a moderate pick only to find that she was not ready for prime time when she started gaffing her way out of the lead.
Angle sounds a bit fringy and made the dire mistake of making common cause with Scientologists (!) on a far-out sounding drug detox program. If a politician doesn’t have the good sense to stay away from that bunch, it really makes you wonder. Harry Reid’s Mormonism is familiar to Nevadans, the church of Tom Cruise is not.
The Reid team is thrilled and declaring preemptive victory.
But Harry Reid shouldn’t be working on his next majority leader speech just yet.
Nevada is a weird place and his numbers are still shockingly bad for a powerful multi-term incumbent.
He will have to drop huge negative television advertising on Angle early to try to define her as too far out. And faced with the prospect of a populist like Angle, Reid’s corporate friends will keep sending him the money to do it.
Writer Laura Myers explains that Angle’s only hope is to convince all the factions in the GOP that she’s electable and a fair sight better than Harry Reid.
“”We’ll get behind the nominee and do everything we can to defeat Harry Reid,” said Brian Walsh, spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “And I’m sure that every conservative group across the land is going to get involved in this race as well. Reid is our top target.”
Angle could not have won without outside help. The Tea Party Express spent nearly $600,000 for her on TV ads and the anti-tax Club for Growth pitched in more then another $600,000 — spending as much as the candidate herself. The Tea Party Express said it would spend at least $1 million to try to defeat Reid and the Club for Growth is expected to match that and likely spend even more.”
Los Angeles Times — Whitman, Fiorina cruise to victories
America’s political pundits are suffering from a bit of Scott Brown syndrome. Having seen the politically unthinkable – a Republican winning Teddy Kennedy’s seat – the chattering class developed a unified theory that the entire political establishment is in trouble.
When so many incumbents and establishment favorites won Tuesday, you could see the disappointment creep over the faces of the talking heads.
With four incumbent members of Congress – two in each party – already having lost in primaries and polls that show disgust for Washington at an all-time high, the motif seemed to be holding up. Newspapers hired Tea Party reporters and networks gave over election reporting to dispatches on anti-establishment rage. Like diagnostic physicians, they had found a disease the fit the symptoms.
Yes, but…
On Tuesday:
–Blanche Lincoln won.
–California Republicans shunned grassrootsy candidates in favor of big-spending establishment types for Senate and governor.
–In Iowa, a former governor who is the embodiment of Midwestern establishmentarianism easily won over an outsider dude. Terry Branstad is now chugging toward knocking off incumbent Chet Culver.
–In New Jersey, all of the Republican incumbents in the House easily won nomination, as did the party-backed candidate in a Dem-held target district, despite noisy challenges from Tea Partiers.
So is the anti-incumbent fever breaking? Is voter rage quieting down after a year of anger?
–Another incumbent member of Congress, Rep. Jay Inslee, R-S.C., lost. Inslee, a onetime supporter of term limits has served six terms and looks unlikely to make it out of a runoff election with Spartanburg prosecutor Trey Gowdy.
–The Tea Party preferred candidate beat the GOP-preferred candidate for the chance to face Harry Reid.
–The incumbent Republican Governor of Nevada, Jim Gibbons, whose divorce-distracted tenure upset the GOP base, got unceremoniously tossed out of office – the first sitting governor of the state to lose a primary in 100 years.
–California voters approved new elections rules that eliminate partisan primaries. Starting in 2012, the top two finishers in a all-comers primary will compete for statewide and congressional offices in November. It could be the end of the two-party system as we know it (seriously).
In a system that so rarely unseats incumbents and so often rewards familiarity, what we’re seeing is still remarkable, but that doesn’t mean that the whole world will be turned upside down at once.
Money, name recognition and party backing are still good things to have, but they aren’t enough to guarantee victory at a time when voters think Washington is basically out of control.
The other big mistake has been seeing the Tea Party as monolithic. In some places, like Nevada, the Tea Party has some organization and staying power. Nationally, it’s been more of a mindset than a political organization.
Writer Cathleen Decker tells us that in California (where voters also struck down a proposal for publicly financed elections) cash was king in gubernatorial and Senate races that saw more than $120 million inc combined spending:
“California Republicans reached for history in Tuesday’s primary elections, as Meg Whitman claimed the party’s nomination for governor and Carly Fiorina won the GOP race for the U.S. Senate, results that gave women the Republican nominations for the two most powerful statewide political offices for the first time.
The two wealthy businesswomen, who powered their first electoral bids with millions of dollars of their own money, swept into election day as the front-runners and rode the momentum of an angry electorate that spurned the appeals of veteran politicians competing against them on the ballot.”
The State — Haley, Barrett headed for GOP runoff
Nikki Haley is either the coolest politician in a long time or an astonishing liar, and it looks like South Carolinians think she is pretty cool.
South Carolina has been the scene of a long-raging battle between the political establishment (socially conservative, fiscally permissive Republican descendants of Dixiecrats) and outsiders (small-government types like Jim DeMint and Mark Sanford).
The dying establishment threw everything it had at Haley – including a double-barreled accusation of marital infidelity against the fetching mother of two – but she rolled forward, coming just short of the 50 percent she needed to avoid a runoff.
The good news for Haley is that the most sober seeming of her three opponents came in second (22 percent to her 49 percent), and that she might not have to face demands like sitting for a lie detector test from the business-minded Rep. Gresham Barrett.
There is some kind of Democrat running down there (state Sen. Vincent Sheheen) but barring a major meltdown, this is solid GOP country this year.
Writer Gina Smith explains Haleymania:
“Haley, a six-year member of the S.C. House who has won endorsements from former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and former S.C. first lady Jenny Sanford, has run an anti-establishment campaign, calling for more on-the-record votes in the Legislature, term limits for lawmakers and increased auditing of state agencies. In the Legislature, her bills to translate her ideas into law have faltered, the majority never making it beyond the House committee level.
With little money, many political observers had written Haley’s candidacy off. Others speculated her ties to Sanford, caught in a sex scandal, would doom her campaign. But twin endorsements from Palin and Jenny Sanford catapulted Haley from back-of-the-pack status to front-runner.”
New York Times — Nominee for Spy Post Opposed More Clout
Why did President Obama pick retired Lt. Gen. James Clapper to be his Director of National Intelligence?
Maybe because Clapper thinks the position is an irrelevancy too.
Writer Eric Schmitt tells us that Clapper wrote a memo bashing the top intel job recommended by the 9/11 commission and created by George W. Bush.
“One of General Clapper’s biggest supporters in the Obama administration is Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, a former C.I.A. director who brought the general back into government after he was forced out after clashing with former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.”
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