Brendan Nyhan

Add Charlie Rangel to the list of House Democrats calling on their Senate colleagues to force real filibusters:

[A]s Congress struggles to adjourn for Christmas, relations between House Democrats and their colleagues in the Senate have devolved into finger-pointing.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) accuses Senate Democratic leaders of developing “Stockholm syndrome,” showing sympathy to their Republican captors by caving in on legislation to provide middle-class tax cuts paid for with tax increases on the super-rich, tying war funding to troop withdrawal timelines, and mandating renewable energy quotas. If Republicans want to filibuster a bill, Rangel said, Reid should keep the bill on the Senate floor and force the Republicans to talk it to death.

Reid, in turn, has taken to the Senate floor to criticize what he called the speaker’s “iron hand” style of governance.

Democrats in each chamber are now blaming their colleagues in the other for the mess in which they find themselves. The predicament caused the majority party yesterday surrender to President Bush on domestic spending levels, drop a cherished renewable-energy mandate and move toward leaving a raft of high-profile legislation, from addressing the mortgage crisis to providing middle-class tax relief, undone or incomplete.

“If there’s going to be a filibuster, let’s hear the damn filibuster,” Rangel fumed. “Let’s fight this damned thing out.”

As I said before, I don’t understand what Rangel and the other House Dems think real filibusters would accomplish.

PS Every time there’s a change in party control in the Senate we go through this process of recrimination when the majority runs up against the filibuster. Did the House Democrats think the filibuster magically went away in 2006? What were they expecting?

PPS “Stockholm syndrome”? Wow!

On Tuesday, I asked if I knew anyone knew the sourcing on this quote from Sally Bedell Smith’s WSJ op-ed, which also apparently appears in her book (my emphasis):

For many years, one of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s closest friends, TV producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, has been fond of saying that when the Clintons “are dead and gone, each of them is going to be buried next to a president of the United States.”

It is an idea that the Clintons began talking about decades ago. Back in 1974, Bill Clinton told his friend Diane Kincaid that Hillary “could be president someday.” During his own presidential campaign in 1992, he said in an interview, “Eight years of Hillary Clinton? Why not?”

I was tipped that the quote originates in Gail Sheehy’s book Hillary’s Choice (pp. 197-198).

While Bedell Smith makes it sound like Bill Clinton brought up the idea of “[e]ight years of Hillary Clinton” unprompted, Sheehy apparently drew out the statement in question:

Eight years of Bill, eight years of Hill.

That was the dream. It was Hillary’s private slogan, shared with one of her closest intimates, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason. Early in his 1992 presidential campaign, I asked then Governor Clinton if he was concerned about being upstaged by his wife. He was unfazed. “I’ve always liked strong women. It doesn’t bother me for people to see her and get excited and say she could be president too.”

“So, after eight years of Bill Clinton?” I teased.

“Eight years of Hillary Clinton,” he said. “Why not?”

While Bedell Smith’s representation of this quote isn’t as bad the other distortions catalogued by Media Matters, she is still omitting relevant context.

TNR editor Frank Foer has an amusing post up on the wacky world of political air travel:

Some of my best campaign memories come from air travel. I once awoke from a nap on a transcontinental flight to find Alan Keyes hovering over me. After I rubbed my eyes, he was still there. Apparently, I was sitting a row behind his kids. Where Keyes traveled in first class, he kept his kids back in the cheap seats. As I arose, Keyes delivered a lecture on the curvature of the planet. It was a stunning performance–the same slap shot gesticulation and stentorian tone that he deployed in his compulsively watchable turns at GOP debates. There was no difference, apparently, between his public and private personas–a disturbing and (weirdly) delightful epiphany. Keyes, by the way, will join today’s Des Moines Register debate.

When I journeyed to Des Moines last night, I hopped a flight that should rebrand itself Conventional Wisdom One. It is the lone direct flight from Washington National to Des Moines, and it leaves every afternoon at 4:55. The airline assigned me to sit next to a colleague from National Review–not nearly as awkward as you would imagine. Needless to say, David Broder was there, too. (Yes, he talks about the virtues of America’s governors even in his down time.) National Review had just endorsed Romney, a source of much buzz. There were lots of jokes about what John Edwards might say about the exceptionally cramped conditions on our Northwest jet. As I plugged in my earbuds and began to read through a stack of manuscripts, I imagined the screed Glenn Greenwald might write after witnessing this scene.

The only thing funnier than Hillary Clinton questioning Barack Obama’s experience is Hillary Clinton questioning his electability:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign abruptly shifted gears Tuesday, arguing Obama can’t beat a Republican. Until now, her attacks targeted Obama’s experience, not his electability.

