By Jeff Smith, on Tue Aug 27, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET  Q: What should you do if you work for a candidate or elected official who doesn’t turn out to be quite who you thought they’d be? I’m not talking about any kind of scandalous behavior but about pols who wind up not being as dedicated to the policies they preach, or candidates who try to present a reformer image but are in fact willing to take money from the “wrong” sorts of people. Should you stay to build up your résumé— and your connections? Or should you try to be true to what you really believe? —D.N., New York City
Great question. The answer depends on why you decided to work for the politican in the first place. If you are an idealist who was inspired by the candidate when you first met him/her and thus decided to apply for a job, then I think you should probably leave, since the work appears to be a disheartening, compromising experience. If, on the other hand, you took the job because you saw it as a good way to get where you want to be, then you should probably stay, so long as the job continues to serve that purpose.
No candidate is as wonderful as his staunchest supporters imagine or as awful as his fiercest opponents allege. Paul Wellstone, the first politician I ever “fell for,” voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 as he faced a tough re-election battle. While I understood the political context, his vote disappointed me. (He later apologized and said he regretted the vote.) Conversely, John Ashcroft, whom I reviled as a U.S. senator and attorney general, ultimately made a very courageous decision, standing up to White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card regarding a domestic surveillance decision as he lay on what he thought was his deathbed. I try to keep these examples in mind before falling too hard for—or harshly condemning—any politician.
Q: So, dude, I’m a former high school teacher and I keep getting Facebook friended by girls I taught who have become WAY hot. So here’s the thing: I’m hoping to run for office next year and my question is, is it okay for me to message them to ask for help with my campaign, or will it totally creep them out? —Hot for Student, Somewhere in the Midwest
So, dude, maybe you haven’t been keeping up with the news, but have you heard of this guy named Anthony Weiner? Yeah, because you make him sound classy.
Regarding messaging them: As your FB friends, they will be able to see all of your updates once you announce your campaign, and will be able to decide on their own if they would like to volunteer. But if you’d like to reach out to them to make an individual ask—which is always more effective than a mass update—I’d suggest you do so via a campaign manager or volunteer coordinator. I actually didn’t follow the advice I’m giving—I reached out to many former students personally for campaign help—but I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say I wasn’t as creepy as you.
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Jeff Smith: Do As I Say – A Political Advice Column
By Michael Steele, on Mon Aug 26, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET From 92 Y at the Jefferson:
 Former Chairman of the Republican National Committee Michael Steele recently sat down with 92Y Producer Jordan Chariton at The Jefferson Hotel in Washington, D.C. to discuss how to revive the Republican Party.
In part one of our extended interview, Steele urged his party to become the party of civil rights, a party that welcomes the immigrant instead of “repelling” the immigrant, and to realize “the old way of doing politics is not what America’s interested in anymore.”
Steele noted that when the GOP was successful in recent years, the message “wasn’t about treating women as property or looking at them as if they had no say in how to control their lives.”
Steele also reflected on the GOP’s 2012 election defeat, saying that election was over by July or August, even before the infamous 47% tapes came out. Steele says most voters had made up their mind against the GOP and Mitt Romney long before the derogatory tape came out.
Steele also strongly denounced the label attributed to the Republican Party as the “party for the rich.”
“I’ve always been amused at the argument that somehow we have cornered the market on rich. Most of the CEOS of the biggest companies…are Democrats, and they supported Obama, and yet the narrative is they’re in our pocket. I’m like ‘dude, that’s not the reality, they’re not writing checks to the GOP.’”
Do you agree with Steele’s recommendations for the GOP? Comment below!
By Michael Steele, on Fri Aug 23, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET Last summer when the Supreme Court delivered its surprising affirmation of the Patient Protection and Affordable CareAct (a.k.a “Obamacare”), liberals rejoiced and sang the praises of the very court they had, up until then, vilified; and conservatives scratched their heads at the perceived betrayal by Chief Justice John Roberts and renewed their call to “repeal and replace” the law after the November elections.
But Obama won, Democrats picked up two seats in the Senate and Republicans lost 8 seats in the House.
We’ve come a long way since those heady days. And still, the news on Obamacare has not been all that great.
