The Colorado Republican Senate primary took a strange turn into gender politics yesterday, when candidate Ken Buck — seen in the clip above — told a questioner at a campaign stop that she should vote for him "because I do not wear high heels."
Buck was apparently responding to his rival Jane Norton's recent ad blaming him for independent attacks on her.
"You'd think he'd be man enough to do it himself," she says in the ad.
The connection isn't immediately clear in the video, in which he responded to a simple question from a woman in the audience.
"Why should you vote for me? Because I do not wear high heels," he said, to laughter and some apparent confusion.
"She has questioned my manhood. I think it's fair to respond," he explained. "I have cowboy boots. They have real bulls*** on them."
A longer video containing the snippet above, both provided by a Republican operative, can be seen here. The primary is Aug. 10 in a race that has a mail-in ballot and that seems to be getting interesting.
UPDATE: Buck spokesman Owen Loftus emails, "Obviously, the comment was made in jest after Jane questioned Ken's 'manhood' in her new ad. The Norton campaign has routinely commented about her being a good choice because she is a woman, and [on ]her choice of shoes."
The latest battle in the civil war inside the Republican National Committee came today with Treasurer Randy Pullen's filing of an amended FEC report suggesting the committee had concealed $7 million in debt to give a false impression of financial strength.
Amid the talk of "unreported debt" is a story related to me in simpler terms by a well-informed RNC insider: The committee has been delaying payment to its major vendors. That's not an unusual way to exaggerate your cash on hand, but the party source -- backed today by Pullen -- says that they've been doing it on an unusually large scale.
By this source's calculation, the RNC's real cash on hand is a very modest $1.7 million.
UPDATE: The RNC's outside counsel, in a memo this afternoon, deny the party has major unpaid debts:
These reports are extraordinarily misleading. As reflected on the monthly report the RNC filed yesterday, which covers the month of June, the RNC had approximately $2 million in unpaid invoices at the end of the month, which were completely paid in the first half of July. In other words, as reflected on that report, all of this debt – as well as the debt reflected on the amended reports for April and May – has been paid off. Contrary to the hyperbolic claims in the media reports, the RNC has not at any time carried $7 million of debt, and all the debts at issue have been paid.
President Barack Obama has made a mantra out of insisting he and his White House won’t get caught up in “cable chatter,” with aides proudly insisting they don’t let 24-hour news outlets drive decision-making.
But this week’s forced resignation of a previously obscure Agriculture Department employee is just the latest example of Obama officials reacting to a cable news-driven obsession of the right.
It not only infuriates Obama’s liberal base, which feels like the episodes just reinforce the power of the right to push a damaging story into the mainstream press. But as this week shows, the White House’s touchiness even threatens Obama’s ability to keep control of his own public persona, or steer the national conversation in a way that’s conducive to promoting his message and his agenda.
The anger on the left is now reaching new decibel levels due to the quick decision by the Agriculture Department to push out a Georgia-based employee, Shirley Sherrod, who was captured on video at a recent NAACP conference appearing to make racially insensitive comments about a white farmer....
On Wednesday, liberals expressed fury that Sherrod hadn’t immediately been re-hired and lamented how the same president who broke so many conventional rules as a candidate was now bowing to the same forces on the right that have tormented Democrats for years.
“Now that the full video is out there, and Sherrod's version of events is vindicated, Obama looks foolish, impulsive and reactive,” said Jane Hamsher, a prominent liberal blogger and frequent Obama critic. “And he has only empowered Breitbart, who will continue to employ the same tactics until someone stands up to him. You would hope the president of the United States could manage that.”
"They desperately want to be liked by the right, and this pathological need to ingratiate themselves with people who want to destroy them lead them to make stupid move after stupid move," complained Markos Moulitsas, who runs the influential Daily Kos blog
Said the Nation’s Ari Melber: “Obama's team is right to condemn the sensationalism of 24-7 news, but they play right into the problem by rushing to judgment and ditching people stamped controversial by their opponents. We live in a world where anyone can be Breitbarted — the question isn't whether you can be clipped out of context, or have your life's work overshadowed by a day's worth of links.”
Melber added: “Politically, the obvious lesson is that the administration should worry more about figuring out who's right before overreacting to liars who oppose their agenda.”
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs apologized to Shirley Sherrod, a Department of Agriculture employee who was forced out after a videotape surfaced of her making what initially appeared to be racially discriminatory remarks to an NAACP audience.
"Without a doubt, Miss Sherrod is owed an apology," Gibbs said Wednesday at his afternoon briefing. "I would do so on behalf of this administration."
