John Salazar Trails Republican Opponent by Four Points, According to The Hill
Earlier this summer, John Salazar, the three-term Democratic Congressman from Colorado’s third Congressional district, appeared safe from the Republican tsunami awaiting Democrats in November.
Now, however, a new poll conducted by The Hill has Salazar trailing his Republican opponent, Scott Tipton, by four points. It observed that:
Independent voters are breaking for Tipton by 15 points. He’s also winning among male, female, middle-aged and older voters.
Salazar is winning among younger voters, but the three-term lawmaker gets mixed reviews from his constituents. When asked about him, 46 percent gave Salazar a favorable rating while 48 percent gave him an unfavorable one.
A big issue in this district is earmarks. Tipton has criticized Salazar for bringing home millions in federal dollars and has taken a no-earmark pledge.
Voters tend to agree with him. When asked if they’d rather have a member of Congress who’d fight to cut spending or one who will fight to bring benefits to the district, 55 percent said they’d prefer a lawmaker who cut spending while 36 percent wanted one who would bring back the money.
This rapid change in fortunes for Salazar, who is the younger brother of former Senator and current Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, does not bode well for Democrats nationally. It means that Republican gains on Nov. 2nd could amount to a blowout of historic proportions.
Difficult Votes in House Left Vulnerable Democrats to be Crucified at the Ballot Box
Commenting on a column penned by Gerald Seib in The Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Chait is surprised more haven’t made the same recrimination. Seib writes:
In June 2009, just six months into the Obama era, House leaders brought to a vote a broad, highly ambitious bill to attack climate change, in part by changing American energy habits and in part by instituting a new cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse gases. That bill presented an extraordinarily tough vote for lawmakers from coal-producing and industrial states, because the carbon cap was seen as a threat to both the coal industry and to energy and manufacturing plants across the upper Midwest.
That might have been a political risk worth taking if the legislation was about to roar ahead on the wings of popular demand. Instead, House members cast this hard, politically risky vote on a bill that proceeded to go—nowhere. The Senate not only didn't take up the bill, it moved on instead to health care, while a handful of senators sought to write a different version of climate-change legislation that failed to fly.
So a handful of brave Democrats put their necks on the line for what has turned out to be a meaningless vote. Now those lawmakers—Rick Boucher in Virginia and John Boccieri and Zack Space in Ohio most notably—are being pilloried for their troubles. If those Democrats lose, and Democrats lose the House by a couple of seats, they can look back on cap-and-trade and wonder.
In response, Chait argued that there was never any real hope of cap-and-trade passing the Senate, and he notes that the one political move that clearly backfired on Democrats in the 111th Congress was trying to move massive climate change legislation.
Don’t Boot the Blue Dogs. Promote Them.
Ari Berman wrote a major Op-ed piece in the The New York Times on Sunday, arguing that a smaller, more ideologically coherent Democratic majority in Congress will move a progressive legislative agenda better than the current majority. Suggesting that the Party should ‘Boot the Blue Dogs,’ he writes:
A smaller majority, minus the intraparty feuding, could benefit Democrats in two ways: first, it could enable them to devise cleaner pieces of legislation, without blatantly trading pork for votes as they did with the deals that helped sour the public on the health care bill. (As a corollary, the narrative of “Democratic infighting” would also diminish.)
Second, in the Senate, having a majority of 52 rather than 59 or 60 would force Democrats to confront the Republicans’ incessant misuse of the filibuster to require that any piece of legislation garner a minimum of 60 votes to become law. Since President Obama’s election, more than 420 bills have cleared the House but have sat dormant in the Senate. It’s easy to forget that George W. Bush passed his controversial 2003 tax cut legislation with only 50 votes, plus Vice President Dick Cheney’s. Eternal gridlock is not inevitable unless Democrats allow it to be.
Berman’s entire rationale collapses under the weight of its own logical inconsistencies. Berman advances an interesting idea, but I fail to see how it is going to yield more progressive outcomes. Even a small majority in Congress requires moderate and conservative Democrats from swing districts, especially since only about 180 seats are in safe Democratic territory. Moreover, a smaller majority only increases the likelihood of needing Republican votes to pass any piece of legislation. Berman seems to think getting the GOP to compromise would be easier than conservative Democrats within the caucus. That is just absurd.
DCCC Pulls Betsy Markey’s Ad Funding, Salazar and Perlmutter Still Get Ad Buys
Reid Wilson at the National Journal’s Hotline On Call is reporting that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has pulled its independent expenditure advertisements for Betsy Markey in Colorado’s CD-4. National Democrats, Wilson wrote, “are using their checkbooks as acknowledgement that nearly a dozen members are beyond saving.”
