By RP Nation, on Fri Jan 6, 2012 at 11:00 AM ET I did not know Gatewood well, but I do have a story about him.
While in private practice, I was with a firm that maintained office space in the same building as Gatewood. I remember I first saw him in the parking lot after his run. A gangling man in his fifties, sweating profusely and wearing nothing more than a very small pair of running shorts and shoes. It was not the kind of sight that goes easily unnoticed, nor was his periodic tai-chi routine.
Always a very likeable man, I once offered to buy him a drink at Lynagh’s. He slowly turned to me with his characteristically big smile shaded by the brim of his trademark fedora and responded boisterously, “Buddy, I haven’t had a drink for over 20 years…it messes with my buzz too much.”
I also watched as he explained to his friend Willie Nelson, why he chose an office across the street from the police department… “so we can keep an eye on each other.”
Gatewood was a very bright and witty man who was very comfortable in his skin and not afraid to stand up for everything he believed in. For this (and for my brief elevator ride with Willie Nelson) I admired him very much. The world will definitely be a little less pleasant without him.
By RP Nation, on Fri Jan 6, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET
The author, C. Josh Givens, in a 2008 Halloween costume. No person can truly dress as a Kentucky punk without a "Gatewood for Governor" t-shirt. As a community newspaper journalist in Kentucky since the mid-90s, I came to understand Gatewood was someone most media types would expect walking into the lobby each campaign cycle. Whether a race was on for governor, Congress, or even the local city council, Gatewood was expected, whether he was running or not.
Some called him a “perennial” candidate, but I have never liked that tag. It always sounded a tad bit back-handed to me, like the big papers and television talkers were saying, with some snarky inside wink-and-nod, “Here comes Gatewood … again and again and again.”
With Gatewood, somehow folks tried to make the very word — “perennial” — some type of curse word.
Perhaps those that used it the most were part of the “petrochemical-pharmaceutical-military-industrial-transnational-corporate-fascist-elite SOBs” crowd, which Gatewood convinced many of us were a threat to our Constitutional freedoms.
Then again, perhaps those who used it the most were part of what is mainstream, conservative Kentucky.
Gatewood always answered questions, which can be a novel ideal when considering Kentucky campaigns and the often too-comfortable relationship between hometown media and candidates.
Genuinely good guy Gatewood, you were comfortable with him, yes, but there always seemed to be an unspoken — “I am here to get my message out. If you don’t ask the right questions, I will still give you the answers. It’s an important message.”
Gatewood made you smile, whether you knew who in the Hell he was or not.
In what would be his final campaign, Gatewood and his running mate Dea Riley, fought a huge uphill battle in the Kentucky Governor race. But despite this uphill battle, Gatewood and Dea were keen to come to smallish Butler County — a heavily Republican county — and talk with me. We ran his story on the front, we ran his picture, we published a 30-minute video interview.
It lit a small fire of sorts. My phone rang, my email inbox filled — “Who is this Gatewood? I like the way he thinks.”
Now, memorializing with a tear in my eye, I enthusiastically agree with them. I sure did like the way that genuinely good guy Gatewood thought … which was for himself.
Rest in peace, Gatewood. You have shown us all, coming back year-after-year creates lasting marks. Your Commonwealth will long remember your impact.
You have made the path smoother for those will continue to come back and back and back.
By Jeff Smith, on Thu Jan 5, 2012 at 11:30 AM ET
William Faulkner once wrote that in the South, the past isn’t dead — it isn’t even past.
His words seem eerily appropriate as two Southern Republican presidential candidates are confronted with the racial skeletons in their closets.
First it was Texas Gov. Rick Perry and “Niggerhead,” the alleged name of his family’s hunting camp. Now, it’s fellow Texan Ron Paul’s sundry offensive statements about blacks, arguing among other things that in the wake of the Los Angeles riots, “order was only restored when it came time for the blacks to collect their welfare checks,” and that “95 percent of black men in Washington are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.”