Recently, one of the architects of the legislation, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), actually admitted that the Affordable Care Act “is beyond comprehension”; while another, Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) called it a “train wreck.” But it was Henry Chao, Obama’s chief technical officer in charge of putting in place the insurance exchanges mandated by the law, who caused heads to turn when he said “I’m pretty nervous . . . Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience.” With supporters like that…
Certainly, actions taken by the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) leading up to implementing the convoluted law have not helped assuage the perceptions of members of Congress, let alone the American people. Forced to suspend the employer mandate to offer insurance to employees, the Administration finds itself in a mad scramble to play down the administrative SNAFU by playing up lower premiums for all while blaming those pesky Republicans for putting the administration in this situation in the first place.
But House Republicans (like Senate Democrats) only get to vote up or down on legislation. It is the agencies and departments of government (run and managed by the administration) that must implement the law. And for this administration, the hit parade of problems continue to mount. For example, while most Americans were enjoying their 4th of July holiday and not paying attention, HHS sheepishly announced, in a “final ruling” it will not attempt to verify individual eligibility for insurance subsidies. Instead it will rely on individuals “self-reported eligibility”. So I get to tell HHS I’m eligible and they write a check subsidizing my insurance? I can’t think of a more sublime invitation to massive fraud.
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Michael Steele: How Republicans should fix Obamacare
By Artur Davis, on Thu Aug 22, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET To the extent there is a species of Republican the very left leaning blogosphere approves of, it usually sounds something like this: pro immigration reform and eager to take to task the xenophobic strands of the anti immigration argument; libertarian on gay marriage; skeptical of the Tea Party influence on the modern right; dismissive of government shutdown threats; and independent enough to call out a conservative favorite like Rand Paul when he puts a secessionist sympathizer on the federal payroll.
That happens to also be a point by point account of the opinions of the Washington Post’s Republican blogger Jennifer Rubin, and it explains why she has taken her share of shots from the right (Erick Erickson has famously said that she has “nothing in common with conservatives other than hating terrorists”). But the fact that she is something of a punching bag within the left’s online community is a mystery to me and I suspect a lot of others who actually read her work. And the broadside she just absorbed from the Post’s former ombudsman is even more bizarre, when its principal claim is that she is a serial recycler of “every silly right wing theory to come down the pike.”
An odd charge, given her relatively centrist views, and the frequency with which she expresses them: albeit a common one based on any random perusal of the comments on her blog. Putting the ex ombudsman aside (there is no politics like intra office politics) the “Rubin is far right” charge seems to typify one of two scenarios: either a classic case of the messenger overwhelming the message or, alternatively, a pretty fair reading of the abuse any card carrying conservative faces in the volleying that passes for ideological debate circa the Obama era.
Given that most of Rubin’s online critics probably could not pick her out of a lineup (her only steady television presence is the lightly watched MSNBC roundtable Chuck Todd hosts) and allowing that the author of a three year old column is hardly a long-running bête noire of the left, I’ll opt for theory 2: whatever the precise shade of her ideology, Rubin still wears the c-label as opposed to branding herself a moderate, occupies the most prominent online conservative niche in a liberal leaning paper, and those red flags alone have made her a target. So much so that no matter how many times she deviates from right wing orthodoxy, the credit has been sparse from people who make a habit of dismissing that orthodoxy and claim to value “adults” who break ranks with it.
And that’s the most salient aspect of why a blog dustup over a nationally unknown pundit is worthy of examination: it’s a smallish but telling piece of evidence of how liberalism circa 2013 practices its own form of insularity and narrowness, and how the left exists within the same kind of ideological bubble the right is alleged to live inside. The result is a sense of mission about liberal causes that makes it hard to see conservatism in any form as a serious intellectual rival or a sensibility worth understanding. How can it be, when the left assumes that to be a conservative is to be a one percent coddling, gay hating, war on women waging, vote suppressing, science denying kind of clown.
