Day: April 8, 2013
How Running for President is Like Sex
Running for president is like sex. No one ever did it once and forgot about it.
— James Carville, quoted by Maureen Dowd.
Most House Lawmakers ‘Survive’ Their Scandals
250
Members of the House of Representatives have been involved in various scandals since Watergate and roughly 40% did not “survive” their scandal, according to Scott Bassenger, writing in Political Research Quarterly.
The Republican Party is Broken
I think the emphasis on partisan polarization is misplaced. There’s nothing about strong partisanship that makes effective government in the U.S. impossible… Indeed: I suspect the game theorists might actually find that it should be easier for two well-organized parties to cut those deals, even if their ideal points are quite distant, than it would be to reach a deal between unstructured, factionalized parties, even if there are no extremists among them… And yet: dysfunction, crises, threats of shutdown and irrational outcomes no one claims to want. … My conclusion? It’s not partisanship. It’s not polarization. It’s not even extremism. It’s the Republican Party. The GOP is broken.
— Jonathan Bernstein, writing in Salon.
The Amount of Money It Would Take for Hillary to Clear the Field
$100 million
Amount top Democratic operatives tell Time that Hillary Clinton will need to raise over the next 20 months if she hopes to clear the field of serious Democratic challengers. Said one: “I would think you’d want an eye-popping number to clear the field. I think the $100 million commitment would say to potential opponents, ‘Think before you jump to your death.'”
Please Don’t Do It, Chelsea!
Right now I’m grateful to live in a city, in a state and a country where I strongly support my mayor, and my governor, and my president, and my senators, and my representative. If at some point that weren’t true and I thought I could make a meaningful and measurably greater impact, you know, I’d have to ask and answer that question.
— Chelsea Clinton, quoted by NBC News, on whether she would run for political office.
National Republicans to Hold Spring Meeting Behind Enemy Lines – in Hollywood
Here’s one for the WTF file: The Republican National Committee is holding its spring meeting in Hollywood, of all places, next week. It is a mystery why Chairman Reince Priebus would choose Hollywood, one of the GOP’s favorite punching bags, as the site of their meeting, especially since it is situated in a state where there is not a single elected GOP state official, where Democrats hold veto-proof majorities in both houses of the legislature and where Republican voter registration has cratered to 29 percent, the lowest it’s been since the 19th century:
