Sovereignty Blog

The Honeymoon Is Over: After five days of giddiness, Democrats express dismay that their new House leader has thrown herself into the fight to become her Number 2, creating a potentially lose-lose situation where she could either be defeated in her first public contest since the election, or brand herself as a dove. (Mike Allen, 11/13/06, TIME)

As she awaited her new grandchild after her election-night triumph, Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi was lauded as one of the most consequential Democrats in history and treated as a foreign head of state at the White House, where she got the big chair in front of the Oval Office fireplace. But the dour Republicans and worried Democrats have switched places, however momentarily, now that she has unexpectedly injected herself into the bitter race to be her underling, the House Majority Leader. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen a leader insert themselves like this,” said a veteran of many Democratic leadership races. Pelosi’s camp says it’s like a high-school election and won’t be a defining moment for her leadership. [...]

“We had a great deal of unity last week and encouraging Murtha to run against Hoyer really threatens to fray that unity at a time when we want to project an image of being strong and together,” said one Democratic aide. “It doesn’t bode well for our first 100 hours. To be a majority party, you have to bring disparate groups together, and she’s been given credit for being very good at that. If she departs from that record or that approach, it’s harder to stay a majority.” [...]

Hoyer poses a competing power base to Pelosi, and they have not had warm relations. “She wants to purge the leadership of people who disagree with her,” said a Democratic official with a front-row seat. “It’s about people she can personally control. Hoyer is an excellent public face for the party. She’s more a behind-the-scenes player.”

Nice shot.

Boston places highest Matsuzaka bid (Jon Heyman, 11/13/06, SI.com)

Sen. Mel Martinez to Chair RNC (NewsMax, 11/13/06)

Sen. Mel Martinez, the first-term lawmaker who previously served in President Bush’s Cabinet, will assume the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, GOP officials said Monday.

Martinez, 60, will replace current chairman Ken Mehlman, who will leave the post in January at the end of his two-year term, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid pre-empting a formal announcement.

The Blue Man Who Threw the Montana Race to Tester: In Big Sky country, a libertarian with a very puzzling medical history did just enough to give the Senate race to the Democrats. (Josh Harkinson, November 10, 2006, Mother Jones)

Rove’s woe has been triggered by a Smurf-like (more on this shortly) libertarian, Stan Jones, who helped bring down the mighty Conrad Burns in Montana by snatching three percent of the don’t-tread-on-me vote, quite likely tipping the race to Democratic challenger Jon Tester. The Republicans have thus far accepted this likelihood with noble restraint. Jones told me no angry red staters have called to harass him, and I couldn’t find a single complaint about his race on conservative blogs. It could be Republicans are too shell shocked to notice. Or, to their credit, too preoccupied with soul searching.

That Jones could be the man who indirectly turned Montana, and thus the whole Senate, blue, is oddly poetic given that Jones is himself blue. By this I don’t mean he’s sad, louche, or a libertarian with Democratic sympathies (though the lattermost is also true), but that Stan Jones is blue. A few bloggers know the story: In the days leading up to the dawn of the new millennium, Jones believed the Y2K virus could cause the collapse of Western Civilization. To steel his immune system against a post-apocalypse wracked by pandemics, he began drinking a solution of ionic silver, which he believed was a more powerful armor than vitamin C. “The pioneers that crossed the plains of America used to put a silver dollar in the bottom of a bucket of milk to keep it fresh longer,” he explained when I reached him at his house in Bozeman. “So anyway, I studied it, and I thought it would be a good preventative, so I just started taking it all the time. But I wasn’t smart enough to figure out the whole story.” He didn’t realize the silver ions would bind with minerals in the Montana tap water and lodge in his cells. “The silver is nontoxic; it doesn’t affect my health in any way,” he said, “but I am a little blue-grey.”

A Republican who needs that extra three percent to carry Montana has already biffed too badly top get much sympathy.

The Democrats’ plans: Old-timers will run the House, but their agenda is not clear (The Economist, Nov 9th 2006)

IF YOU think the Democrats’ triumph will bring fresh young faces pushing a well-honed agenda, think again. Unlike the Republican upstarts who stormed to power in 1994 with their “Contract with America”, the new House of Representatives will be run by veterans with few coherent plans.

Nancy Pelosi, the putative speaker, has agreed to respect the ancient custom of appointing committee chairmen by seniority (a tradition the Republicans ignore these days). As a result, seven of the 19 likely committee chairmen are over 70. John Dingell, who is set to head the Energy and Commerce Committee, has been in Congress for 51 years. [...]

