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Republican nominee for governor Meg Whitman speaks during a campaign stop at Cisco headquarters in San Jose , Calif., Wednesday, Sept. 29. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)
A slew of wildly varying public polls in key primary and general election contests are adding to the sense of chaos in the 2010 cycle, as pollsters grapple with trying to predict which members of the angry and unpredictable off-year electorate will come out to vote.
The contrasts can be dizzying. In New York, for example, either the race for governor is extremely close, or Democrat Andrew Cuomo has a 30-point margin. The same is true in Florida, where Republican Rick Scott has a solid lead — unless you believe competing data that show Democrat Alex Sink ahead. And Democrats are either well ahead in the generic ballot, according to the vaunted Gallup survey, or not, depending on whether subsequent weeks show a tie or strong movement in Republicans’ direction.
So it goes, and has gone, with survey taking in recent months, creating rough seas for campaigns as they try to chart a course — stay positive or go negative — while questioning whether the numbers they see in public polling are a more realistic snapshot than their internal numbers.
This Election Day is poised to send a message about how valid the methodologies behind the surveys are — and prompt questions about how reliant the 24-hour news cycle ought to be on polls for headlines that end up influencing everything from strategy to campaign donations to the perception of viability.
"Right-wingers have always liked gays. Look at all of Ronald Reagan’s gay friends. Look at my personal hero Joe McCarthy and his special assistant."
I took her tone, and a hand gesture, to be referring to rumors that McCarthy was himself gay; she was, she writes, referring to Roy Cohn.
Coulter has a number of other complaints — she says the laughter at her black jokes was not "nervous," for instance — that make less sense to me, are of a piece with a polemic that compares me to Jayson Blair, writes that I'm "probably homophobic," and concludes:
As even the non-English-speaking Ben Smith grasped the point being illustrated was that Republicans have always liked gays — not that they always were gay.
Reagan had gay friends and associates. AND YET Reagan was not gay. Joe McCarthy assistant Roy Cohn was gay. AND YET McCarthy was not gay. Coincidentally, my monumental No 1 bestselling book "Treason" attacked liberals for ludicrously accusing McCarthy of being gay on the basis of his having a gay assistant. The only "air quotes" are around the word “reporter” in regard to Ben Smith.
I confess to having missed "Treason," and to not being all that well versed in her monumental opus.
Meg Whitman's campaign and her former housekeeper and nanny's high-profile lawyer, Gloria Allred, offered dueling versions of the story today dominating the race for governor of California.
They agree that Whitman fired Nicky Diaz last June on the grounds that she was an illegal immigrant, a few months after Whitman began her campaign for governor.
Whitman's lawyer, Tom Hiltachk, said Whitman fired her after she "confessed" her status. Allred said Whitman fired the housekeeper after she asked Whitman's help getting legal status.
The nanny had, he said, deceived Whitman: She filled out standard [Internal Revenue Service] forms and Department of Justice forms and presented her Social Security card and California driver's license. She filled out immigration forms that stated under penalty of perjury that she was a lawful resident."
Allred said her client "alleges that Ms. Whitman was aware of her status." She provided no direct evidence for that but suggested Whitman should have known because of the nanny's references to her inability to travel outside the country and by alleged letters from the Social Security Administration reporting that her social security number did not match her name.
Her employment and firing were a "nightmare" said Allred, who cast the case in the most politically inflammatory terms possible, and said her client had been "exploited, disrespected, humiliated, and emotionally and financially abused" and that she was filing a claim in state court for damages included unreimbursed mileage on the nanny's car.
Allred then coached the nanny through a tearful press conference in which she recounted an argument between Whitman and her husband when they learned that she was in the country illegally, in which -- she claimed -- Whitman said the family was "at fault" because they "never asked" if she was in the country legally.
"I hope no one else has to suffer the way that I did," she said. "She treated me as if I was not a human being."
Whitman said in a statement that she's "worried" about Diaz and that she is being "manipulated" by Allred.
"Nicky told me that she was admitting her deception now because she was aware that her lie might come out during the campaign. Nicky said she was concerned about hurting my family and me," Whitman said. "As required by law, once we learned she was an illegal worker, I immediately terminated Nicky’s employment. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I considered Nicky a friend and a part of our extended family."
The widening Republican strength is forcing Democrats and their allies into triage mode, and to decide which incumbents can — and should — be saved.
MoveOn's Michael Sherrard e-mailed the group's members today that liberal stalwart Russ Feingold "could lose."