 As Perry and Paul probably know, the modern Republican Party has its rhetorical roots in George Wallace and Barry Goldwater’s states’ rights rhetoric from the 1960s. Wallace laid the foundation for a generation of Republican hegemony in presidential elections via deft manipulation of racial and cultural issues; Richard Nixon and his guru Kevin Phillips studied Wallace’s tactics closely. Nixon’s 1969-’72 strategy, which focused on appealing to the 10 million Wallace voters from ’68, heralded a partisan realignment that would shape American politics for the next half-century, as Phillips himself predicted in 1969’s “Emerging Republican Majority.”
So when Ronald Reagan went to Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were brutally murdered in 1963, to kick off his 1980 general election bid and proclaimed that “the spirit of Jefferson Davis lives in this year’s Republican Party platform,” it was no accident. Rather, it was a rare statement of the Republican Party’s fundamental strategy since 1964.
Read the rest of…
Jeff Smith: From Wallace to Paul to Perry
By Artur Davis, on Tue Jan 3, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET  Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson’s announcement that he is retiring from the Senate can be seen in three different ways. One is that he simply confronted poor poll numbers, coupled with the politics of a state red enough that Barack Obama is guaranteed to lose it.
Second, Nelson’s demise can be seen as a final verdict on a maneuver that transpired almost exactly two years ago. In case you forgot, Nelson and his Arkansas counterpart, Blanche Lincoln, are the two conservative Democrats who saved the health-care overhaul in late December 2009. Had these two senators stuck to their criticisms of the bill, it would have died in the Senate in late 2009. The bill likely would have been downsized to a modest expansion of Medicaid and some tighter rules for pre-existing illness exclusions.
 Instead, both senators, reluctant to be blamed for the failure of a 63-year-old Democratic-agenda piece and fearing nationally funded primary opposition from the left, swallowed hard and voted yes.
Neither Lincoln nor Nelson recovered. Lincoln lost in 2010. For Nelson, a significant infusion of off-year independent ad expenditures and relentless attention to Nebraska-based concerns failed to rescue his numbers from the depths they reached after the health-care vote. In Nelson’s case, the failure must be especially galling — given that he traded his vote for a provision that pumped extra federal Medicaid dollars into his state.
The “Nebraska compromise” was never honored, and it was a trade Nebraskans never liked anyway, given their resistance to the rest of the law and, perhaps, their indifference as residents of a low-poverty state to a poverty-based program like Medicaid.
Read the rest of…
Artur Davis: Ben Nelson Retires
By RP Staff, on Tue Dec 27, 2011 at 2:00 PM ET  The RP was catching some waves in Southern California last week…Er, he was actually home on his phone calling into the public radio station…Whatever…The RP was sharing the No Labels “Make Congress Work” gospel with the people of the Left Coast at KPCC, Southern California’s Public Radio.
Click here to listen in.
And click here to help Make Congress Work.
By John Y. Brown III, on Tue Dec 27, 2011 at 12:00 PM ET  You know how when you are talking to someone who is undergoing hormone replacement treatment in preparation for gender reassignment surgery it can sometimes be awkward?
You know, how you try to make the other person feel like you have no idea they are about to change from a man to a woman or vice-versa and try to bring up banal topics like basketball or the weather?
Of course you do.
And it is confusing.
Sometimes –given how far along the person is in the process–it can be confusing about which “brand” (so to speak) they are leaving and which one they are becoming.
I just went through McDonalds drive-thru a few minutes ago and was struck with that same awkward feeling I have when around people getting sex changes.
The drive-thru menu was very feminine, so to speak, splattered with colorful pictures of apples, oatmeal, fruit and all manner of healthy foods and fancy girly coffee drinks.
 This used to be a fry and burger joint with hot black coffee that would burn your skin off—a fast food joint with more of a guy’s personality. But I went through the drive thru anyway.
As I paid I looked the person working the register in the eye as if to say, “I have no idea what you are going through and it is none of my business. I do not judge. I’ve known people who have gone through transformations like this and they are good people and I wish you the best. Please just give me my Big Mac and fries while I still recognize this place so I can leave because I have nothing to add about basketball or the weather.”
I think the person at the register understood what I was communicating and appreciated the subliminal gesture. It was the right way to handle an otherwise awkward situation.