Never mind that the supposedly monolithic right is almost Baptist like in its proliferation of rival doctrinal camps. Never mind that George W. Bush tightened more financial regulations than Bill Clinton; that even an eloquent gay advocate like Frank Bruni initially questioned the wisdom of a federal judicial overturn of traditional marriage laws; that the GOP social issue de jour, banning of abortions after 20 weeks, is the position a growing plurality of Americans hold. Never mind that a liberal icon named John Paul Stevens blessed voter ID laws during his Supreme Court tenure, or that the fact of human influenced climate change can be accepted without co-signing the Obama Administration’s aggressiveness on regulating carbon emissions.
Notwithstanding any of those stubborn facts, the left’s vision of right and wrong (and smart and dumb) thoroughly monopolizes the mainstream press, and the lion’s share of social media. Its dominance, of course, has generated a parallel universe on the Fox News Channel, with its own convictions and suspicions about the other side. But the presence of a Fox does not change the reality that in the most credentialed and prestigious media circles, denigrating conservatism is the last socially acceptable prejudice; and the rightwing counter to that contempt is still confined to one TV channel and a shrinking pool of radio stations.
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Artur Davis: What the Mini War on Jennifer Rubin Reveals
By Artur Davis, on Thu Aug 8, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET Nate Cohn’s piece in the New Republic, which relies on results from a Pew survey out this week, offers some blunt conclusions on the challenges of Republican rebranding: relatively few rank and file Republicans actually want the party to shift toward more moderate ideological positions, and those who do are generally matched by GOP voters who would just as soon shift to the right, and substantially outpaced by the numbers who prefer the status quo.
To be sure, there are methodological challenges that Cohn acknowledges but deserve more analysis: for example, a survey that assumes that voters are correctly identifying, or that they even mean the same thing, when they describe their party’s “current position”, is begging for a set of false positives. But anyone who spends time at Republican activist events can attest that the gist of the data feels about right. To the extent there is enthusiasm for redefining the party, it is more oriented around hopes for “better messaging” or a “more positive way of framing our arguments” than a wholesale desire to revisit actual substantive policies.
That’s a challenge, for a variety of reasons that I will keep addressing in these pages, but I’ll pull out one aspect of it for an extra word of elaboration: the goal of broadening the party without changing it very much explains a lot about one particular African American outreach effort that is becoming faddish on the right: capitalizing on prospective tensions inside the Democratic base between blacks v. Latinos by emphasizing the potential costs that legalizing undocumented immigrants might have on black low wage workers.
I happen to be a skeptic of the Senate immigration legislation, who would prefer Republicans counter it with an amalgamation of approaches that cross conventional lines: support of something like the DREAM Act that prioritizes immigrants who migrated as children or teenagers, combined with a more rigorous employment verification regime and tougher border enforcement, and strengthening the penalties for illegal immigration to match, say, Canada’s felony status for undocumented workers and genuinely stiff sanctions for smuggling.
 But that skepticism does not translate into an intuition that black unemployment or limited access to jobs dominated by illegal immigrants is a major economic consequence of reform. The evidence of any trends to that effect seems highly selective. Most of the case rests on an overreliance on data showing that illegal immigration diminishes low level wages even further, without accounting for the obvious: the alternative to reform is not some national dragnet that would deport most of the illegal immigrant population, and open up previously immigrant dominated jobs, but a muddling through with the status quo in which the undocumented population ratches up each year and may hit 14.5 million by 2018. Nor do the arguments that blacks are adversely affected by a pathway to citizenship grapple with another just as apparent fact: the long waiting period for actual citizenship will still mean that the current undocumented pool remains for most of the next decade what it is today: a collection of workers who have become accustomed to abysmal wages and can’t sue or comfortably complain to federal safety regulators. In other words, a more attractive labor source to certain elements of the low skill retail, construction and agri-business sectors than blacks with legal status could conceivably be.
And the heavy flaws in the effort to lure blacks with immigrant bashing don’t compare with another underlying political reality: if a politician’s sympathy for low income blacks surfaces only in the context of thwarting immigration legislation, but has no antecedents in other contemporary policy fights, like extending unemployment benefits, or preserving the recently expired FICA tax cuts, that candidate is unlikely to plausibly position himself as a champion of low wage black aspirations.
