For reasons unknown, Crazy Jack pulled out of today’s debate in Rochester with Republican Jane Corwin and Democrat Kathy Hochul. The cameraman, a GOP volunteer, was trying to ask Davis why he canceled his debate appearance less than two weeks before the May 24 special election in New York’s 26th congressional district.
UPDATE: Moe Lane at Red State: “I believe that we have finally established, once and for all, that this guy is a Democrat.” (Hat-tip: The Right Scoop.)
Lots of new developments in New York’s 26th District special election campaign since I blogged about it yesterday. First, here’s a look at that new TV ad from American Crossroads:
They’re targeting Crazy Jack Davis, the fake “Tea Party” candidate who ran three times unsuccessfully as a Democrat in 2004, 2006, and 2008. Meanwhile, in a sign of surging interest in this key race — the special election is May 24 — the national GOP is getting more directly involved on behalf of Republican Jane Corwin:
The National Republican Congressional Committee hasn’t invested in the increasingly competitive race for a vacant western New York House seat – until now.
The House GOP campaign arm has activated its independent expenditure unit, authorizing it to begin spending funds in the race, according to an NRCC official.
Unlike the NRCC itself, the committee’s independent expenditure wing does not face contribution limits in the race and can spend freely on TV, radio ads, get-out-the-vote and other election efforts. . . .
The committee has funneled $40,000 in checks from House GOP lawmakers to her campaign, and has dispatched Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and NRCC Chairman Pete Sessions to hold in-district fundraisers for her.
The committee has also been holding nightly phone banks in support of Corwin, and is assisting her campaign with GOTV and communications efforts.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, for its part, has invested $250,000 in TV time in the race and has funneled around $100,000 to Hochul’s campaign.
Bellavia and many of his supporters felt betrayed by the GOP establishment’s choice of Corwin. This very much reminds me of the situation during the PA-12 special election a year ago, when the disgruntled Bill Russell refused to support the nominee Tim Burns.
The fortunate difference is that NY-26 is a natural Republican stronghold, whereas PA-12 was Democrat Jack Murtha’s personal fiefdom. So while Bellavia’s disaffection can hurt the GOP, it’s not nearly as disastrous as was Russell’s in the Democrat-leaning Pennsylvania district where the Republicans needed every possible break merely to be competitive. Meanwhile, there’s more big news in NY-26:
The Tea Party group FreedomWorks is mobilizing its grassroots network in New York’s 26th congressional district to “defend the Tea Party brand” against third party candidate Jack Davis, who the group is labeling “a fraud.”
FreedomWorks, led by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R), is the latest national group to get involved in the May 24 special election with polls showing a tight three way contest between Democrat Kathy Hochul, Republican Jane Corwin and Davis. . . . “We basically feel that we need to defend the Tea Party brand,” said Brendan Steinhauser, the group’s director of federal and state campaigns, who called Davis “a fraud.”
Steinhauser said the group will coordinate with local Tea Party leaders to organize door-to-door canvassing efforts and ask its members across the country to participate in phone banking efforts targeting Davis.
Less than two weeks until the election, and this one’s turning into a real donnybrook.
So why do we have a conservative PAC making Democrat-style class-warfare attacks on a third-party candidate? I guess the point is to confuse further the already-confused independent voters. Maybe American Crossroads has looked at the polling numbers and figured out something about the NY-26 electorate that isn’t apparent to an outside viewer.
If Republican Jane Corwin goes down in defeat in the May 24 special election in New York’s 26th congressional district, blame Republican Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) budget, Donald Trump said Wednesday.
Trump, speaking in the first-in-the-nation primary state of New Hampshire, blamed Ryan’s budget proposal — in particular, its controversial provision to reform Medicare — for dragging Corwin into a competitive race to replace resigned Rep. Chris Lee (R).
“A very popular Republican woman is running for the office. She was expected to win easily,” Trump said in the Granite State. “She’s having a hard time defending that whole situation with Medicare.”
“Too early, too soon. There was no reason for him to do it,” he later said.
Of all the numerous problems facing Jane Corwin in NY-26, I’d guess that this is very close to being a non-factor. That’s merely a guess, of course, since I’m not in the district and just began paying attention to the campaign yesterday. But for Trump to attempt to make this about something happening in D.C., rather than something happening in the 26th District, strikes me as implausible.