This post from Ta-Nehisi Coates hints at the damage this episode has done Obama among his friends:
The argument has been made that this isn't Obama, just the people working under him. That theory elides the responsibility of leaders to set a tone. The tone that Obama has set, in regards to race, is to retreat with great velocity in the face of anything that can be defined as "racial." Granted, this has been politically smart. Also granted, Obama has done it with nuance. But it can not be expected that the president's subordinates will share that nuance.
More disturbingly, this is what happens when you treat the arrest of a black man, in his home, as something that can be fixed over beers. This is what happens when you silently assent to the notion that racism and its victims are somehow equally wrong. The ground, itself, is rigged with a narrative of inversion that goes back centuries. When you treat the two side as equals, expect not just more of the same. Expect worse. ...
On the great American scourge of racism, this administration must stand, sometimes publicly, for something. Failing that it will fall — indeed, already has fallen — for anything.
A new political operation conceived by Republican operatives Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie formed a spinoff group last month that - thanks in part to its ability to promise donors anonymity - has brought in more money in its first month than the parent organization has raised since it started in March.
The new group, called American Crossroads GPS, has been telling donors their contributions would be used to dig up dirt on Congressional Democrats’ “expense account abuses” and to frame the BP oil spill as “Obama’s Katrina.”
The GPS group pulled in $5.1 million in June, its first month in operation, while the original American Crossroads, which has spent $600,000 on tough ads blistering Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, has pulled in $4.7 million since its launch.
There's long been a school of thought -- on defense at the moment -- arguing that voters, when it comes down to it, won't vote on an abstract issue like the deficit.
And while this may just be a matter of my own visceral instincts, the contrast between the attempt to revive the famous Lyndon Johnson "Daisy" spot in a Michigan congressional race seems to underscore that point. Contrast it with the original:
I was surprised to read on The Daily Caller yesterday that a POLITICO colleague of mine was among those who “participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.”
The phrase, which came without evidence in a story about the listserv Journolist, has drawn POLITICO into some conspiracy theorizing and earned us a drubbing on Fox News. But my colleagues and I can’t quite figure out what the Caller’s Tucker Carlson is talking about.
POLITICO executive editor Jim VandeHei tells me he “asked Tucker Carlson to clarify his story that POLITICO reporters were not involved in the Wright string (he didn’t)” or “to present evidence one of our reporters was directly involved (he didn’t, other than to say Avi [Zenilman] made some disjointed remarks).”
So I asked Zenilman, my former assistant on this blog, who left POLITICO in November 2008, what he’d written. He dredged up the e-mails, which came in response to others’ angry comments about ABC’s moderation of a presidential primary debate. (Carlson also sent them to VandeHei.)
"Actually, I remember Stephanopolous moderating two really good debates on Sunday morning in the primary season,” Zenilman, now a freelancer, most recently for Capital New York, wrote in one e-mail. “People — moreso (sic) conservatives — got really pissed with CNN for how they handled the GOP YouTube debate; not just the unvetted pro-Hillary gay general, but the fact that all the questions were these absurd gods gays guns immigration questions.”
Those weren’t terribly interesting e-mails (much less “outpourings of anger”), or disjointed, though Avi also wrote one truly disjointed remark: “Romney’s lawn.” So “participated in outpourings of anger” seems to mean “said unremarkable things to angry people.”
The sloppy line in The Daily Caller, though, gets at a real, and reasonable, concern that I’ve heard from readers and commentators: A handful of POLITICO reporters, myself included, were members of the now-defunct listserv, which has been portrayed at times as a kind of cabal aimed at, among other goals, doing physical harm to Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh and destroying Fox News. (POLITICO was also among the first publications [Correction: Kaus was first.] to report on the list, much to the dismay of some of its participants, and that piece remains a useful explanation of what Journolist was.)
As I’ve written before, my view is that I’ll listen in on any conversation that I’m allowed to listen in on. When I can, I attend the conservative, often off-the-record, Monday Meeting in New York for much the same reason — my job is to report on politics, and I’m grateful for opportunities to hear what smart ideologues on both sides are saying.
But I’m also sensitive to the perception from readers that, in particular, admission to a conversation itself reflects some kind of tacit stamp of ideological approval, though participating in that list certainly didn’t require any overt test. I asked POLITICO editor-in-chief John Harris for his thoughts on the question.
“I understand why people are troubled. The very fact that you’re let on suggests that they’re accepting you into a club,” he said, adding that he had not “seen anything on Journolist that compromises POLITICO.”