Less clear is whether Ms Pelosi and her generals can push a coherent agenda of their own. The Democrats’ equivalent of the “Contract with America” is a 31-page pamphlet called “A new direction for America”, boiled down for campaign purposes to “Six for ’06”, a six-pronged action plan that Ms Pelosi promises to enact within 100 hours of becoming speaker.

Unfortunately, this “agenda” is little more than a series of soundbites designed to show that Democrats care about the plight of ordinary workers. There are pledges to raise the minimum wage, expand tax-break subsidies for college, “free America from dependence on foreign oil” by boosting alternative fuels and ending tax giveaways to big oil, allow the government to negotiate lower prices with drug firms, promote stem-cell research, and stop any plans to privatise Social Security.

The plan says nothing about some of the tougher issues facing America’s legislature. Not a word about how Democrats might fix Social Security’s finances. No mention of how they will deal with the Alternative Minimum Tax which will, without new legislation, hit 22m Americans in 2007, up from 3.4m in 2006. Worse, the proposals are internally inconsistent. There is a promise to end the Republicans’ fiscal profligacy by reinstating budget rules that require tax cuts and spending increases to be matched by savings elsewhere. But there is no explanation of how the Democrats’ own pet tax cuts or spending increases would be paid for.

Within the next few months the Democrats will have to decide whether they care more about fiscal discipline or shovelling money at ordinary Americans.

The problem for Democrats is that seniority means their committee chairmen are mainly from safe inner-city districts and haven’t ever had to reconsider their support for the Great Society. The House will be run by folks who think the ’70s were the Golden Age.

Ex-presidents keep them laughing in New Orleans (AP, 11/12/06)

They’re separated by more than 20 years, they come from opposing political parties, and one evicted the other from the White House. But Bill Clinton and George Bush act like a team, a pair of touring comedians with a well-honed act. [...]

One problem with retirement, Bush said, is that memories do not fail on certain topics.

“After 14 years no one forgets if you throw up on the Japanese premier,” he said.

However, he said, years of being badgered by the news media have left him with him a simple philosophy: “Now if I don’t like your questions, the heck with it, then I’m not going to answer them.”

Clinton played second banana after Bush’s round of jokes.

“You’ve just witnessed George Bush’s revenge for the 1992 campaign,” Clinton said of the year he defeated Bush for the presidency. “I’m condemned for the rest of my life to be his straight man.”

Bush can get away with some things more easily, said Clinton, whose presidency was marked by the Monica Lewinsky scandal, noting that if he were to repeat one off-color joke that Bush told, “the New York papers would kill me.”

What’s more, the 60-year-old Clinton told the crowd, Bush, at 82, is in better shape.

“Make no mistake about it,” said Clinton, who has undergone quadruple bypass surgery. “George Bush will speak at my funeral.”

As Brother Francoeur says: “The great thing about this stuff is that it drives the far left and right bonkers. They can’t understand why these two gentlemen don’t hate each other’s guts.”

The Basic Political Balance (Michael Barone, 11/12/06, US News)

A couple of numbers from the EMR exit poll. Party identification was 38 percent Democratic, 36 percent Republican. That’s only a point different from 2004′s 37 percent Democratic, 37 percent Republican. Republicans did worse because they had less support from independents this time.

On ideology, 36 percent identified themselves as conservatives and 21 percent as liberals. This is in line with the long historical trend. [...]

Fred Barnes in the Weekly Standard makes the case that immigration restriction wasn’t a plus issue for House Republicans. In Arizona, with the biggest illegal border crossing crisis in the nation, two loud advocates of immigration restriction and opponents of guest-worker and legalization provisions lost: incumbent J.D. Hayworth in the Scottsdale-Tempe Fifth District and open-seat primary winner Randy Graf in the Eighth, which includes the east side of Tucson and Cochise County, site of most of the illegal border crossings. In 2004, Graf won 43 percent in the primary against incumbent Jim Kolbe, who favored guest-worker and legalization provisions. With Kolbe retiring, Graf won the same 43 percent in the primary again, but that was enough to win a three-candidate race. I tend to agree with Barnes’s take. If an anti-immigration candidate can’t win in these two districts, where can he win? As I said on Fox News on election night: “Nativism and protectionism are political weapons that in a certain light look very strong, which seem to be gleaming swords that will slay all before them. But, again and again, they crack like glass in your hand.”