By Grant Smith, RP Staff, on Tue Dec 27, 2011 at 9:15 AM ET
TSA plans to expand beyond airports. [L. A. Times]
By Jeff Smith, on Tue Dec 27, 2011 at 8:30 AM ET
 Missouri Congressman Russ Carnahan has led a charmed political life. After losing a congressional race in rural Southeast Missouri in 1990, Carnahan moved to St. Louis and ran for the state House in 2000, when his father was a popular two-term governor. He ran against a political neophyte and prevailed by 64 votes. In 2004, he ran in a 10-way primary for ex-House Leader Dick Gephardt’s seat and won by 1.6%. (Disclosure: I finished second, and six years later went to federal prison after lying to the government during an FEC investigation stemming from a Carnahan complaint.) In 2010, in a district Obama carried by 20 points, he edged Tea Party favorite Ed Martin 49-47. None of those election results was determined until the wee hours of the morning.
But in 2011, Congressman Carnahan’s luck ran out.
 Congressman Russ Carnahan After Missouri lost a congressional seat, the Legislature eliminated his district and split it into four other districts, one represented by black Democrat Lacy Clay and the others by Republicans. Clay did not discourage the Legislature from passing the map. Unlike Carnahan, he built relationships with state Republican leaders, engaging them throughout the process. When the map reached the state Senate, which experiences frequent filibusters that are rarely ended via cloture (fewer than ten times in 50 years), the Republican leadership braced for an all-night filibuster by Senate Democrats. But none spoke; the bill passed immediately.
Read the rest of…
Jeff Smith: Some Unsolicited Advice for Cong. Carnahan
By Artur Davis, on Fri Dec 23, 2011 at 8:30 AM ET The political cliché of the moment is “authenticity”, which its most avid users describe as a consistency of stated political beliefs; it is regarded as the moral opposite of “flip-flopping” or “pandering”. By the standards of the “authenticity” test, Mitt Romney is deeply flawed, having shifted views on the usefulness of healthcare reform, the legality of abortion, the literalness of the Second Amendment, and having discovered new reservations around the rights of gays and the claims of illegal immigrants.
This is a fair enough description. Romney rose as a Republican fending for votes in the most liberal state, Massachusetts, and neither his run against Ted Kennedy nor his governorship sounded very much like the standard form conservative trolling for early state Republicans today.
 But the “authenticity” test finds fault in unexpected places. Barack Obama gets mixed grades at best. In the span from 2003 to 2008, his criticisms of the death penalty gave way to support for extending it to non death offenses like sexual abuse of minors; his support for stiffer gun laws turned into an endorsement of the Supreme Court’s rejection of tough local gun restrictions. The Patriot Act he assailed during the Senate campaign was a thing he voted to renew as a senator. As president, the forthright critic of non-judicial detention of suspected foreign terrorists has more or less copied the last administration’s playbook on the same subject. The candidate who jabbed his principal Democratic opponent for wanting to require that individuals purchase health insurance is now a president who has converted to the “mandates” cause.
Obama has gotten no real grief for directions in the past several years that don’t match the things he said in the heat of campaigns to win liberal hearts in Illinois, and then the country. In contrast, it is George Bush who draws considerable ire for staying fixed in stone on Iraq, even when the results were a quagmire that nearly undermined the success of dethroning Saddam. If memory serves, Bush also won not much praise for sticking to his moderate stances on immigration: the Texas governor who aggressively courted Latinos was the same president who infuriated his base for favoring a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
Read the rest of…
Artur Davis: Authenticity and Politics
By RP Staff, on Thu Dec 22, 2011 at 6:14 PM ET Oh, well.
House Republicans, fearing the tongue-lashing they were about to receive from the RP on CNBC’s “Kudlow and Company” agreed to the payroll tax cut, prompting CNBC to shift programming and cancel his appearance tonight.
So, if you know any TV producers out there, please recommend the RP as their good-luck charm.
Maybe if he knew that the RP was about to appear on Al Jazeera, Bashar Assad will finally step down in Syria…
Maybe if they knew that the RP was headed for Sportscenter, the Duke Blue Devils would just call it a season and cede the NCAA Championship to the Kentucky Wildcats…
Maybe if they knew that the RP was joining Ryan Seacrest on E! News, the Kardashians would just go away…
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