Month: February 2010

Politico Names an NRCC Dud; UPDATE: Roby Says FEC Numbers Show Otherwise; Time for Some Shoe Leather Reporting?

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This one’s going to leave a mark:

“Montgomery city councilwoman Martha Roby, the leading Republican to face Rep. Bobby Bright (D-Ala.), only brought in $76,000, and spent more than she raised.”

One of the reason’s for Roby’s lackluster performance is the entry of Tea Party-backed Republican candidate Rick Barber into the AL-2 primary, which I mentioned here Saturday.

GOP insiders no longer have the ability to hand-pick establishment candidates and shove them down the throats of Republican voters.  And guess who Rush Limbaugh just endorsed?

Adam Andrzejewski. I believe the word is “Heh.”

UPDATE: Andrzejewski on the Limbaugh endorsement: “Holy mackerel!”

UPDATE II: A source tells me that Politico‘s numbers for Roby are more than $100,000 short of her actual FEC numbers. Will have more news, as more becomes available.

UPDATE III: A source with Roby’s campaign says the FEC report for Dec. 31 shows they’ve raised $293,277, spent $118,981 and have $174,294 cash on hand, contrary to the Politico story.

One of the commenters mentioned Les Phillip’s Tea Party-backed challenge to Parker Griffith in AL-5, and somebody just e-mailed me a press release from the Phillip campaign about President Obama’s proposal to eliminate the manned space flight program:

There are over 7,000 jobs at stake at the Marshall Space Flight Center [in Huntsville, Ala.] . . .
At a time when Washington is focused on job creation it is unfathomable to me to cut thousands of jobs in Alabama, Florida, Texas and other parts of the country. This decision would leave all of the vital research being done on the International Space Station to be supported by Russian launches. Not only is that un-American. It is unacceptable.

So that’s two contested GOP congressional primaries down in Alabama, on top of the battle in the primary for governor and, as I told the commenter, I’m thinking I need to get down home to do some shoe-leather work. Y’all hit the tip jar.

UPDATE IV: Alabama GOP gubernatorial candidate Tim James reports raising $4 million. I’ll remember this the next time my Alabama Republican friends start poor-mouthin’ like they can’t afford to hit the tip jar.

You Betcha: Palin Endorses Rand Paul in Bitter Kentucky GOP Senate Primary

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Maybe she did this just to make Allahpundit’s head explode:

National political icon and conservative leader Sarah Palin has endorsed Dr. Rand Paul in his bid for United States Senate from Kentucky.  The Paul campaign has received a generous donation from Governor Palin’s PAC.

Palinistas + Paulistas = Wow. The Kentucky primary is extremely bitter (53 comments on that thread) and the last thing I expected was for Palin to get herself involved in that feud.

UPDATE: Scott Brady at Conservatives for Palin says, “Rand Paul has solid conservative positions on the major issues,” and quotes more from the Paul campaign’s press release:

Dr. Paul was recently identified as one of the five most important candidates to support by Dick Armey, Freedom Works and the National Tea Party Movement. Dr. Paul has also received endorsements from Concerned Women for America, Gun Owners of America, Steve Forbes and RedState.com.
Recent independent polls show Rand holding a double digit lead in the Republican primary and large leads over either Democratic opponent. Rand Paul has raised over $1.8 million dollars, including over $650,000 in the fourth quarter of 2009.

These are bandwagon arguments and I don’t suspect they will placate Kentucky conservative Lisa Graas and other such supporters of Bill Johnson, to say nothing of Trey Grayson’s supporters. Meanwhile, it seems Allahpundit has been stunned into silence.

Katie O’Malley: Can the Scott Brown Factor Elect Adam Andrzejewski?

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A very insightful column at Human Events:

After Scott Brown’s upset senate victory in Massachusetts, everyone — left and right — is left wondering how big an omen it is for November. In the Tuesday Republican primary for the Illinois governor’s race, Adam Andrzejewski may provide the answer. . . .
He is backed by Tea Party activists statewide and has never held elective office, an asset for many people in this political environment. There may be some who believe that the political machine is simply too powerful for a political outsider to break. But in this new landscape, the machine’s limitations and deep fractures have never been more apparent. . . .

Read the whole thing.

The Right Hand Doesn’t Know . . .