“I knew you were on it, I knew Mike Allen was on it,” he said. “It seemed appropriate to me to have you following a conversation where you might learn something germane,” he said, adding, that he understood, accurately, that we were there “more as observers than as participants in an ideological conversation.”
But Harris also said he agrees with Andrew Sullivan’s criticism of the list, which is more intellectual than ethical.
“[S]ocialized groupthink is not the answer to what's wrong with the media. It's what's already wrong with the media,” Sullivan wrote.
Harris said he worried about “cliquishness” and “groupthink.”
“This is true for reporters and even for ideological commentators: You don’t play on one team or another — you play on your own team,” he said.
I don’t have particularly strong feelings on where and how ideologues should have conversations with one another, and it doesn’t seem like a terribly pressing issue. The list was free of the sort of effective coordination some critics allege, and many of its participants disagreed with one another bitterly, while others on the list mostly lurked silently. I can’t recall any substantive difference between what people wrote privately and publicly. Like many private e-mail conversations, it had no shortage of stray inflammatory and ill-advised comments, and many, many more mundane ones.
I’d add only one thing: I never found out any good secrets on Journolist. It wasn’t that kind of list. But to get the flavor of it, you can read conversation that mirrors it on Twitter. That platform — although it’s in principle open and democratic — in fact reflects more or less the same virtues of hashing out ideas and the dangers of the herd mentality.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's veteran political reporter Jim Galloway writes:
You and I have just become eyewitnesses to the practical side of Sarah Palin.
With a simple Facebook posting nine days ago, and a 30-second message sent to telephones in 400,000 Republican households, Palin served as both sword and shield for Karen Handel — boosting the former secretary of state to the top rung in a GOP runoff for governor.
It may have been the most efficient and impressive use of political celebrity this state has ever seen, made on behalf of a woman whose views sometimes mirror those of the former Alaskan governor — but not always.
Which is where Palin’s practical side asserted itself.
Some people would rather be right than be president. Tuesday’s vote in Georgia proved that Sarah Palin isn’t one of them. ...
In a closed staff meeting Tuesday morning, a senior administration praised elements of the White House's initial response to a partial video of a speech by a Department of Agriculture official — a response that the Administration has since reversed.
White House officials yesterday afternoon told reporters they did not press Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to demand the resignation of Shirley Sherrod, but that they stood by the hasty decision; last night, they took credit for pressing Vilsack to rehire her when a fuller video revealed that her remarks had been edited to mean the opposite of what she said.
But three Democratic sources said deputy chief of staff Jim Messina singled out the White House's initial response to the incident for praise in the regular 8:30 a.m. staff meeting Tuesday morning. The sources differed on the substance of Messina's praise, but concurred that he had praised the speed of White House communications in response to the flap, which was driven by a misleadingly edited video posted to Andrew Breitbart's Big Government website.
One source, who is unhappy with the administration's handling of the incident, paraphrased Messina's remarks: "We could have waited all day — we could have had a media circus — but we took decisive action, and it’s a good example of how to respond in this atmosphere."
But two other senior officials present at the meeting, who responded to a call to the White House press office, said the gist of Messina's words had been conveyed to POLITICO inaccurately, and that Messina — a top political operative and senior manager — was merely speaking in his capacity as deputy chief of staff for Operations and "cheerleader" to boost staffers' morale.
Messina was merely praising the White House staff for "communicating well, sharing well, basically rising to the occasion" on the Sherrod story, one official said. "It was an institutional or procedural point."
Messina could not have been praising a White House decision to fire Sherrod, the source said, because the decision was made by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
UPDATE: Gibbs, in the briefing, offered a vague denial that Messina praised the handling of the Sherrod case. “I’ve seen the reports of what somebody believed Jim said,” he said. “I did not hear Jim say that.”
[F]ormer Gov. Palin isn't making these endorsements because, as she claims, she has spent time in New Hampshire and thus knows that the people here are a lot like Alaskans. She spent a few hours here on one day during the 2008 presidential election. That's still more time than she spent getting to know Ayotte, but it takes quite a bit longer to know New Hampshire.
A word of advice for supporters of Messrs. Bender, Binnie, Lamontagne and Hodes (sounds like a law firm, doesn't it?): Don't fret over what a "Mama Grizzly'' from Alaska does. Right now, Granite Staters have more to worry about in keeping bears away from bird feeders.
The debate comment: "We need a NASA budget that doesn't cater to making Muslims feel good but that is strong on science."
Writes the Post's Littwin:
I'll pause here, while you read that again. Later, I checked the tape to make sure I had it right. I remember how my jaw had dropped the first time and tried to keep the jaw from hitting the desk again.
