Pelosi or not Pelosi? That is the question for House Democrats
Nancy Pelosi — the first woman Speaker of the House — is soon to become the first woman ex-Speaker of the House.
But the trouncing of House Democrats in Tuesday’s elections, which flipped control of that chamber to Republicans, has not deterred Pelosi from wanting to hang onto the leadership reins.
She announced on Twitter and in a letter to her colleagues that she will run for House Minority Leader in the new Congress. It’s a position she held before becoming House Speaker — third in line to the presidency – in 2007.
And back then it was also a first. Pelosi became the first woman to lead a major party in the House when she was chosen as minority leader to replace Dick Gephardt, who stepped down after disappointing results in the 2002 midterms.
Before she made her intention public, some members of her caucus were quite publicly saying they wanted somebody different in the minority leader chair.
For instance, Congressman Dan Boren of Oklahoma released a statement this morning that said: “I cannot in good conscience support Nancy Pelosi as Leader. I intend to support a more conservative Democrat alternative.”
Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, tweets “Nancy Pelosi was called most powerful Speaker since Sam Rayburn. Now she wants to imitate Rayburn–stay as Min Ldr after losing top post.”
Contrite Obama shows personal side
It wasn’t quite a Bill Clinton-style “I feel your pain” moment, but for President Barack Obama it was about as emotional as he ever gets in public.
Often criticized as aloof and cerebral, Obama showed his personal side at Wednesday’s news conference.
His tone throughout was one of a chastened leader, aware that voters had dealt him and his party a rebuke over the failure to fix the economy.
The contrition was palpable both in his words, his subdued demeanor and his admission that the election had been in part a referendum on him, and that he had gotten a “shellacking.”
“I’m doing a whole lot of reflecting and I think that there are going to be areas in policy where we’re going to have to do a better job.” He made clear that he was reflecting on the need to keep his promises on transparency in decision-making and the need for better outreach to businesses, among other issues. But when pressed directly on his leadership style toward the end of the news conference, Obama said he thinks the effects of being in the White House bubble had made him seem removed from the struggles of ordinary Americans. He contrasted this with his famed ability to connect on the campaign trail in 2008. “Folks didn’t have any complaints about my leadership style when I was running around Iowa for a year and they got a pretty good look at me, up close and personal, and they were able to lift the hood and kick the tires. And, you know, I think they understood that my story was theirs.” Obama said his relationship with the American people was going through a “growth process.” It peaked “at this incredible high,” then became “rockier and tougher,” he said. “And it’s going to, I’m sure, have some more ups and downs during the course of me being in this office.”
Photo credit: Reuters/Larry Downing (Obama at post-election news conference)
Election is over, now can they get along?
It’s the day after the election and the big question now is will they play nice?
The Tea Party’s coming to town, Republicans seized control of the House, and Democrats are still in charge of the White House and Senate.
Soon-to-be House Speaker John Boehner today said he saw no problem with incorporating members of the Tea Party into the Republican Party. And Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said the goal was “how do we meet in the middle?”
Tuesday’s election shows that American voters want Washington to stop the political squabbling and fix the economy, said Assistant Senate Democratic Leader Dick Durbin.
“As long as this is a weak economy with uncertainty for people when it comes to their jobs and their homes, they are telling Washington to roll up your sleeves and get to work,” he said. Durbin, a close ally to President Barack Obama, made the comments in an interview with Reuters while votes were being counted in Tuesday’s election that saw Republicans take control of the House of Representatives and cut deeply into the Democrats’ Senate majority. “We need to move beyond filibusters and enter a real conversation about passing legislation that this country needs,” Durbin said. He acknowledged that the upcoming 2012 White House race could make finding common ground difficult, but that the two parties must do so. “I hope the president can really appeal to Republicans to at least work with us and put aside the presidential race while we try to solve some of the problems we face,” Durbin said. “We have to get together to get this economy moving forward,” he said.
Photo credit: Reuters/Jim Young (Obama hugs Durbin at a reception for Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias in Chicago)
Reuters.com has the midterms covered
After a long and bitter campaign, Americans voted in midterm elections that could sweep Democrats from power in Congress and slam the brakes on President Barack Obama’s legislative agenda.
Our midterm coverage has all the angles covered, with the latest breaking news and developments, as well as thoughtful insight and analysis.