Small wonder, really, that the “Trump bubble” as a potential GOP 2012 presidential candidate was so short-lived.
You may remember in February when “fit fun classy guy” Rep. Chris Lee (R-Stupid) resigned from Congress after being caught trolling Craigslist for dates. That set up a special election to fill the seat, now scheduled for May 24 — two weeks from today.
Republican county chairs picked Assemblywoman Jane Corwin as their candidate, while Democrats picked an obscure county official, Kathy Hochul. This is a strong Republican district in western New York and Corwin, who also has the crucial endorsement of the state’s Conservative Party, should be running away with this.
Alas, there is the Crazy Jack Davis, a once-upon-a-time Republican who, in 2004, 2006 and 2008, ran for the NY-26 seat as a Democrat. Crazy Jack has now managed to get himself on the May 24 ballot as a “Tea Party” candidate. Of course, he’s not in any way representative of the Tea Party movement, and is supported by no Tea Party organizations, but nevertheless — funny how these coincidences happen — Davis has the “Tea Party” ballot line.
Crazy Jack Davis is a millionaire protectionist. As Sam Foster pointed out at Red State, “His signature issue, his raison d’etre has to do with our nation’s trade imbalance . . . He wants to cancel all free trade agreements in favor of something he calls ‘balanced trade.’ ” Which is utter nonsense, of course. (How is it that some people — Donald Trump is another — become millionaires without understanding basic economics?) “Balanced trade” is just a variation of economic nationalism which, in turn, is a straight road to the planned economy. But if you don’t yet understand why free trade is better policy than protectionism, there’s no point in my lecturing at this point: You’re on the wrong blog, pal.
Of far more immediate political relevance is the fact that a substantial number of NY-26 residents appear to be buying the Smoot-Hawley snake oil that Crazy Jack is selling. One recent poll showed Davis playing the “spoiler” role in the special election by pulling independent voters away from the conservative Republican, Jane Corwin. This has enabled the Democrat to eke out a lead:
They fancy themselves the vanguard of a revolution, when in fact they are typical self-absorbed, privileged children used to having their way — now — and uninhibited about complaining loudly when they don’t.
The question conservatives should be asking themselves is, “Why is a transparent fraud like Davis evidently hurting the GOP in this poll?” And the answer, I would suggest, is two-fold:
1. Republicans have done a piss-poor job of articulating the principles of a free-market economic policy, having become accustomed instead to winning elections waged over cultural issues or national-security policy.
2. The New York state GOP establishment, in particular, is inept and out-of-touch.
Talk to conservative grassroots Republicans in New York — and I talked to lots of them during the fabled NY-23 campaign of 2009 — and you will get an earful about the “Albany insiders” and their idiotic idea that the GOP can win elections as an unprincipled “me-too” party.
Despite the fact that 36% of New York residents are Catholic, and these Catholic voters represent the “swing” vote in every close election, state GOP leaders have a profound horror of pro-lifers and other social conservatives. This was why they thought pro-abortion Dede Scozzafava was a good candidate for NY-23 and why, in last year’s mid-term election, a pro-life candidate like Ann Marie Buerkle in NY-25 got very little support from the party establishment.
Of course, fixing the Republican Party in the two weeks between now and May 24 is not an option. The question is how to beat Hochul by rallying support for Corwin and discrediting Crazy Jack. Looking on the upside, the polls probably overstate Crazy Jack’s support. A lot of people who tell pollsters they’ll vote for a novelty candidate won’t actually show up to vote on Election Day. But New York Tea Party activists (some of whom were disgruntled by the GOP’s choice of Corwin) need to get the message out that Crazy Jack is the wrong choice for NY-26.
NY-26 is a winnable district, and a GOP defeat would be interpreted by the media (however falsely) as a repudiation of the conservative agenda. Let’s win this one!
A win by the Democrat in this Republican district — even if created by a phony Tea Party candidate siphoning off votes from the Republican– will be spun as a major victory for Obama. You will hear nothing but how it signals Obama’s turnaround, how it reflects Obama’s new found popularity after the bin Laden kill, and how it signals unhappiness with Republicans.
Officials in the Obama administration “go to great lengths to avoid disclosing their meetings with lobbyists,” a Republican congressman said Tuesday, as he opened a House subcommittee hearing to investigate whether the White House is keeping its promises of “transparency.”
