Elections & Political Parties

Here are the five questions that I wish would be asked at today’s debate, but probably won’t be.

There are pivotal moments in politics that shape our view of the democratic process. For some, the election of President Obama was such an event. For other, more sadistic, types, perhaps it was when Richard M. Nixon resigned. For me, however, it's the story former Democratic Rep. Eric Massa told last week about an alleged encounter -- the White House denies it happened -- between the troubled pol and the president's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.

Amidst the speculation over whether David Axelrod hates Rahm Emanuel or Rahm Emanuel hates David Axelrod or Lawrence Summers hates them both, the punditocracy has glossed over something significant: Team Obama has had one hell of a month. In late January, health care reform was widely considered dead. Now it’s considered a better than even bet. It could all still end in tears, of course. But for the moment, Barack Obama has his mojo back. And he has it back for one basic reason: He’s given up the dream that he could transcend the partisan divide.

Joseph Stack had barely finished flying his airplane into a Texas office building when the battle over his legacy began.

Bloggers on the left asked why people — especially people on the right — weren’t calling him a terrorist. “If this had been done by a brownish-looking Muslim guy whose suicide note paralleled Islamist political themes,” wrote Matthew Yglesias, then right wingers would be “demanding that anyone who refused to label the attack ‘terrorism’ be put up on treason charges.”

Californians, meet your next governor.

Let’s call him Jerry Schwarzenegger.

As former California Gov. Jerry Brown officially rolled out his 2010 campaign for governor this week, he was confronted by questions about how a new Brown term in the stateh ouse might be different than his first, an entertaining if unfocused eight-year stretch from 1975 to 1983.

We’re past deadline at Fox & Hounds Daily, so these are hastily assembled first impressions of today’s U.S. Senate radio debate. And I’m scoring these folks on presentation—their views on foreign policy and national security, the subject of the debate, are so similar that there is simply no reason to get into that here.

Joe Mathews, a fourth-generation Californian and longtime student of Golden State politics, is an Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. In this podcast, Mathews discusses the upcoming gubernatorial race, the long-running fiscal crisis, and the basket of problems that awaits whomever replaces Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Meg Whitman says she wants to run California state government like a business.

(cross posted at Fox & Hounds Daily)

Right now, Meg Whitman is spending millions to convince Republican primary voters that she’s the most authentic, conservative, anti-tax candidate for governor. Steve Poizner is doing the same (though he’s spending fewer millions).

Harold Ford is exiting the New York Senate race the same way he almost entered it: incoherently. Start with his supposed reason for not running. “If I run,” he wrote in The New York Times, “the likely result would be a brutal and highly negative Democratic primary—a primary where the winner emerges weakened and the Republican strengthened. I refuse to do anything that would help Republicans win a Senate seat in New York, and give the Senate majority to the Republicans.”