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Artur Davis: Another Poor GOP Strategy For Pursuing Black Votes
By RP Nation, on Wed Aug 7, 2013 at 4:30 PM ET Nick Simon, the well-respected CEO of Publisher’s Printing in Sheperdsville, Kentucky, has submitted the following response to Jonathan Miller’s column this week in The Daily Beast: “McConnell’s Fancy Farm Monster Comes Back to Haunt Him.” Enjoy:
If the McConnell-Grimes U.S. Senate race in Kentucky in 2014 turns out to be as close as you think, McConnell has an “ace in the hole.” This is the State Constitutional provision denying felons the right to vote. The right can only be restored by a formal pardon from the Governor. This provision was established in the Kentucky State Constitution of 1892 and modified by Section 145 ratified in 1955. Section 145 was proposed by the General Assembly in 1954 and ratified by the voters in 1955. To the best of my research, both the 1892 Constitution and Section 145 were enacted with Democrats controlling both the Governor’s mansion and both Houses of the General Assembly.
The Commonwealth of Kentucky does not keep official records on the number of felons in the state. But from two websites, the Sentencing Project and Federal Probation, I got estimates that range from 125,000 to 240,000. Surveys of felons who have the right to vote in other states show they break for the Democratic candidate by 2.5 – 3 to 1 over the Republican candidate.
Kentucky is one of three states (the others are Florida and Virginia) that disbar felons from voting for life. So let’s say Kentucky had more “normal” state rules – felons could vote after their sentences are completed, including completion of all parole and probation. Let’s be conservative with the number of felons in the state and take the low figure of 125,000. Let’s say they only break 2 to 1 Democratic, Kentucky being more conservative than the nation as a whole, so their felons might be a bit more conservative also. Of these felons, let’s say only 25% register and vote – 25% of 125,000 is 31,250 votes. They break two-thirds Democratic and one-third Republican 20,834 Democratic votes – 10,416 Republican votes equal a 10,418 net vote margin to the Democratic candidate.
So this 10,418 vote deficit is McConnell’s ace in the hole. Because of the restriction of the franchise to felons in the state, Allison Lundergan Grimes will start election night with a tally of negative 10,418 votes, versus what she would start out with in one of the 47 other states in the Union (excluding Virginia and Florida). I did not research the number of felons in the state in 1984, but arguably McConnell’s victory margin of 5,269 votes over Dee Huddleston in 1984 was because of this restriction of the franchise. So on election night in 2014, if McConnell ekes out a victory of 10,418 votes or less, he needs to send a bottle of bourbon over to State Democratic Headquarters in Frankfort. For it was voting rules restricting the franchise of felons established by Democrats who will have made his victory possible – McConnell’s 10,418 vote “Ace in the Hole”.
By Artur Davis, on Tue Aug 6, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET
Having written favorably about Chris Christie in the past, and having taken to task Rand Paul on other occasions, it won’t be surprising that I lean toward the governor and not the senator in the much discussed back and forth between the two over national security and electronic surveillance. I am also in the camp that views an internal dust-up between presidential level Republicans as a good thing that promises that the party is headed toward a 2016 field that is decidedly less one-note than the one in 2012.
In fact, it’s worth hoping that the conversation between the two current Republican front-runners (as subject to change as Cory Booker’s claim that he won’t run for president in 2016) rapidly expands to encompass the domestic side of the equation. To date, it hasn’t, and the vague, far from congruent, alignments of center-right conservatives and libertarians around various economic and social issues has made this week’s tensions seem artificially stark. In fairness, the non-congruent, hazy nature of these domestic divisions has prevented any coalescing into the kind of binary lines that might lead to more clarity.
So, rather than a coherent libertarian v. center-right debate, the 60 percent of Republicans who endorse some revamp of the party have splintered into social moderates who prioritize expanding the party’s appeal to suburban professional women and 18 to 29 year olds; right leaning populists who want to recast the party as a skeptic of crony capitalism and oversized banks, and who reject amnesty for illegal immigrants as a threat to downscale workers; establishment types who want to revive the Bush vision of “compassionate conservatism” and pro-immigration reform; social conservatives who also see merits in amnesty and more emphasis on poverty and education; to libertarians who want to reconcile a move to the center on gay marriage (although generally not abortion) with a hard right turn on entitlements and domestic spending. And the soft borders between these camps mean that in some respects, a Paul has as much of a claim to a reformer mantle as a Jeb Bush.