When she said it, I looked around the room, filled with reporters and staff members, for help. Norton, I was pretty sure, hadn't mentioned Muslims and NASA earlier in the debate. She didn't mention them later either. That was it. It was what you'd call context-free argument....
After the debate, I asked Norton what she meant. She smiled and said maybe she could have phrased her point better.
I was still wondering what her point was, and then I got the, uh, answer in an e-mail from her campaign.
It was — of course — Obama's fault. How could I have missed that? The campaign sent stories showing that NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden had said — on al-Jazeera no less — that NASA was asked by the president to do outreach to countries that didn't have space programs, including Muslim countries.
Bolden quoted the president as saying he wanted to help these Muslim countries feel good about their contributions to science. The White House has said there is no such program, but not everyone is buying that.
The election of Barack Obama, America’s first black president, was supposed to be a sign of our national maturity, a chance to transform the charged, stilted “national conversation” about race into a smarter and more authentic dialogue, led by a president who was also one of the nation's subtlest thinkers and writers on the topic.
Instead, the conversation just got dumber.
The America of 2010 is dominated by racial images out of farce and parody, caricatures not seen since the glory days of Shaft. Fox News often stars a leather-clad New Black Panther, while MSNBC scours the tea party movement for racist elements, which one could probably find in any mass organization in America. Obama’s own, sole foray into the issue of race involved calling a police officer “stupid,” and regretting his own words. Conservative leaders and the NAACP, the venerable civil-rights group, recently engaged in a round of bitter name-calling that left both groups wounded and crying foul. Political correctness continues to reign in parts of the left, and now has a match in the belligerent grievance of conservatives demanding that hair-trigger allegations of racism be proven.
“I thought we were going to move beyond this,” said Abigail Thernstrom, a conservative historian of race and a Bush appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, who called the current racial climate “a catastrophe.”
“There’s a kind of heightened racial consciousness that’s very worrisome. It’s not good for us, it’s not good for the very fabric of American society,” she said, objecting in particular to the claims of racism against the tea party movement.
The turn toward racial farce drew an embarrassing, reactive reversal from the Obama administration Wednesday morning, as Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack promised in a terse statement to reconsider the firing of Shirley Sherrod, his hitherto obscure Georgia director of rural development. In a video posted Sunday on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government website, Sherrod recounted a story in which she considered refusing a federal grant to a white couple based solely on race. The deceptively edited video seemed to present yet another racial stock figure turning her resentment into a kind of petty tyranny, and the Obama administration did not hesitate in demanding and receiving her resignation.
But an extended version of Sherrod’s speech suggested she was in fact preaching the exact opposite message. The story she was recounting had taken place more than two decades ago – and she was using it to tell a far more nuanced tale. She had, the white farmer from the anecdote emerged to testify, saved his farm. The line delivered just before the excerpt began introduced the anecdote as a lesson from God that “the struggle is really about poor people,” not race.
White House officials Tuesday pinned the decision to fire Sherrod on Vilsack, who said the appearance of the edited clip was — regardless of its actual meaning — simply too damning.
“The controversy surrounding her comments would create situations where her decisions, rightly or wrongly, would be called into question, making it difficult for her to bring jobs to Georgia,” he said in a statement.
The White House, an official said, backed Vilsack’s decision – drawing, in turn, mockery and outrage from both sides of the ideological spectrum, and a second reaction from the White House, where aides took credit for pressing Vilsack to back off.
“I am of course willing and will conduct a thorough review and consider additional facts to ensure to the American people we are providing services in a fair and equitable manner,” Vilsack said in a second statement.
“Above all else, it is hilarious to watch the White House scrambling out of fear for Andrew Breitbart,” wrote RedState.com founder Erick Erickson.
Liberal bloggers called for Vilsack to be fired instead of Sherrod.
And other observers simply shook their heads at the scramble to condemn Sherrod.
"What's striking to me about this Department of Agriculture fracas is that everyone was so quick to jump to conclusions: Someone reports a few ambiguous comments out of context and, before checking with the woman or getting the whole story, concludes: 'She's a racist!'" said Richard Ford, a law professor at Stanford and author of "The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse."
President Barack Obama is staffing his Justice Department with some of his predecessor's fiercest critics, and lawyers who have spent years defining the limits of executive power will now be helping to wield it.
The change may be most dramatic at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — which defended some of Bush’s most controversial policies — where a small cadre of lawyers who had an outsized influence on legal criticism of Bush are taking the top three jobs.
Those three — Dawn Johnsen, Martin Lederman, and David Barron — and others made the case that Bush’s interrogation policy was justified by flawed legal reasoning. Their arguments precipitated one of Obama’s most dramatic early acts: flatly repudiating all government legal advice on interrogation issued between September 11, 2001, and January 20, 2009.