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. . . what the far-right hand is doing:

In November, the morning after Election Day, a conservative blogger in Georgia blasted an e-mail to 65,000 people.
Erick Erickson’s 5 a.m. “Morning Briefing” seemed counterintuitive — the election of a Democrat to a U.S. House seat in Upstate New York held by Republicans for more than a century, he wrote, was “a huge win for conservatives.”
Yet the missive immediately was posted online by the conservative publication Human Events, a corporate sibling of Erickson’s blog, RedState. It next reached the Web site of the American Spectator magazine, whose publisher, Alfred S. Regnery, sits on the board of the conservative publishing house that owns RedState and Human Events.
Ricocheting inside the Beltway, Erickson’s analysis fueled discussion later that morning at two influential weekly meetings of D.C. conservatives. Next, it was endorsed by radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, considered by many conservatives the ultimate authority. “We kept a horrible Republican from possibly winning,” Limbaugh said. . . .
With the Democratic defeat in the recent special senatorial election in Massachusetts, engineered in part by tea-party activists working with several Beltway-based groups, the conservative movement is more energized than it has been in years. . . .
Such coordination is increasing. Inside the Beltway, much of it is fueled by the Conservative Action Project (CAP), a new group of conservative leaders chaired by Reagan-era attorney general Edwin Meese III. CAP, whose influential memos “for the movement” circulate on Capitol Hill, is an offshoot of the Council for National Policy, a highly secretive organization of conservative leaders and donors.
“There is a definite sense that the various parts of the conservative movement are coming together,” said Regnery, a leading CAP member.

I’ve sent a memo to Al Regnery about this article. How are loyal minions like myself and Tim Graham supposed to march in lockstep, if we don’t even get our marching orders before this stuff shows up in the Washington Post and on Memeorandum?

(Cross-posted at Right Wing News.)

Andrzejewski’s Army

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My latest column at The American Spectator:

Adam Andrzejewski refers to his opponents in the Illinois Republican primary as “the Redcoats,” while calling his own grassroots campaign for governor “the ragtag army.”
Revolutionary War metaphors come easily for Andrzejewski, whose showing Tuesday in Illinois will provide an early test of the ability of Tea Party activists to deliver votes in Republican primaries during this year’s mid-term campaign. . . .
Like George Washington’s ill-equipped colonial soldiers outnumbered by the professional troops of the British Empire, Andrzejewski finds himself up against more experienced foes in the gubernatorial race. His opponents in the seven-candidate primary include veteran state Sen. Kirk Dillard and former state GOP chairman Andy McKenna. Yet their experience may actually prove a liability in Illinois, a state plagued by corruption scandals, including the one that led to last year’s impeachment of former Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
“My opponents have 100 years of combined Illinois political experience,” Andrzejewski said in a telephone interview Sunday. “I ask one question on the trail: Do you feel Illinois is running well? Nobody in 11 months has raised their hand.” . . .

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: While I was on the phone with Andrzejewski yesterday, he told me he was late for another interview — with Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit. I told Andrzejewski, “Tell Jim I said to say hello to Charles Johnson. He’ll understand.” Inside-blogging jokes aside, here’s a video clip from Jim’s exclusive interview with Andrzejewski:

Both Jim at Gateway Pundit and Adam Brickley at Race 4 2012 report that Andrzejewski’s internal poll shows him surging — which I don’t doubt, but I didn’t include that in the Spectator story, for several reasons.

First, there’s no way to verify the numbers in a campaign’s internal polls. These are tools the campaign uses for its own purposes, and not intended for public consumption. Obviously, after last week’s PPP survey showed Andrzejewski 8 points behind Kirk Dillard, the Andrzejewski campaign wants to counter the perception that their candidate is trailing. And there are certainly reasons to believe the race has tightened, as I reported:

Since [the PPP poll was released], Dillard has come under heavy criticism for appearing in a 2008 campaign commercial for Obama, and Andrzejewski says his own campaign has gained ground.
“We feel we’re either within the margin of error or leading the race right now,” said the Tea Party candidate, adding that he senses “panic” among his rivals in the crowded primary field. “We think 22 percent wins the race. Anywhere from 150,000 to 200,000 votes — in a state of 13 million — will win the nomination. The bar is that low.”

Which brings us to the second reason I didn’t include the internal poll: In this kind of situation– seven candidates in a tight race, on the eve of a February primary — polls don’t really mean much. It’s about turnout at this point, and the difference between victory and defeat may come down to a few hundred votes. That’s why the Andrzejewski mailer featuring Lech Walesa’s endorsement is so important.

If they’ve actually targeted that to more than 200,000 Polish-American households in Illinois, as a campaign source told me last week, that could prove decisive. Memories of Poland’s Cold War struggle against Soviet domination are strongest with older voters and, as my brother once remarked to me, “Old people vote.”

Everybody talks about getting out the “youth vote,” but senior citizens are always more likely to turn out in primary. And the appeal of a clean-cut young Polish-American success story endorsed by Lech Walesa . . . Well, that’s got to be worth a few thousand votes, right?