It is not altogether clear where Christie falls on that grid. And to be sure, for the same pragmatic reasons that Republicans are transitioning swiftly from “Hillary never would have made Obama’s mistakes” to criticisms of Benghazi and the old Clintonian penchant for influence peddling, liberals can be counted on to temper their praise of Christie as a “responsible adult” with jabs at his resistance to gay marriage and his “demonization” of teachers. For equally clear tactical reasons related to nomination politics, Christie would be foolish to wear the label as the moderate trying to upend the conservative grip on the party. (In fact, one assumes that Christie appreciates that his long standing toughness on anti-terror tactics also shores up his conservative credentials in a party where to most, Edward Snowden resembles a subversive more than a patriot).
But there are reasons to think, and to wish, that Christie offers a potential of shaping at least some of the disparate elements of reform into the kind of conservative vision I have praised: one that takes middle class economic anxiety seriously, that is not allergic to market based strategies to address the chronically poor and the uninsured, and that treats a more cohesive, less fractured society as a valid goal of the political right. Some of that promise is rooted in a gubernatorial record that has been impressively attentive to education reform, and that whether he ends up being wrong or right on Medicaid expansion, at least acknowledges the moral dilemma of a low wage poor population that lack health care through no fault of their own. And some of the case for Christie as the best prospective champion of reform is admittedly derived from atmospherics, like his penchant for rebuking some of the less becoming traits on the right, i.e., a NRA web attack ad that featured Barack Obama’s daughters.
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Artur Davis: What The Next Christie/Paul Fight Should Look Like
By Jonathan Miller, on Mon Aug 5, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET The RP had the number one clicked piece in Sunday’s The Daily Beast: “McConnell’s Fancy Farm Monster Comes Back to Haunt Him.” Here’s an excerpt:
For those uninitiated in Bluegrass State politics, the Fancy Farm picnic is neither fancy nor on a farm. The picnic, held annually on the first Saturday in August in a tiny, far-Western Kentucky hamlet called Fancy Farm (population 458: Salute!), is hosted by St. Jerome’s Catholic Church, which bills the event as the “world’s largest one-day BBQ.” While the day’s menu features bingo, 5k runs, and some of the world’s most savory sandwiches (Try the mutton… seriously), the main event begins at 2:00 PM when the state’s most powerful politicians (and occasionally a few national figures such as George Wallace and Al Gore) take the stage for five to ten minute riffs on the year’s hottest campaigns.
Over the past few decades, the picnic’s celebrity has generated a full long-weekend’s worth of satellite activities all over the Jackson Purchase: four days of small-town meet-and-greets, skeet shooting competitions, watermelon smashes, bean suppers and country ham and egg breakfasts. It’s politics just the way the old-timers remember it: plenty of hand-grabbing and bear-hugging and back-slapping and tall-tale-telling. Best yet, it’s the one weekend that the most remote area of the state (and one of the country’s most economically-struggling regions) receives the full respect and attention of the big city slickers, capital politicos, and budget-debilitated Frankfort press corps. This is grassroots politics at its finest.
The Fancy Farm political speaking forum used to have a similar old-fashioned feel. Al Cross, the dean of Kentucky political journalists, remembers that Fancy Farm used to be a “traditional community gathering with the focus on the interests of Western Kentucky,” with a small-town, state-fair sort of ambiance.
But that all changed dramatically in the 1980s, when the picnic’s political forum devolved, according to Cross, into “a piece of political theater”: a hyper-partisan, name-calling screaming match, a microcosm of everything that Americans hate about politics.
The primary culprit? Cross points squarely at Mitch McConnell, and few would disagree. Al Smith, a retired journalist who’s such a Kentucky legend that the state’s major journalism award bears his name, argues that the Senator must assume significant responsibility for the precipitous decline in civility at Fancy Farm: “McConnell was the first with the idea to bus in hundreds of noisy supporters from the rest of the state, and maybe out-of-state as well…[and he] was the first to use the stage as political theater,” cutting down his opponents with elaborately designed, choreographed productions, dressing up his staff to make fun of his opponents.
