In his interview with The Washington Times, Mr. Gingrich sketched out a vision for conservatives and Republicans to block what he considers the Obama-Democratic march to socialism by thinking outside the party-label box. That includes building a center-right majority in Congress and the state legislatures — regardless of party identification — even if that means the heretical idea of Republicans actively promoting and backing conservative Democratic candidates in selected races where a GOP candidate would have little chance of winning.
"I would urge conservatives in California to find a Democrat to run in every Assembly and Senate seat in California that can't be contested by Republicans, and then to run a Republican in every seat they could possibly win, and then have an overt goal of creating a bipartisan conservative coalition," Mr. Gingrich argues. "I'd do the same thing nationally."
Can't wait to see how "Endorsed by Newt" plays in a Democratic primary...
Steve Singiser at Kos has a followup thought on the NRCC's campaign spots targeting House members who backed the American Clean Energy and Security Act. My first thought was that his Energy and Commerce membership prompted the spots, but Singiser has another theory:
Some of the representatives targeted by this ad make sense. They include a group of potentially vulnerable freshmen... Others are a bit more curious, because they are incumbents in swingy districts who cakewalked to wins in 2008. This might be a tipping of the hand by the NRCC, a sign that they think that they have legit candidates at the ready for 2010:
Senator Al Franken FINALLY gets sworn in today Tuesday, and just to give conservatives even greater fits, I'll note (behind the curve since I was off the grid all weekend with nothing but intermittent smart phone reception to follow the Palin story) that he'll be in Iowa at the Harkin Steak Fry on September 13.
Franken's been a Steak Fry speaker before -- my 2007 research doesn't get the exact year -- but of course not as a Senator. Looking back to 2006, it was the beginning of Obama's long march... can we say Franken 16? Can we see Rush's head exploding?
Ya know, quittin' your job and bein' a full-time presidential candidate for three years is kinda like bein' a small state governor -- except you don't have Actual Responsibilities.
Update: in an insane way this almost makes sense. Alaska is in the way of the ambition and the day job doesn't help in any way. It actually hurts; stuck six time zones away dealing with trivia like a state budget.
One of the most popular parodies of Campaign 2008 was a photoshopped image of Sarah Palin's head onto the body of a woman wearing an American flag bikini and brandishing a gun. Enough people found this image of Palin plausible that Snopes had to debunk it.
Vanity Fair's Todd Purdum hit the streets this week with a lengthy Palin piece. Seemingly in response, though the timing is a coincidence, Palin appears in Runner's World. The takeaway quote is her complaint that Team McCain didn't schedule enough time for her morning jogs.
But what's really interesting is the photo gallery. Palin poses in tight workout shorts, with better hair and makeup than one would normally have for jogging. Baby Trig is a prop in a couple shots. There are no shots of Palin actually exercising, the way they show Obama shooting hoops and sweating. Instead, she's stretching and posing. One pose has her hand on hip in front of a flag, and there's almost no way not to think of the bikini-gun picture.
Physical fitness is of course a good thing. Palin and I are almost exactly the same age and she looks to be in better shape than I am (my workouts have slipped lately). But wouldn't baggy sweats have sent that message just as well as a Maxim lite layout?
Middle-aged male candidates since JFK have had the tanned and blow-dried anchorman archetype to follow (see: Romney, Mitt and Edwards, John). Female politicians have no equivalent, so Palin is on uncharted ground. Purdum writes:
"Another aspect of the Palin phenomenon bears examination, even if the mere act of raising it invites intimations of sexism: she is by far the best-looking woman ever to rise to such heights in national politics, the first indisputably fertile female to dare to dance with the big dogs. This pheromonal reality has been a blessing and a curse. It has captivated people who would never have given someone with Palin’s record a second glance if Palin had looked like Susan Boyle. And it has made others reluctant to give her a second chance because she looks like a beauty queen."
Dangerous ground for a male writer. But he says in prose what the woman who parodied Palin said in punch lines.
Fierce feminist Tina Fey backed Hillary Clinton in the primary with the rallying cry "Bitches get stuff done," yet played heavily on the Palin as Conservababe image from her very first impersonation, the famous "I can see Russia from my house" appearance.
Hillary Clinton: But, Sarah, one thing we can agree on is that sexism can never be allowed to permeate a American election.