He writes:
Because keeping Sen. Feingold's voice in the Senate is so important, this race has become our top national priority. Sen. Feingold's campaign is up against a critical fundraising deadline that expires tomorrow. Right now, he urgently needs the resources to expand his grass-roots campaign, reach out to more voters and get his message out in Wisconsin. We're aiming to raise $300,000 for Sen. Feingold's campaign before the deadline.
Meg Whitman's campaign, hit today as only the campaign of a California self-funder could be by a TMZ report of a lawsuit from a former domestic employee, responds through spokeswoman Andrea Jones Rivera:
With the polls tied, it comes as no surprise that the morning after a successful debate for Meg that the sleaze machine of the political left is now focused on the politics of personal destruction. Gloria Allred is a shameful manipulator and the timing of today’s news conference so close to the election should serve as a warning to Californians that they are witnessing dirty political smears at their worst.
The campaign points to a $150 contribution from Allred to Jerry Brown's '06 Attorney General campaign, a bit of a thin reed, and more convincingly to a (dismissed) suit against Arnold Schwarzenegger by a stuntwoman during the '03 campaign.
I'm not sure why the facts suggest that Allred is playing politics, rather than trying to get some headlines and some leverage for her client.
A campaign spokesman declined to comment on whether there had been settlement talks.
UPDATE: A lawyer e-mails to disagree with my analysis: "By making the matter public, she gave up her client's real leverage."
OpenSecrets.org is out with a couple of charts on which members of Congress receive the most money from out of state.
The numbers are interesting on the merits, though the general, bipartisan flow of money from big metropolitan areas to powerful members from smaller, poorer places is hardly a surprise. The data is also pretty much made for attack ads.
Geraghty flags this Wisconsin spot under the headline "He’s a Lumberjack, and He’s Okay" and wonders whether we won't look back at this year as "a Golden Age of Political Advertising."
A defense of Andy Stern against anonymized reports of an FBI investigation comes today from an unlikely quarter, conservative writer Ira Stoll.
His objection is to what he takes as prosecutorial leaking:
As we said then, if the FBI is out tarring firms, or, in this case, Mr. Stern, by making accusations of criminal behavior from behind a veil of anonymity provided by the press, you'd think it'd be the sort of abuse of power that the press would want to be investigating rather than facilitating.
It's not clear to me that the leaks in the Stern stories came from the FBI. They're sourced to labor figures, a world where Stern has many enemies. But Stoll's point is a very good one.
A story that once might have prompted shock and outrage got very little play outside political circles. Why? Because the information juggernaut built by Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, once a GOP attack dog and now head of Fox News, has been tilting the playing field for so long, so persistently and denying its bias so shamelessly that it's created an alternate reality.
We are talking about a new order where Fox parent News Corp. unapologetically gave $1 million to the Republican Governor's Assn. We are talking about a new order where Fox's supposed news personalities — not just its prime-time opinion makers — routinely pound away at conservative talking points. (Who, but Fox, knew that a couple of punks calling themselves Black Panthers and standing in front of a Pennsylvania polling place in the last national election had fomented a national crisis, worthy of weeks of breathless coverage?) We are talking about a new order where Palin and a clownish Florida pastor (and would-be Koran burner) unabashedly commend Fox as the place to go to get your story out.
One doesn't even blink with surprise anymore when a Fox opinion program rolls out black-and-white newsreel footage of fascists, and with uniformly straight faces suggest that the Obama administration has America on the brink of a similar calamity.
The challenge to reporters is to cover Fox -- and, at times, MSNBC, and a range of print and online publications, and to a lesser degree every media outlet -- as the political actors they often are. That's what I try to do here, and why my coverage often blends into media reporting. Fox is the 800 pound gorilla of campaigning media outlets, and the balance of its goals -- various internal players have competing commercial, political, ratings, and lobbying aims -- may be the best story in contemporary politics and media. I'm not sure expressions of "outrage" at the hijacking of what was, for a time, a more neutral form are all that useful. After all, neutral journalism is a historical blip. But certainly, reporters don't have to take Fox at its word on its own "balance" any more than we have to take a politician at his word.
And as the POLITICO article suggests, it's a story that will only get bigger as the 2012 Republican primary campaign ramps up. That's a campaign in which Fox News is just undoubtedly the single most important player -- it pays the candidates, and reaches the electorate. Its executives' and hosts' specific decisions will be crucial to deciding the nominee. Coverage that treats Fox as an observer, not a player, will miss much of the point.
The three states that kick off the presidential primary process all could have new Republican governors next year – and GOP White House hopefuls are working tirelessly to get in the good graces of the would-be chief executives.