By Jonathan Miller, on Fri Aug 2, 2013 at 12:05 PM ET Subscribe FOR FREE to The RP’s KY Political Brief – an email prepared every weekday morning by former journalist Kakie Urch — with links to all of the day’s Kentucky political news.
This year’s Fancy Farm picnic promises to be a doozy — the political speech-a-fying will mark the unofficial launch of perhaps the top 2014 political battle in the nation — as U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell fights to hold his seat against the dual challenges of Democratic Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, and Tea Party businessman Matthew Bevin.
The RP and a cast of Kentucky political and media luminaries will be tweeting from the events in far Western Kentucky, and you can follow them LIVE below. You will especially love all of the fun, 15-second video interviews of the state’s top politicos that The RP will be posting.
And you too can join the fun. Simply go to your normal Twitter account and use the hashtag #fancyfarm. Your tweets will appear below LIVE!
By John Y. Brown III, on Thu Aug 1, 2013 at 3:00 PM ET  Kentucky has a constitutional oath that requires officeholders to swear they won’t fight in a duel. Yet at the same time Kentucky has the political crucible of Fancy Farm that requires candidates seeking statewide… and congressional office are required to endure each August —which at times has seemed less inviting than a duel with guns (and a few times less dangerous, too.).
It’s not bullets you fear but jeers and cheers (for your opponent) and the momentary mental lapse of twist of tongue that could be the gaffe that everyone talks about the next day. You fear humiliation on the most prized of our state’s political stages, the platform for political speeches at Fancy Farm.
Fancy farm is an amalgam of history and entertainment. Part historic and revered much like the old Chautauqua assembly and yet also part “trial by ordeal” much like the carnival game of baseball toss to cause the seated person to fall into the dunking tank. As a speaker at Fancy Farm you strive to be remembered as falling into the former category rather than into the metaphorical dunking tank. And if you succeed, you are the exception to the rule.
At 32 I was the Democratic Party’s nominee for secretary of state and slated to speak at the vaunted Fancy Farm picnic. The picnic is on a Saturday and I was staying in Paducah, Kentucky the entire week before leading up to Fancy Farm to campaign in the Western Kentucky region and prepare mentally for the big day. As the big day approached, the more nervous I got. Thursday I was barely able to eat. To make matters worse, it was my anniversary and, yes, I somehow blanked out and forgot. And didn’t remember before my wife reminded me. She had not forgotten. Fortunately, with the help of some wonderful local friends we found a romantic restaurant in Paducah to spend our 4th anniversary together. And after that romantic dinner, and the gift of a kitchen table my wife had been lobbying me to buy us for several months, and the passing of another 18 years of marriage, I almost feel like that incident is behind me now. Almost.
The next day was the other big annual event that weekend: The Democratic Party’s Bean Supper in Marshall County. It was my first visit to Marshall County since the primary and I got off to a rocky start after I announced to the large audience that it was “Great to be back in McCracken County again.” After the speech the chair of the Democratic Party, Terry McBrayer, whispered to me that I was actually in Marshall County. I asked Terry if I should get back on stage and correct myself and maybe explain it was confusing with both counties starting with the letter “M” but he suggested I just let it lie and work on getting it right next year. That was wise advice.
I also learned after my less than dazzling speech that swung for the fences and at best turned out to be a broken bat single (or arguably a forced walk) that sometimes less is more from the speaking stump. I spoke after attorney general candidate and current state auditor Ben Chandler. Ben gave a familiar and non-controversial speech that was well received, as always. I was all over the place with my speech trying to stand out. Trying to quote Shakespeare and comparing Larry Forgy to Hamlet. Afterward as we listened to others give their speech I asked Ben how I did. He smiled in the way a mentoring friend would if he were wanting to say to you, “Well, you didn’t humiliate yourself. But you came darn close a few times.” Of course, Ben was too much of a gentleman to say that and instead whispered to me, “You know, it’s not always the best strategy to try to give the most memorable speech at Fancy Farm.”
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John Y. Brown, III: Fancy Farm Memories
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