With just two weeks to go before election day, he goes on to say:
The DCCC did not spend money on behalf of Reps. Mary Jo Kilroy (D-Ohio), Debbie Halvorson (D-Ill.), Betsy Markey (D-Colo.), Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), Suzanne Kosmas (D-Fla.), Patrick Murphy (D-Pa.) and Steve Kagen (D-Wis.), the filings show. Republicans believe those seven seats are all but guaranteed to fall their way.
Even though the DCCC has pulled Congresswoman Markey’s ad buys for the week, it still invested $236,000 for John Salazar in CD-3 and $147,000 for Ed Perlmutter in CD-7—a sign that Democratic leaders in Washington still believe both seats can still be saved from the national Republican wave.
The Best Defense is a Good Offensive: Betsy Markey Goes On the Attack.
Betsy Markey is finally going on the offensive against her Republican opponent, Cory Gardner. According to the Coloradoan, Markey’s first attack ad of the 2010 election cycle seeks to “tap into voter frustration with government by calling Republican opponent Cory Gardner a ‘career politician.’”
"Taxpayers have already had enough, so Colorado can't afford a career politician like Cory Gardner in Congress. Gardner skipped legislative votes to attend Washington fundraisers, but took his taxpayer funded salary anyway," the ad says.
For readers of this blog, the ad treads on familiar territory. It echoes many of the attacks I, a not-so-humble political writer/policy wonk, have leveled against Gardner. During the Republican primary in March, I criticized Gardner’s lack-luster performance in a debate in Loveland by suggesting he was out of step with the populist anger toward not just Democrats, but established elites. I wrote:
Markey Must Go on the Offense Against Gardner to Win Re-Election
Bob Moore at the Fort Collins Coloradoan writes:
Rep. Betsy Markey will need to go on the offensive against Republican Cory Gardner - and soon - if she hopes to win a second term, two Colorado State University political scientists said after a poll by a GOP-affiliated group showed the challenger with a comfortable lead.
"She does not have to hit him all by herself, assuming that there is outside help from the (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) or other groups, but she does have to hit him," CSU political science Chairman Bob Duffy said.
"And I think those hits have to start coming now, before the narrative takes hold that Gardner is a shoo-in."
Gardner, a state representative from Yuma, leads Markey 50-39 percent, according to a poll of 400 likely 4th Congressional District voters conducted Aug. 23-26 and Aug. 28 for the American Action Forum, which is headed by former Minnesota Republican Sen. Norm Coleman and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Sen. John McCain's economic adviser in the 2008 presidential campaign. Margin of error for the survey, the results of which were released late Wednesday, is listed at plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.
The Death of Supply-Side Economics
Back in April 2007, Bruce Bartlett wrote an article that appeared on the New York Times editorial page where he argued that supply-side economics should declare victory in its struggle against Keynesianism in America and then promptly fade away from the public imagination. “It did its job, creating a new consensus among economists on how to look at the national economy, he wrote. “But today it has become a frequently misleading and meaningless buzzword that gets in the way of good economic policy.”
What came out of that editorial—an editorial that helped cement Bartlett’s apostasy from a movement he helped build—was the seed that became the basis of his book, The New American Economy. In a post he published in his blog last fall promoting his book, Bartlett argued that whereas the original supply-siders in the 1970s and 1980s believed that some tax cuts, under special circumstances, could lead to new revenues, supply-side economics during the Bush years got distorted into the truly absurd notion that “there is no economic problem that cannot be cured with more and bigger tax cuts, that all tax cuts are equally beneficial, and that all tax cuts raise revenue.”
Reforming the Senate Filibuster
Washington Post columnist, Ruth Marcus, has a noteworthy column this morning offering a four and a half step process in fixing the filibuster. The filibuster, of course, has been used more and more in the legislative process over the last decade as a tool of minority party obstructionism.
As such, it has led some—like blogger Ezra Klein—to argue that it is one of the various reasons why Congress is broken. Indeed, between 2007 and 2010, the Senate has had to call 214 cloture votes to break filibusters, far more than the 57 years between 1919 and 1976.
My Interview With Tom Lucero
Over the last several weeks, both the local and national media have been aflutter over the tough re-election race faced by Betsy Markey in Colorado’s Fourth Congressional District. For local pundits and political insiders, however, that comes as little surprise because most knew that even before Markey began her first-term, she was occupying a seat that has been Republican for well over thirty years.
Indeed, even before she was sworn into office, Berthoud Republican, Tom Lucero, who is finishing his second term on the CU Board of Regents, declared his intention to challenge Ms. Markey. Since declaring his candidacy, however, his campaign has been plagued by problems, including staff shakeups and poor name recognition, weak fundraising numbers, as well as a strong primary challenge from Yuma Republican, Cory Gardner, whose campaign appears to be an unstoppable freight train.
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