“I think they will be an irritant for Obama in the best possible way — they’re very honest lawyers,” said Rosa Brooks, a professor at Georgetown University Law School, where Lederman also taught. “When Dawn and Marty and David think that he is asking if he can do something that in their view pushes the envelope and goes beyond the bounds of what is legal, they’re going to say, ‘Sorry Mr. Obama, we think that would be illegal.’”
But Johnsen withdrew her nomination in the face of attacks related to her work on abortion, not executive power. Barron announced last month that he'd return to Harvard, and Charlie Savage writes tonight that Lederman is headed back to Georgetown.
Their nominations represented an attempt to make a dramatic break from the national security policies of the Bush years, as they were leading critics of torture and detention policies. Their departures seem to represent the limits of that ambition.
Whiplash, in a statement from NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous:
The NAACP has a zero tolerance policy against racial discrimination, whether practiced by blacks, whites, or any other group.
The NAACP also has long championed and embraced transformation by people who have move beyond racial bias. Most notably, we have done so for late Alabama Governor George Wallace and late US Senator Robert Byrd--each a man who had associated with and supported white supremacists and their cause before embracing civil rights for all.
With regard to the initial media coverage of the resignation of USDA official Shirley Sherrod, we have come to the conclusion we were snookered by Fox News and Tea Party Activist Andrew Breitbart into believing she had harmed white farmers because of racial bias.
Having reviewed the full tape, spoken to Ms. Sherrod, and most importantly heard the testimony of the white farmers mentioned in this story, we now believe the organization that edited the documents did so with the intention of deceiving millions of Americans.
The fact is Ms. Sherrod did help the white farmers mentioned in her speech. They personally credit her with helping to save their family farm.
It's fairly common practice for political organizations stoking the outrage of the day to put their outraged statements in the voice of an official of the affected group -- a Hispanic spokesperson to take offense on an ethnic issue, for instance, or a woman to take offense when women have been allegedly insulted.
This may sometimes happen because the person was actually offended, but since such statements are typically drafted by committee, and since the name on the statement is typically just another choice the committee makes (a statement from a deputy press secretary signals a minor issue; the chairman signals a major one), it's usually just a way to amplify the message.
And RNC co-chairman Jan Larimer, a prominent Wyoming Republican woman, appears to be the RNC's designated offense-taker on matters of gender.
Today's statement:
Senator Leahy’s accusations of gender bias on the part of Republicans are outrageous, offensive and outdated. It is startling that he would insinuate that a candidate for our nation’s highest court should not be held to the highest level of scrutiny simply because of her gender. As a member of the Senate’s rapidly-shrinking Old Boys club, you have to wonder if he has also missed the record number of Republican women running for elected office this fall on issues that speak to small business owners, job-creators and entrepreneurs of both genders. Senator Leahy should apologize for failing to understand that women today don’t need throwbacks like he is to protect them. Women today are doing just fine out-performing those who insist on underestimating them.
The words made me wonder the last time I'd heard from Jan Larimer. Oh, right:
Senator Specter’s rude and arrogant comments yesterday were not only disrespectful to Congresswoman Bachmann, but demeaning to all women. Senator Specter should immediately apologize to the Congresswoman and to all of his constituents for such disgraceful behavior. Women should never be treated as second class citizens. It’s clear Senator Specter has spent too much time in Washington, and this November I am confident Pennsylvanians will choose a new direction.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) denied Florida Gov. Charlie Crist’s claims that Reid’s reached out to him in recent weeks, seeking to end speculation that he is quietly trying to woo Crist to caucus with Democrats if the independent wins his Senate race this fall.
“You must be reading somebody’s mail other than mine,” the Nevada Democrat said Tuesday when asked why he’d spoken with Crist in recent weeks. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Asked whether he’d spoken to Crist about joining the Democratic Caucus should he win in November, Reid said: “Of course not,” saying he was supporting Democratic Rep. Kendrick Meek in the race. “I placed one call to Gov. Crist, and I was glad I did that — that conversation was several months ago.”
As news of Rod Blagojevich’s federal indictment broke in late April, stenciled graffiti portraits of a fearful-looking Blago wearing his signature track suit appeared in Chicago alleys and underpasses, as well as a few more prominent locations, like the wall outside Wicker Park bar the Violet Hour. We thought the stencils were bleepin’ golden—a perfect blend of pop culture, public disdain for crooked Illinois politics and guerrilla street art. Three months later, they remain visible (and illegal) all over town.