Each of the potential new governors—Iowa’s Terry Branstad, New Hampshire’s John Stephen and South Carolina’s Nikki Haley—has received fundraising help from potential presidential candidates and will get more of it before November. They got endorsements in their own primaries this year and regularly receive solicitous calls inquiring about the progress of their campaigns.
I just finished Kate Zernike's sympathetic, and quite useful, book on the beginnings of the Tea Party movement, "Boiling Mad," which consists largely of portraits of the people, mostly women, organizing on a ground level.
The book also rebuts the notion that the movement is an "astroturf" creation of the Koch brothers, in part by showing how many times Koch groups and others tried and failed, often laughably, to create such a movement.
You can't, it seems, just can't conjure these things out of the air.
FreedomWorks, had been "trying to grow a grassroots movement" since 1984, she writes:
It had not had much success. Every April 15, FreedomWorks would hold protests outside post offices across the country -- "Hate your taxes? Join us!" -- but they rarely attracted more than a handful of people.
It had even proposed the idea of a modern-day Boston Tea Party -- more than once. "Do you think our taxes are too high and our tax code too complicated? We do!" the site proclaimed, as "The Star-Spangled Banner" piped in the background. It mocked Tom Daschle, then the Democratic Senate Mmajority leader, in a cartoon video game where a visitor to the site could click on boxes of tea to dump in the harbor while "Redcoat Daschle" stood on the wharf demanding, "Gimme all your money."
In 2007, Dick Armey and Freedom Works' Matt Kibbe "wrote an op-ed proposing the Boston Tea Party as a model of grassorots pressure on an overbearing central government."
They couldn't get it published anywhere.
Which isn't to say that these groups aren't a crucial piece of infrastructure in the conservative grassroots revival; but just that it's so easy to overstate their role.
ALSO: For a totally unsympathetic take on the Tea Party, try Taibbi.
James O'Keefe's latest prank goes lamely awry, producing a painfully deadpan CNN report on his attempt to "punk" reporter Abbie Boudreau.
Instead, CNN gets a planning document:
Listed under "equipment needed," is "hidden cams on the boat," and a "tripod and overt recorder near the bed, an obvious sex tape machine."
Among the props listed were a "condom jar, dildos, posters and paintings of naked women, fuzzy handcuffs" and a blindfold.
According to the document, O'Keefe was to record a video of the following script before Boudreau arrived: "My name is James. I work in video activism and journalism. I've been approached by CNN for an interview where I know what their angle is: they want to portray me and my friends as crazies, as non-journalists, as unprofessional and likely as homophobes, racists or bigots of some sort....
"Instead, I've decided to have a little fun. Instead of giving her a serious interview, I'm going to punk CNN. Abbie has been trying to seduce me to use me, in order to spin a lie about me. So, I'm going to seduce her, on camera, to use her for a video. This bubble-headed-bleach-blonde who comes on at five will get a taste of her own medicine, she'll get seduced on camera..."
The pro-Israel group AIPAC says a campaign ad from Rep. Joe Sestak that claims that, "According to AIPAC, Joe Sestak has a 100% pro-Israel voting record" is inaccurate.
The group, a spokesman said, does not not issue such evaluations.
"Joe Sestak does not have a 100% voting record on Israel issues according to AIPAC. It couldn't be true, we don't rate or endorse candidates," said AIPAC spokesman Josh Block of the ad, which ran in the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent.
Sestak has faced repeated attacks over his stand on Israel since signing a January letter aimed at easing Israel's blockade of Gaza, though critics point more to letters and to sponsorship than to any votes that break with Congressional Democrats' generally pro-Israel party line. (There haven't been many actual difficult votes on the issue, one way or the other). And Sestak has sought in the past to associate himself with AIPAC.
"You look at my voting record and AIPAC says it’s perfect," he told the Orthodox Union earlier this month, according to video of the event. "There’s no letter that I ever sign or don’t sign that I don’t contact AIPAC
"That’s just the way it is, you know," he told the Jewish group. "My voting record is right down the line."
A prominent AIPAC supporter in Pennsylvania, who supports Sestak but wouldn't be quoted by name because he doesn't speak for the organization, said that while the ad was "technically" incorrect, it reflected the fact that Sestak has voted for foreign aid bills and for sanctions against Iran, the major legislation AIPAC lobbied for.
Sestak spokesman Jonathon Dworkin dismissed the issue as semantics, and attacked Republican candidate Pat Toomey for voting against aid to Israel in the context of votes against foreign aid more generally.