Sarah Palin: So, please, stop Photoshopping my head on sexy bikini pictures!
Palin: Reporters and commentators, stop using words that diminish us! Like "pretty", "attractive", "beautiful"...
Clinton: "Harpy", "shrew", and "boner shrinker".
With 1:36 remaining in the clip, Fey actually strikes the bikini-gun pose. Her later parodies usually touched on the Conservababe image: flashing some leg or doing some "fancy pageant walkin'" in front of Palin herself. Of course, parody was difficult when Palin was winking at us in the debate.
Meanwhile, Amy Poehler's long-suffering Hillary Clinton touches on one of the big reasons that a moderately attractive middle-aged pageant contestant was greeted in the world of politics like Jessica Alba on a red carpet: Women still generally wait until after they've had kids to run for office, and often abandon their own ambitions in favor of their husband's.
Bill Clinton was 28 when he made his first run for office. Hillary was 53. One of the interesting things about Nancy Pelosi's rise to power wasn't just the first woman thing--it's that she rose to the top when she didn't win elected office until age 47, a decade or two older than most other recent Speakers.
One would think, as the baby boomers approach Social Security, that our culture's notions of what's considered attractive would have aged accordingly. Instead, we've become more youth-obsessed than ever. A still-beautiful Jamie Lee Curtis is stuck at age 50 in yogurt ads because 60 year old leading men get to play opposite 25 year old starlets as love interests. Catherine Zeta Jones, meet Michael Douglas. Saturday Night Live played the idea of sex with 62-year-old Susan Sarandon for laughs in May. Faith Hill gets photoshopped into a Barbie doll, and Nicole Kidman has disfigured her 40something face until she looks like the Stepford Wife she once played.
They say Washington is Hollywood for ugly people, and that sets the bar low enough that the physically fit but relatively ordinary Palin stands out. There simply aren't very many women in their 30s or early 40s in public office, and our society doesn't acknowledge female beauty past that age. Thus Palin's main achievement -- if you call being plucked out of relative obscurity an achievement -- is merely to have climbed so high at a young enough age that she's still seen as a woman and not an "old lady."
I've ranted recently about crossover voting in primaries. As anyone who reads a site like mine should know, Iowa is a "closed" (sic) primary state, meaning you have to be registered in a party to vote in a primary, and you vote only in one party's primary at a time. You can't for example participate in a Republican primary for governor and a Democratic courthouse primary.
It's a soft version of "closed," because you can change party on the spot, and a lot of people do. Leaving aside my opinion on that law, let's look at how it can impact a statewide race. In a sense, Vander Plaats and Rants and Fong aren't just running against each other--they're running against the interesting local Democratic contests.
The People's Republic of Johnson County, you'll be surprised to know, is among the top ten in the state in number of registered Republicans. Even though they're outnumbered by Democrats roughly 2.5 to 1 (in both party registration and the 2008 presidential results), that still leaves a lot of Republicans just on sheer population.
Locals call our Democratic primary the "real election" for courthouse jobs. But in 2002, Johnson County Democrats had their only uncontested primary in county history. Incumbent vs. write-in, from Tom Vilsack on down to county treasurer Tom Kriz. But 2010 is likely to see contested Democratic courthouse races, with Janelle Rettig already up and running for supervisor.
1998 was a more typical gubernatorial year: a moderately interesting Republican governor's race with Jim Ross Lightfoot heavily favored over Paul Pate and Dave Oman, and white-hot open seat recorder and supervisor races on the Democratic side. And oh yeah, incidentally, governor too. How much is the Johnson County Democratic primary a local race? 800 more votes for recorder than for governor, as (I'm generalizing about secret ballots here, but it's not much of a stretch) crossover Republicans left the Tom Vilsack vs. Mark McCormick race blank.
(Tangent: That one was closer than people remember, just over 3000 votes statewide; Vilsack won it by rolling up Kim Jong Il sized margins in his senate district.)
With no local excitement on the Democratic side, more Republicans actually stayed in the Republican primary in 2002. Turnout jumped to 3,386, half again more than `98, and (generalizing again) those 800 people who skipped the governor's race in 1998 were probably a big chunk of that.
The more moderate 2002 candidate, Doug Gross, carried Johnson with 1341 votes and 40 percent, with Vander Plaats last at 941 votes and 28 percent--exactly 400 votes apart. With competition for voter interest on the Democratic side in 2010, lower turnout in a moderate county means a lower numeric margin for a moderate candidate.
