Keeping It To 8 Losses Would Be Nice

Fresh off of failing to recruit anyone decent to run as a Republican for the US Senate and seeing:

• loony Steve Pearce use Club for Growth money to beat the more moderate Heather Wilson in New Mexico's primary, putting that Senate seat against Ton Udall out of reach

• an 85 year-old former Green Party candidate win the Republican primary in Montana

• the golden boy candidate Jim Ogonowski fail to get on the ballot in Massachusetts

...NRSC Chair Jon Ensign (won't be NRSC Chair for long-NV) has settled on a at least we're not going to lose the right to filibuster strategy to fire up his base:

NRSC chair John Ensign has moved the goal posts, according to the Savannah Morning News, saying that the GOP will have succeeded if they don't lose more than eight seats.

Ensign pointed out that if the Dems win nine seats they'll get to the filibuster-proof magic number of 60 -- at which point, Ensign warned, "they will be able to do pretty much whatever they want."

So if the Dems can't get to a 60-seat super-majority, the GOP will have won. Talk about lowering the bar.

That's not lowering the bar, that's throwing the bar on the ground and stepping on any ants that try to get near it.

Meanwhile, Democrats have great recruits almost everywhere, including Al Franken, who won the endorsement of the DFL Caucus in Minnesota this weekend.

It's a good time to be the Senate Guru.

Wave Election

Democracy Corps released their latest poll, and the news is very good for Democrats:

Analysis: Democrats Improve Advantage in 45 Republican-Held Districts

Even as we modified our sample design to include more hard-to-reach Republican-held districts, Democrats have significantly expanded their lead in this totally Republican battleground that Bush won by 12 points in 2004 and Republican members won by the same margin in 2006. You have to remind yourself that this is not a national poll but a poll in Republican-held seats where Democrats have moved to a 7-point lead (50 to 43 percent). Further, Republican incumbents have a very weak standing to be reelected while Democratic challengers enjoy a larger pool of winnable voters to approach in this election, win the issue debates and prove to be resilient to the most vicious Republican attacks. The underlying dynamics of the race show that the battleground could expand even further into Republican territory as more voters are open to vote Democratic in November.

Inside the numbers, we see that the strength for Democrats is in suburban and exurban districts, which is a real change from 2004, when George Bush took almost all of the fastest-growing districts in the country. The incumbent job approval in these 45 districts is down to 38%, which is significant because usually the situation is that people hate Congress but like their own representative. The analysis is pretty amazing.

The general election is going to be a mish-mash of identity politics and dishonest smears and 527 ads and the time-honored questioning of patriotism. At the district level, it's more typically a battle of party identification. And nobody wants anything to do with Republicans anymore.

That guy Jim Ogonowski who was the Republicans' prime Senate recruit, to take on John Kerry? He really didn't qualify for the ballot.

In a major embarrassment to Republican leaders in Massachusetts and in the U.S. Senate, Jim Ogonowski, the party's anointed candidate to challenge Democratic Senator John F. Kerry, failed by a razor-thin margin today to qualify for the GOP primary ballot.

With Ogonowski's stunning blunder, the only GOP name on the primary ballot will be Jeff Beatty, a little-known security expert from Harwich.

It's hard not to feel a bit of schadenfreude over this.

What A Poor Excuse For A Political Party

Conservatism isn't going anywhere, and I assume the Republican Party will one day get their sea legs again. But the incompetence and mismanagement that has contributed to the country turning violently against the Bush Administration has infected their campaign operations, too. Two stories highlight this.

The GOP has been boasting for months about their dark horse candidate taking on John Kerry in Massachusetts. That they're targeting the John Kerry seat in one of the nation's bluest states instead of finding half-decent candidates to run in friendlier states like West Virginia, South Dakota or Iowa is problem number one. Problem number two is that Jim Ogonowski, their white knight, savior of the party, young gun with the stuff to slay the dragon, couldn't get enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.

When the deadline for certification passed yesterday, Jim Ogonowski, the Republican leadership's choice to challenge US Senator John F. Kerry, was 82 signatures short of qualifying for the GOP primary ballot, according to the state's central voter registry.

But Ogonowski's campaign aides contend there are enough certified signatures at various town offices around the state not filed yet on the computerized registry to put him across the 10,000 threshold [...]

Even if Ogonowski does get the 82 signatures he needs, his fight probably is not over.

Election specialists say he will not have the needed cushion of extra signatures to insulate himself from legal challenges.

Ogonowski's only primary opponent, Jeff Beatty, is expected to challenge the validity of his signatures before the ballot law commission.

How weak is that? This is literally one of the only Senate challengers that the national GOP is talking up and he can't find enough signatures? George Bush got over a million votes in Massachusetts in 2004. You can't find 10,000 of them?

The next bit is from a McCain campaign email sent today:



For a donation, you can get a personalized McCain banner for yourself. And the person they use as the example to highlight it is Frank Donatelli. Who's a big-time corporate lobbyist.

McCain Tapped Lobbyist Frank Donatelli To Run His Efforts At RNC. McCain tapped lobbyist Frank Donatelli to become deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee. The New York Times reported Donatelli will “act as the main liaison between the committee and the McCain campaign.” Donatelli is a lobbyist at McGuire Woods and previously served as a lobbyist at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. His clients have included AT&T, Exxon Mobil, PhRMA, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Verizon. [New York Times, 3/7/08; McGuire Woods, accessed 5/12/08; Senate Lobbying Disclosure Records, accessed 5/12/08]

Donatelli Enlisted to Improve Ethiopia’s Relationship with U.S. In a September 2005 letter sent to Ambassador Kassahun Ayele of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, Donatelli set forth his obligations under their contract, namely to provide “government relations and related public communications services to assist and work with Ethiopia in Washington, D.C., in promoting and strengthening Ethiopia’s relations with the United States and, in general, providing such other appropriate advice and assistance as will serve to achieve these purposes.” [FARA Database, accessed 3/18/08, Letter signed by Frank Donatelli on 9/6/05]

• Human Rights Watch: “The Ethiopian Government’s Human Rights Record Remains Poor.” According to Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2008, “The Ethiopian government’s human rights record remains poor, both within the country and in neighboring Somalia, where since early 2007 thousands of Ethiopian troops have been fighting an insurgency alongside the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia. Government forces committed serious human rights violations, including rape, torture, and village burnings, during a campaign against Ethiopian rebels in eastern Somalia Region (Region 5). Abuses took place in other parts of the country, notably in Oromia State where local officials carried out mass arrests, extra-judicial killings and economic sanctions.” [Human Rights Watch, accessed 5/12/08, emphasis added]

Really, it's like the entire campaign arm of the party all withered up and died. They couldn't find any random person to pose for a picture except a lobbyist?

The old adage used to be that Republicans didn't know how to govern, but they knew how to win elections. Maybe that's still true, but the stories here, repeated seemingly dozens of times ALREADY in this cycle, and more in 2006, aren't promising. There's a reason Republican incumbents are already running ads, leaving the Congress in droves, and generally frightened out of their minds about their prospects this fall. It's the fundamentals, but it's also the campaign operations. They can't qualify candidates for the ballot, they can't help but step around in scandal, their accountants are literally stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from campaign accounts, and they generally can't manage their way out of a paper bag. Democrats have closed the gap on the traditional operations where they were always behind - microtargeting, low-dollar fundraising, etc. But on the level of simple management, it's like there's some kind of Bush disease and all the operatives have caught it. I guess when your governing philosophy demands no oversight and lax regulation, it's no wonder that the same principle applies in these campaigns. The inmates are truly running the asylum.