“The American people were promised a new era of openness and accountability and they haven’t gotten it,” said Rep. Cliff Stearns, chairman of the oversight and investigations subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
“We’ve seen a lack of transparency in the Administration’s response to FOIA requests; their secrecy about the work done by key czars, such as the Climate Change Czar and the Health Reform Czar; and, more recently, they’ve tried to require selective disclosure of the political contributions of government contractors, but not unions,” Stearns said. “And our own investigation into the secret health care negotiations has been delayed by the Administration for more than a year.”
Stearns cited a recent report by the Center for Public Integrity which found that logs of White House visitors released by the administration “routinely omit or cloud key details about the identity of visitors, who they met with, the nature of the visit, and even includes the names of people who never showed up. These are critical gaps that raise doubts about their historical accuracy and utility in helping the public understand White House operations from social events to meetings on key policy debates.”
As Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner noted, “White House staff have purposely and repeatedly circumvented … visitor logs by meeting with lobbyists at Caribou Coffee and other locations outside of the White House.”
Thanks to Moe Lane for pointing this out. In the immediate aftermath of the mid-term GOP tsunami, Democrats were boasting about how many of the Republican freshmen they were targeting for 2012. In the past few months, however, these boasts have been significantly downsized. Jim Geraghty at National Review reprints this e-mail from the National Republican Congressional Committee:
IN NOVEMBER 2010, THE DCCC SAID IT WAS TARGETING 61 DISTRICTS CARRIED BY OBAMA: “The DCCC has identified 61 seats currently held by Republicans in districts that Barack Obama won in 2008. ‘Republicans won a lot of seats they have no business winning,’ said a top Democratic strategist. ‘It’s going to be a full-on recruitment cycle [and] Israel is the perfect person for that.’” (Brian Beutler, “Blue Dogged: Meet Steve Israel, The Incoming Chair Of The DCCC,” Talking Points Memo, 11/23/10) EARLIER THIS MONTH, THEY SCALED THAT BACK TO 37 SUBURBAN DISTRICTS: “Representative Nancy Pelosi’s selection of Mr. Israel to lead the Congressional campaign had much to do with his district, a swath of Nassau and Suffolk Counties where Democrats hold a modest registration edge but independents decide elections. The path to retaking the House, both say, leads through 37 similar suburban districts, home to nine million independents who voted for President Obama in 2008 but deserted the party in the 2010 elections.” (David M. Halbfinger, “L.I. Congressman Leads Uphill Charge Toward a Democratic House,” New York Times, 03/19/11) NOW, THE DCCC HAS BEEN FORCED TO FOCUS ON ONLY 14 DISTRICTS: “The Democratic Party is taking aim at 14 freshmen Republicans in the House, of 87 elected, whom it deems the most vulnerable…the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is focusing on districts where Mr. Obama and Senator John Kerry both won as presidential nominees and where Democrats have a registration advantage.” (Jennifer Steinhauer, “Hardly Settled in House, but Already in Hot Seat,” New York Times, 03/27/11) ACTUALLY, THEY EVEN GOT THAT NUMBER WRONG. IT’S 13 DISTRICTS WON BY KERRY, NOT 14: “All told, 63 Republicans in the 112th Congress will hold seats that President Obama carried in 2008 and, of that group, 13 will hold seats that Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) also won in the 2004 presidential race.” (Chris Cillizza, “The Obama Republicans,” The Washington Post’s “The Fix” blog, 11/11/10)
Which is not to say that Republicans can shift into neutral and expect to coast to re-election, of course. We’re way too early in the cycle to start trying to predict what the results will be on Nov. 6, 2012. “But it’s pretty remarkable that we’re not hearing much talk about Democrats retaking the House in 2012,” Geraghty says.
And I would add that, if we take this as evidence of demoralization and disarray in Democrat ranks — combining it with Obama’s sagging poll numbers — this provides a strong argument against GOP leaders rolling over easy on the budget showdown.
That would be former Democratic congressman Dan Maffei, who ended up losing by 567 votes to Republican Ann Marie Buerkle, and who the Politico reports is still trying to figure out how he lost:
As victims of the House Democratic election massacre speak out about what caused their ouster last November, they are pointing their fingers squarely at a Washington duo: Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama.
Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) moved their party’s agenda too far left during the past Congress. And then they failed to help rescue the party’s mostly supportive lawmakers, two defeated first-termers who have joined Washington-based think tanks said Tuesday.
“Moderates and independents who leaned toward Obama didn’t come out because they saw a continuing polarization. Health reform was only supported by Democrats. So, the message from Washington was that Obama was getting his way,” said former Rep. Dan Maffei (D-N.Y.), who has become a senior fellow with Third Way, the centrist Democratic group.
Party leaders and liberal allies told him that he was too pessimistic last fall when he warned them that he was in danger of losing. Obama and Pelosi “couldn’t bring themselves to believe that it would be this bad,” said Maffei, who unsuccessfully sought a late campaign stop by Obama. “Low turnout was why I lost. My opponent [Republican Ann Marie Buerkle] was seen as fringe and voters didn’t think she could win.”
Look, if Dan Maffei wants to make excuses and scapegoat other people for his own failures, I suppose I ought to just laugh and move on. However, Maffei is actually kind of close to being right about what Obama and Pelosi did wrong. And the weird thing is, Democrats had plenty of warning . . . from me. Continue reading NY-25 Flashback: Dan Maffei Still Trying to Comprehend His Own Defeat →
Everybody on Capitol Hill has stories to tell about members of Congress who are screaming tyrants toward their staff. John McCain is notorious in that regard. But by far the worst bosses on Capitol Hill are women members, and one might narrow down that list by saying “liberal Democratic congresswomen,” among whom a particuilarly vile specimen is Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Hell):
The Houston Democrat addressed one of her employees as “you stupid motherf****r.” And not just once, but “constantly,” recalls the staffer, “like, all the time.”
Another Jackson Lee aide recounts the time her parents came to Washington to visit: “They were really excited to come to the congressional office. They’re small town people, so for them it was a huge deal. They were actually sitting in the main lobby waiting area….[Jackson Lee] came out screaming at me over a scheduling change. Called me a ’stupid idiot. Don’t be a moron, you foolish girl’ and actually did this in front of my parents, of all things.” . . .
Capitol Hill is famous for its demanding, insensitive bosses. Yet even by the harsh standards of Congress, Sheila Jackson Lee stands out. She may be the worst boss in Washington. “It’s like being an Iraq War veteran,” says someone who worked for her. Strangers may say, “‘oh I know what you’ve been through.’ No, you really don’t. Because until you’ve experienced it. . . . People don’t tell the worst of the stories, because they’re really unbelievable.”
House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) fired Kurt Bardella, one of Capitol Hill’s top press secretaries, after he provided e-mailed correspondence with other journalists to New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich.
Issa, in a statement Tuesday afternoon, said that the “information shared with Mark Leibovich appears to have been limited to Kurt’s own correspondence with reporters,” claiming that the internal workings of the committee — which include sensitive documents — had not been jeopardized.
“Though limited, these actions were highly inappropriate, a basic breach of trust with the reporters it was his job to assist, and inconsistent with established communications office policies,” Issa said in the statement released Tuesday afternoon. “As a consequence, his employment has been terminated.”
(Via Memeorandum.) One of the things that congressional staffers must always keep in mind is that they collect their salaries from the taxpayers, and that they cannot use their positions for personal or purely partisan purposes. If you want to go be a political operative, or if you want to hustle up a freelance income, no problem — but first, quit your job, because you can’t do that other stuff while you’re on the congressional payroll.
In Bardella’s case, it doesn’t appear that he was engaged in anything that compromised his boss, nor do we have any reason to believe that Bardella was hustling a buck or pushing a political agenda. However, any e-mails Bardella received as a result of his position on the congressional staff were official communications — the property of the congressman’s office, and therefore not Bardella’s to do with as he pleased.
By sharing those e-mails with Leibovich, Bardella was violating his official responsibilities. From a more pragmatic perspective, once it became known that Bardella and Leibovich were engaged in a project that excluded other journalists — and, indeed, a project that subjected those journalists’ e-mails to Leibovich’s scrutiny — it compromised Bardella’s standing as an honest broker of information.
Note to my congressional sources: You need never fear exposure for your secret leaks to me. I’m not sure how Politico got wind of Leibovich’s dealings with Bardella, but I’ll carry your secrets to my grave.