Proof comes from an exit poll: “Should most illegal immigrants working in the United States be (a) offered a chance to apply for legal status or (b) deported to the country they came from?” Legal status was favored by 57 percent, deportation by 38 percent. Those favoring legal status voted 61-37 percent Democratic; those favoring deportation voted 56-42 percent Republican. You might object to the wording of the question, but the results suggest to me that anything perceived as a harsh stance on immigration is not an electoral winner and that even those who agree with the harsh stance are not very likely to be propelled to vote Republican because of it. [...]

Almost all incumbent House Democrats voted against a free-trade measure as innocuous as the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Protectionism has become a partisan issue, with virtually all Democrats for and most Republicans against. So you can score a Democratic victory, like this year’s, as a victory for protectionism. It will certainly have consequences.

The election is reminiscent of the 1992 presidential, when the Right convinced itself not to vote for George H. W. Bush because he was insufficiently pure. Those same voters came crawling back though in ’94 after seeing what they’d wrought. Fortunately, this time they didn’t stick us with a president who got to reap a Peace Dividend for which his party bore no responsibility.

Will the pork stop here?: Reid pledges change, but he pushed funding that may benefit him. (Chuck Neubauer and Tom Hamburger, November 13, 2006, LA Times)

Incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid vows to make reform of congressional earmarks a priority of his tenure, arguing that members need to be more transparent when they load pet projects for their districts into federal spending bills.

But last year’s huge $286-billion federal transportation bill included a little-noticed slice of pork pushed by Reid that provided benefits not only for the casino town of Laughlin, Nev., but also, possibly, for the senator himself.

Reid called funding for construction of a bridge over the Colorado River, among other projects, “incredibly good news for Nevada” in a news release after passage of the 2005 transportation bill. He didn’t mention, though, that just across the river in Arizona, he owns 160 acres of land several miles from proposed bridge sites and that the bridge could add value to his real estate investment.

Reid denies any personal financial interest in his efforts to secure $18 million for a new span connecting Laughlin with Bullhead City, Ariz.

If Democrats had actually learned anything from 1994 it would be that corruption is just another name for perks.

Time in Senate May Be Irrelevant if Obama Runs:
Historically, Governors Have Fared Far Better In Presidential Campaigns (Charles Babington, 11/13/06, Washington Post)

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) might be well advised to stay in the Senate several more years before running for president, as many strategists have suggested. But there are at least 40 reasons to challenge that advice.

That is the number of senators who have tried, and failed, to reach the White House since Sen. John F. Kennedy (D-Mass.) accomplished the feat in 1960. Nearly all of them had more Senate experience than Obama, underscoring the light regard that American voters show for senatorial longevity and expertise in presidential elections.

If Obama’s aim is to become a more respected and knowledgeable senator — in the mold of, say, Robert J. Dole (18 years in the Senate before his 1996 presidential race), Henry “Scoop” Jackson (20 Senate years before his 1972 bid) or Richard G. Lugar (20 Senate years before his 1996 try) — it may be a laudable goal. But it’s a highly questionable presidential strategy.

“The Senate historically has not been a great place from which to run for president,” said former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who personally learned the lesson in 2004. “Senator Obama might feel he would be better off to run while he has not been tainted by an excessive period in the Senate.”

These two years are likely to deep six any chance he had of crafting national appeal.

Palestinians agree on unity premier (Associated Press, 11/13/06)

A senior Hamas official confirmed Monday that the militant Palestinian group and the Fatah faction have agreed on naming Mohammed Shabir to head the next Palestinian unity government.

Moussa Abu Marzouk, deputy to the Damascus-based Hamas political bureau leader Khaled Mashaal, told The Associated Press in the Syrian capital that the two major factions have agreed on the nomination of Mr. Shabir.

Mr. Shabir, 60, headed Gaza’s Islamic University until 2005. The U.S.-educated Mr. Shabir is considered to be close to Hamas but not an active supporter. [...]

Respected economist Salam Fayyad, meanwhile, is being considered for the post of finance minister, a job he held in the outgoing government. Fayyad was credited with fighting mismanagement and cronyism, and his return to the treasury would likely go far in lifting a crippling international aid boycott.

Hamas and Fatah hope that Mr. Shabir and Mr. Fayyad will be acceptable to the international community and help persuade the West to lift economic sanctions on the Hamas-led government.

The leading candidate for the third key post, foreign minister, is Ziad Abu Amr, an independent legislator with ties to both factions, officials close to the talks said. Mr. Abu Amr has mediated between Hamas and Fatah in the past. The post is currently being held by a Hamas hardliner, Mahmoud Zahar.