Pouncing on a report that revealed Obama staked out stridently liberal positions in a 1996 candidate questionnaire, Hillary Clinton’s campaign argued his past record is easy ammunition for the GOP.

I think the Obama campaign had exactly the right response:

Obama spokesman Bill Burton fired back, “For a candidate who 50% of the country says they won’t consider voting for, raising questions about electability is a curious strategy.”

Up is down!

Like Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee is now selling electability in a general election campaign against Hillary Clinton — this was just the top Google ad in my sidebar:

Who Can Defeat Hillary?
Governor Mike Huckabee. Conservatives Find Their Candidate.
www.mikehuckabee.com

But as I noted earlier, the Huckabee backlash is just getting rolling. He may win Iowa, but his campaign will collapse soon afterward. The most important factor is that Huckabee is severely underfunded and has few elite allies in his party. As a result, the flow of negative information about him will be relentless as other Republican candidates, economic conservatives, and liberals pound him in the press and journalists dig up more dirt. The Democratic operative who told Drudge that Huckabee has a “glass jaw” in the general election is probably right, but he won’t get a chance to help break it.

In recent days, polls have showed that Barack Obama has drawn even with Hillary Clinton in Iowa and has cut modestly into her lead in New Hampshire. It’s important news, to be sure, but his futures prices on
the Intrade prediction market have gone up way more than I would have expected.

Here’s the lifetime history of the market price for the Democratic nomination contract on Obama (its value can be interpreted as the percent likelihood of him winning):

And here’s the price of the contract over the last week:

Have the odds of Obama winning the race actually increased by nine percentage points in the last seven days? It seems disproportionate to the gains that he’s made.

Update 12/12 10:13 AM: Maybe I spoke too soon — the latest New Hampshire poll has Obama and Clinton tied. Wow.

Not long ago, many journalists and Democrats were charmed by a friendly Southern Republican governor who appeared to be reasonably bipartisan and concerned with the plight of the poor. And then he turned into … George W. Bush. I don’t think Mike Huckabee is going to turn into Bush, exactly, but you’d think people would be more wary.

Sally Bedell Smith uses a quote today in the Wall Street Journal that I’ve never heard before (my emphasis):

For many years, one of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s closest friends, TV producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, has been fond of saying that when the Clintons “are dead and gone, each of them is going to be buried next to a president of the United States.”

It is an idea that the Clintons began talking about decades ago. Back in 1974, Bill Clinton told his friend Diane Kincaid that Hillary “could be president someday.” During his own presidential campaign in 1992, he said in an interview, “Eight years of Hillary Clinton? Why not?”

Does anyone have the sourcing on this? It appears to be from her book on the Clintons, but I can’t find the quote anywhere in Nexis.

Update 12/12 8:37 AM: See the Media Matters takedown of the book. There are very good reasons to be skeptical of Smith’s claims.

The Hotline gets to the core of the Republican presidential race:

Huckabee is giving GOPers something other WH ’08ers haven’t: A reason to vote for someone instead feeling obligated to vote against someone (whether that’s HRC or another GOPer). Sure, Huck’s got a lot of liabilities. But, is his “Dumond/AIDS/immigration/taxes” baggage any heavier than Giuliani’s “pro-choice/Kerick/ISG/Judith” or Romney’s “landscaping/flip-flopping/Mormon” luggage?

For a while, I’ve been bashing Hillary’s 2000 win in New York, which her campaign thinks proves she is a strong candidate who can win over moderate Republicans, etc. As I showed, however, she actually only did did about as well as Chuck Schumer did in 1998 — an average Democratic performance in a Democratic-leaning state.

In response to questions from the New York Times about her potential effect on down-ballot races, the Clinton campaign trotted out a new lame bit of evidence from New York:

Advisers to Mrs. Clinton, who has long sought to parry concerns within her party that she is too polarizing, dispute the idea that she could hinder Democratic candidates in Republican districts. They note that New York Democrats gained a net of four House seats in her two Senate elections and that she campaigned actively for House contenders in both.

However, the “net of four House seats” actually means the Democrats dropped a seat in 2000 before picking up three in 2006. All three 2006 pickups came in relatively balanced districts (Kerry drew 47% of the vote in the 19th, 44% in the 20th, and 47% in the 24th). Also, the gains in 2006 were fueled by a national Democratic wave during a campaign in which Hillary did not face a credible Republican challenger. It’s not at all clear that these results would extrapolate to more unfavorable terrain in other parts of the country during a hotly contested presidential race.