Let's apply the 2002 candidate percentages to the 1998 turnout totals in Johnson County. Gross's margin over Vander Plaats drops from 400 to 232, a net loss of 168 in one county. That's significant when you consider that Gross was only 1,746 votes away, statewide, from a convention.
And that's even assuming that the relative percentages between conservatives and moderates stay the same. My hunch is that the most committed Republicans would care more about governor than the courthouse.
There are a million such stories in the naked city of Iowa politics. How will, say, the primary for Christopher Rants' open House seat boost Republican turnout, and which of the Sioux City Two will it benefit? How many other things like that are lurking? All we need is someone to crunch the numbers and analyze the lay of the land in 98 more counties, 125 legislative races and five congressional districts.
It's now three Iowa Republicans officially in the governor's race, with newcomer Christian Fong of Cedar Rapids joining the Sioux City Two, Christopher Rants and Bob Vander Plaats. Mentioners are mentioning several others including Rod Roberts, Jerry Behn, Paul McKinley and even blast from the past Terry Branstad. (Seriously.)
It's unlikely all of these guys will get in, or even stay in. Fong's rollout is being dogged by the same "donated to Democrats" issue that was probably critical in Peter Teahen's narrow (120 votes) loss to Mariannette Miller-Meeks last year. But it's clear that we're not going to see a one on one Vander Plaats vs. Not Vander Plaats race. Maybe one candidate consolidates support and becomes the consensus Anyone But, but the differing geographic bases of the potential contenders makes that less likely.
The big field means the Iowa GOP could be faced with a post-primary nominating convention next summer if no one gets to the 35 percent required by state law to win the nomination outright.
The convention scenario was in Ed Fallon's plans on the Democratic side in 2006, as he urged supporters to go to the sparsely attended off-cycle caucuses and split into gubernatorial preference groups. At the time it looked like a four-way race, five if you count Sal Mohamed. But Chet Culver annexed rival Patty Judge as a running mate, which made the brokered nomination less likely. (Still, Culver only won the primary with 39 percent.)
But even in a three-way race a convention is possible, and indeed almost happened to the Republicans in 2002:
Gross
71,478
35.88%
Sukup
64,490
32.37%
Vander Plaats
63,077
31.66%
1,746 votes less and Gross would have been under 35 percent.
The convention scenario, of course, did happen that same year in the 5th congressional district, where the four candidates all landed between 21 and 31 percent in the primary. Steve King went into that convention with two big advantages. He had the most votes in the primary (which may have been the last time Steve King could claim the moral high ground) and he was the most conservative candidate. In a setting where the core of the core of the activists control the process, ideological intensity matters, and with the safe district, Republicans weren't constrained by worries about winning in the fall.
Thus a convention scenario is favorable to Vander Plaats. Looking at the 2002 results he has a base close to, but just short of, 35 percent, and the question is how much room does he have to expand on that. (He also, unlike 2002, has to share his regional base with Rants.) 31 percent was last place in a three way race, but might be the top of a five candidate field.
BVP also seems like the most likely candidate to get his people to an obscure January caucus with no presidential race at stake. At least no IMMEDIATE presidential race; with BVP and Mike Huckabee on board with each other, this could become a presidential proxy war.
The 2006 Democratic caucus-convention period was a breakthrough for the Iowa Democratic blogosphere, the first big story we collectively covered in detail beyond the traditional media. The Republican caucuses will be harder to track because Republicans don't break into preference groups. They just elect their delegates to the next level, which means tracking gubernatorial preferences will be an intense exercise in inside baseball and Republican Kremlinology. All sorts of other agendas will be mixed in; with the low turnout, you'll have a disproportionate number of people who care more about the platform or who gets to be county chair than they care about governor. (Same thing's true on our side.)
It should be good theater, but in the end might not be good democracy or good for the Republicans. (Not that I'm all of a sudden in charge of what's good for Republicans.) They could easily see their least electable candidate nominated by a low-turnout convention process, even though 70 percent or more of the primary voters favored someone else or ANYone else. This is the kind of scenario that instant runoff voting was born to address.
Coming up: how local factors in one county (mine) can ripple through the race.
Senator Al Franken FINALLY gets sworn in