Marc Ambinder

Longtime Obama Friend Leaving White House

Fri,06 Nov 2009 20:03:29 GMT

The White House announced today that Cassandra Q. Butts, a long-time friend of the president's who serves as his chief deputy in the White House Counsel's Office, will be leaving her post to become senior adviser to the Millennium Challenge Corporation.

The agency was chartered by Congress in 2004 to partner with third-world countries and promote sustainable growth and good government.

The Deficit Choice: What The White House Is Thinking

Fri,06 Nov 2009 19:31:59 GMT

Huge deficits will be omnipresent throughout President Obama's first term, complicating his administration's messaging efforts on the economy. But advisers separate the political repercussions from the actual underlying fiscal and monetary policies. In some ways, the short-term politics of the deficit are negligible. They're preferable to the short-term politics of a much higher unemployment rate with no economic growth -- and a smaller deficit.

Paterson's Defiant Ad Buy In New York

Fri,06 Nov 2009 16:21:59 GMT

New York Governor David Paterson (D), emboldened by the results of Tuesday's elections, begins his first flight of television ads today in the state. The ads, entitled "Some Say," refer to attempts by the White House to persuade Paterson, whose approval ratings are low, to not run for his first elected term. According to a Republican media ad buyer, the Paterson campaign is spending about $625,785 for a week's worth of ads in five markets, including Rochester, Buffalo and New York City. The New York Times has more info here.

The White House Political Learning Curve

Fri,06 Nov 2009 15:23:22 GMT

Is Barack Obama's cool style of governing fundamentally incompatible with the furnace of modern politics? Bipartisan conclaves, bringing industry to the table(s), relative transparency, accommodation and consensus meetings are all ornaments of the Obama brand. But political parties, built around existing alignments of interests, tend to get excited about fighting. Base-tending is crucial to political husbandry. Obama has a gourmand's disdain for populism and picking fights.

The Cornyn Caveat: What The NRSC Will Do -- And Won't Do -- In Primaries

Thu,05 Nov 2009 22:26:08 GMT

One day after National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman John Cornyn promised that his group wouldn't play spend money in the Republican primaries, a Republican Senate candidate in Arkansas has gotten some attention for an upcoming fundraiser of his at the National Republican Senatorial Committee headquarters in Washington. Candidate Gilbert Baker has six Republican primary opponents, including the head of the Arkansas Tea Party movement.

The AP says that Cornyn is listed as a host of the 11/19 fundraiser, along with three other GOP heavyweights, including the top Senate Republican, Mitch McConnell.

An NRSC spokesperson told the AP that the fundraiser does not imply that Cornyn is endorsing Mr.Baker. Other candidates, the spokesperson said, could also have their fundraisers at the NRSC.

Interview: The Club For Growth Ascendent

Thu,05 Nov 2009 22:11:19 GMT

Here's a Q and A with ex-Rep. Chris Chocola, president of the Club for Growth, whose endorsement of Doug Hoffman in New York's 23rd congressional district precipitated Hoffman's quick rise to national prominence. Though the Club lost this race, they scored a coup the next day when Sen. John Cornyn, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said that he would not spend money on behalf of candidates who faced primaries, even those candidates he personally recruited.

What's your 30,000 feet take on Tuesday night?

For conservatives, really, they did not lose anything on Tuesday night because even in Hoffman's loss, if the Club for Growth had done nothing, Hoffman wouldn't have been able to mount a viable campaign. You would had the same type of policymaker in Scozzafava or Owens. Certainly we would have rather had Hoffman win. A victory in itself [when] a guy like John Cornyn [says it's] his lesson that the competitive primaries are a good thing. It's not good that party bosses tell the voters who they ought to like. So that's a victory in and of itself.

What's the Club for Growth's brand like out there? I ask that because it seems like a lot of folks in the district didn't like how Hoffman became a talisman for a movement that originated outside the district.

Everyone would say that the [Scozzafava] probably wasn't in hindsight the most attractive candidate for the Republicans. If the county chairman had picked a principled conservative from the beginning, they would have probably won rather easily. So, there was a lot of money coming from all sides, and we don't take solace in this, but she ended up being everything that we said she was. I don't buy the argument that this was a struggle within the conservatives. There was no moderate in the race. There may be examples of that in the future, like in Florida.

Respinning Virginia: Forget The Obama Surge Voters

Thu,05 Nov 2009 20:12:23 GMT

Heaven help me, but I'm going to take issue with a political satirist. And not just any political satirist, mind you, but Jon Stewart himself. On his Monday show, Stewart lampooned the tendency of journo-punditocrats to opine that the interpretation of the election matters as much as the election itself. The humor was based on the premise that both sides will have their spin, pundits will dutifully select whatever spin fits the moment, and then, even though they know they're not telling the truth, will focus the collective mind in such a way as to perpetuate a distorted meaning of the election.

The Great Political Sort Continues

Wed,04 Nov 2009 21:15:16 GMT

New York's House delegation is now 27-2 Democratic, or 93%. (If you add in the senators it goes up to 94%.) For comparison, Texas's House delegation is 63% Republican, Florida's is 60% Republican, and California's (counting Garamendi) is 64% Democratic.

In recent memory, has such a large state been so totally dominated by a single party? The largest I can think of are Massachusetts today (100% Dem) and Oklahoma in the late '90s (100% GOP).

While we're at it: Why has the GOP collapsed in rural upstate New York but not in rural central Pennsylvania? I know there are cultural differences between the two (Yankee vs. Scots-Irish) but it's a striking divide nonetheless.

NY 23, Palin 0, Erick Erickson 1

Wed,04 Nov 2009 20:40:36 GMT

The CW take, courtesy of SNL's Seth Meyers, is that Sarah Palin's brand problems contributed to the defeat of the candidate she backed in the very special election in New York's 23rd Congressional District. But Republican candidates know who butters their bread. There are signs today that, far from taking Hoffman's defeat as evidence that voters are anxious about attempts to run a hard right candidacy, the GOP mod squad is interpreting Hoffman's surge as a warning.

ITEM: The National Republican Senatorial Committee says it won't spend money in Republican primaries even though it recruited several candidates who now face them. The idea isn't to cede control over candidate recruitment so much as it is to back away from the impression that they're in the business of anointing candidates.

ITEM: Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) endorses conservative California Senate candidate Chuck DeVore on the day that the NRSC-recruited candidate, Carly Fiorna, enters the race. (The NRSC says it's not endorsing.)

Sarah From Alaska: The Truth And 2012

Wed,04 Nov 2009 20:17:58 GMT

An interview with Shushannah Walshe and Scott Conroy, the authors of some behind-the-scenes reportage about Sarah Palin's vice presidential candidacy, "Sarah from Alaska."

You try hard to be fair in the book, but you chronicle, fairly persuasively, a large number of what seem to be fairly egregious distortions by the candidate. Why does she do this? Why doesn't she, as you wrote, acknowledge uncomfortable truths?

Palin almost always seems outwardly poised and confident in front of a microphone, but she also demonstrates time and again--often in more subtle ways--signs of profound insecurity. It takes a self-confident person to admit mistakes and acknowledge one's own shortcomings, but Sarah Palin is quick to cast aside people who cross her in even minor ways, and her unwillingness to tolerate much dissent often leads to an infallibility syndrome.