If you’ve got something to hide and you don’t want anyone to find it, hide it in plain view. That’s an old idea, closely akin to another old saying: If you can’t dazzle them with BS, bury them with paper. Both, sadly, apply today. For here we are in 2006 and the United States Senate – unlike everyone else – still files its campaign contributions on paper, as if the year were 1956 and computers were expensive and suspect.
Today the only things expensive and suspect are the Senate campaigns themselves. They’ll be collecting their last-minute campaign dollars from people whose identities won’t be known until weeks after the election is finished.
Continue readingPulling the Local Strings from DC
If you’re looking for a spot-on analysis of how this year’s elections are going to be both nationalized and local, don’t miss today’s column by E. J. Dionne in the Washington Post:
The blogosphere has created central repositories of political information -- including news of very local developments that would otherwise go unnoticed on the national level -- that can speed the flow of intelligence to activists across the nation. And the recruitment of candidates is ever more the job of national party committees, not local officials or organizations. Continue reading
Wall Street Drifting – Slightly – Toward Dems
There’s an interesting story from Bloomberg News today on a shift toward Democrats in political giving this year by Wall Street. The story, by Michael Forsythe and George Stein, cites donation totals from 11 top securities firms, showing $3.1 million going to Democrats in this year’s congressional elections versus only $1.9 million to Republicans.
Bloomberg is certainly well plugged in on Wall Street and the story features interesting quotes from industry insiders. But if you read the story and got the impression that there’s been a real sea change on Wall Street, you’d be wrong.
Continue readingHave the Democrats Peaked?
Okay, okay. Maybe mid-September is a little early to be talking about such things, but I’m beginning to pick up a sense that the prevailing script in the news media – that the Democrats are poised to upset the balance of power in Washington – may have been over-hyped over the past few weeks.
I realize politics is an up-and-down thing and that momentum can shift more than once even at the end of an election season, but here’s why this sense of an impending Democratic takeover seems to me to be overreaching:
Parties are secondary. The polls that count are the ones with candidate names on them, not party preferences. Generic polls that test the electorates’ comfort level with the Democrats and Republicans in Congress may be useful in understanding the background noise for this year’s elections, but voters don’t face off between an elephant and a donkey in the polling booth – they choose between two individuals.
Continue readingThe Company You Keep
“If we are going to have any taxes at all, the fairest place to start is with dead billionaires.” That quote – from Chuck Collins of Responsible Watch – is one side of the argument against doing away with inheritance taxes, a mission high on the priority list of the Bush administration and the Republican leadership in Congress.
The other side of the argument is to call it a basically unfair “death tax.” That’s the mantra that’s been used for years to rationalize raising the limits before the inheritance tax kicks in, and eventually to do away with it altogether.
Continue readingEr, um, what I meant to say was…
A page one story in today’s Washington Post – PAC Funds Undercut Claims in Senate Race – is one of those delicious accounts that almost make suffering through this season of election rhetoric worthwhile.
The story, by Matthew Mosk, focuses on the Maryland Senate race and points out the credibility gap between the actions and deeds of Rep. Ben Cardin, who’s looking to move from the House into an open seat in the Senate. Cardin is running in the Democratic primary against former Congressman Kweisi Mfume and a host of others.
Continue readingThe Stretch Begins
Remember this moment. We’ve just begun the final stretch to the fall campaigns and – at this point – the outcome looks good for the Democrats. The party line, even from the GOP, is that the Democrats have an excellent shot at retaking the House if they can manage not to blow it between now and Election Day. The Senate, while not likely to turn Democratic, will certainly turn more Democratic than it is now.
But as stretches go, this is a long one. Don’t think of it as the end of a horse race. It’s more like the 4th quarter in a game of football, or the end of a baseball game from the 7th inning on.
Continue readingFBI Investigating Top Alaska Donor
FBI agents in Alaska, armed with search warrants, descended without warning Thursday at the offices of several Alaskan lawmakers in what appears to be a major investigation involving VECO, the oil field service company that has long been one the most generous political contributors to Alaska politicians.
Among the offices searched were that of State Senate President Ben Stevens, the son of US Senator Ted Stevens, and an important political ally of VECO in the state legislature. According to the Anchorage Daily News, Stevens has closer connections to the company than simply receiving campaign contributions:
Continue readingFEC Holds the Line on Interest Group Spending
Yesterday’s decision by the Federal Election Commission to hold the line on spending rules for interest groups – essentially a vote not to open a new loophole allowing the kinds of unrestricted ad budgets we’ve seen in the past – was revealing in a couple of different ways.
First I should define the word “decision” in this case. Like so many FEC rulings, it was really a non-decision – the result of a 3-3 split between Democrats and Republicans on the six-member commission.
Continue readingGod and the GOP
A poll released yesterday by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press offers the latest glimpse into the intersection in American life between religion and politics. The poll got headlines for its finding that fewer people than before feel the Republican Party is “friendly to religion.”
Among the findings cited in the Pew poll:
The Democratic Party continues to face a serious "God problem," with just 26% saying the party is friendly to religion. However, the proportion of Americans who say the Republican Party is friendly to religion, while much larger, has fallen from 55% to 47% in the past year, with a particularly sharp decline coming among white evangelical Protestants (14 percentage points).
As I read the explanations behind the numbers, I kept hearing echoes of the people I’d talked with along US Route 50 last year, when I spent 50 days on the road trying to find out what Americans thought about politics.
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