"In terms of supporting Israel, there’s a clear difference in this race between Joe Sestak who has voted every time in israel’s interest and his opponent, Congressman Toomey, who has time and again voted against important funding for Israel," he said.
The ad was paid for by "friends of Joe Sestak," a group of his Jewish supporters, but a legal legend says it was "authorized by Sestak for Senate."
But despite Sestak's protestations, major pro-Israel groups continue to view him with skepticism.
"There are serious concerns about Joe Sestak's record related to Israel throughout the pro-Israel community," said an official with a major pro-Israel organization in Washington. "Not only has he said that Chuck Hagel is the Senator he admires most, which is unusual enough, but when comes to actual decisions that have affected Israel and our relationship with them, he has gone the wrong way several times. It's the height of chutzpah for him to suggest he has a good record, let alone a 100 percent one, on these issues."
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus sent a serious shot across the bows of the growing ranks of groups, most of them on the right, playing aggressively in elections under non-profit 501(c)4 and (c)6 status, with a letter asking that the IRS commissioner examine them for violations of tax law.
A central, and endlessly complicated, legal question is whether an organization's "primary purpose" is politics, and many find ways to spend 51% of their money, for instance, on policy campaigns. Different lawyers have offered different advice to groups on where, exactly, the line is -- but many, like Crossroads GPS and Americans for Job Security, are operating under different versions of the non-profit status to both advertise in elections and keep their donors secret.
The IRS should examine whether the groups' "political activities reach a primary purpose level" and "whether they are acting as conduits for major donors advancing their own private interests regarding legislation or political campaigns, or are providing major donors with excess benefits."
"Possible violation of tax laws should be identified as you conduct this study," Baucus writes, adding that the committee plans to "open its own investigation and/or to take appropriate legislative action."
CASH DASH: Spreadsheet for tonight shows the CRUSH of last-minute political fundraisers at just one restaurant -- Carmine’s, a sprawling, family-style southern Italian restaurant in Penn Quarter.
Mark Leibovich, in a long profile of Glenn Beck that's worth reading in full, explores the difficult relationship between Fox and its hottest figure:
The cross-promotion can be a sore spot at Fox News, particularly for its president, Roger Ailes, who has complained about Beck’s hawking his non-Fox ventures too much on his Fox show. Ailes has communicated this to Beck himself and through intermediaries. It goes to a larger tension between Fox News and Beck in what has been a mutually beneficial relationship. Ailes, a former Republican media guru, runs his top-rated cable-news network like a sharp-edged campaign, speaking with a single voice and — ideally — for the benefit solely of Fox News’s bottom line....
[M]ore than any other person at Fox News, Beck operates as a stand-alone entity. He is the only major personality at the network whose office is not at Fox News headquarters in the News Corp building (Mercury is a few blocks down Sixth Avenue). He employs his own publicist, Matthew Hiltzik, a communications consultant who is the son of Beck’s agent, George Hiltzik. Beck receives a $2.5 million salary from Fox News, which bumps to $2.7 million next year, the last of the contract. It is a small fraction of Beck’s revenues, the bulk of which he brings in from his radio and print deals....
Ailes, who declined to comment for this article, has generally been supportive of Beck. But he has also been vocal around the network about how Beck does not fully appreciate the degree to which Fox News has made him the sensation he has become in recent months. In the days following Beck’s Lincoln Memorial rally, which by Beck’s estimate drew a half-million people, Ailes told associates that if Beck were still at Headline News, there would have been 30 people on the Mall. Fox News devoted less news coverage to the rally than CNN and MSNBC did, which Beck has pointed out himself on the air.
A Fox executive, Joel Cheatwood, tells Leibovich, “There is always going to be the person within the organization who may take issue with or doesn’t like the way the network is programming certain things.... I allow for that anywhere. But in terms of the relationship between Fox and Glenn, it’s extremely solid.”
What would a super-rich California governor candidate be without an accompanying lawsuit led by Gloria Allred and floated, naturally, on TMZ:
The former housekeeper for Meg Whitman -- the Republican candidate for Governor of California -- is about to make "controversial and explosive allegations about her former employer," TMZ has learned.
We're told the housekeeper has lawyered up with none other than Gloria Allred. The housekeeper and Allred will hold a news conference today in Gloria's office at 11 AM PT, "to tell how she suffered as a long-time, Latina household employee in Meg Whitman's home.
We're told the housekeeper will be filing a legal claim against Ms. Whitman.
From what we're hearing, the disclosures could have a significant impact on the campaign and possibly the election.
This seems to have been timed for maximum leverage in settlement talks.