In between reporting the results and implications, our White House team will be tweeting the latest insights from the nation’s capital and posting behind-the-headlines stories to Front Row Washington.
A live blog will deliver news updates from Reuters reporters on the ground, commentary from columnists James Pethokoukis, Bernd Debusmann, Joshua Spivak and Gregg Easterbrook, and analysis by Cliff Young of polling firm Ipsos. Look for frequent updates to that from around 7 pm ET.
And for a more concentrated view of specific state races, check out our interactive Twitter tracker. This real-time tool will aggregate tweets from candidates, commentators and local media from 15 key states.
Our rich multimedia coverage will feature video and pictures from the campaign trail to the voting booth, and our interactive factboxes highlight new faces and look ahead to possible outcomes.
We hope you find out coverage useful, insightful and (where appropriate) fun. And as always, we welcome constructive comments.
Washington Extra – Midterm, one-term?
As we approach half-time in his presidency, just over half of Americans believe Barack Obama will not win re-election in 2012. Our final Reuters/Ipsos poll showed just one-third of those surveyed still thought President Obama would win a second term. An amazing transformation in the national mood in less than two years since the inauguration.
A 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll found 39 percent of those surveyed believe Obama should be a one-term president, compared to 26 percent who wanted a second term and 33 percent who were unsure.
But as that oracle of election wisdom (my barber) observed to me today, for all the polls Obama’s chances in 2012 may come down to just one number. The jobless rate. Anything over 8 percent in 2012, and it will be a huge uphill battle for the president, Curtis predicted. Six percent and he stands a chance. Wise words indeed.
Finally today, and now that sanity (and/or fear) has been restored to these elections, we can end with some irony.
Our poll showed Obama scoring best for his performance on the war in Iraq, one achievement which arguably had more to do with his predecessor than him.
Obama’s worst scores? On the economy, the deficit and taxes, of course. No matter that the financial crisis hit on George W. Bush’s watch, that the federal tax burden has fallen in the past two years or that the seeds of the deficit problem were, according to Democrats at least, sown by the previous administration.
These are Obama’s problems now, and these polls suggest he needs to solve them if he is going to have any chance of a second term.
Is this the most negative campaign ever?
If you think political ads on TV this year are more negative than ever, here’s some data that back up your observation.
An academic consortium called the Wesleyan Media Project, which says it provides “real time” tracking of all political television advertising, says in a report issued on Monday that in the last few weeks it has charted a “large uptick in negative ads.”
A couple of weeks ago, the same group said that the rate of negative advertising this year did not appear to be that much higher than in other recent general election campaigns.
But data analyzed in the final stages of the midterm contests led the group to conclude that 2010 turned out to be “the most negative campaign in recent history by both sides,” with “a marked increase in negativity as the general election season has heated up and drawn close to Election Day.”
Raw numbers cited by the project show that around half the ads broadcast by both official campaigns and “independent” interest groups related to individual congressional races are ads which “mention an opponent” – in other words, attack ads.
The project says that of the pro-Republican ads that it monitored, 56 percent mentioned an opponent, compared to 49.9 percent of pro-Democrat ads. During a comparable 7-week period before the 2008 election, the project said, 49.3 percent of pro-Republican ads were attacks, compared with 42.5 percent of pro-Democrat ads.
“Republicans have been more likely to attack in the waning days of this campaign than Democrats,” said Travis Ridout, a Washington State University political scientist who worked on the project, which was organized by Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
Reuters/Ipsos poll: 52 pct don’t think Obama will be re-elected
President Barack Obama is not up for re-election this week, but the outcome of congressional elections will be seen as a referendum on his policies.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll predicts that Republicans will take control of the House of Representatives by winning 231 seats, compared with 204 seats for Democrats, in the midterm elections Tuesday.
Among likely voters, 50 percent said they would vote for the Republican candidate, while 44 percent said they would vote for the Democrat, the poll showed.
Looking ahead to the 2012 presidential election, 52 percent believe Obama will not win re-election, while 35 percent think he will.
The Reuters/Ipsos national survey found that 51 percent disapproved of the way Obama is doing his job, while 45 percent approved.
The Obama administration received the worst ratings for its handling of the economy, taxes and the deficit — all key election issues this year. On the Iraq war and the environment, the administration was seen has having made a positive difference, according to the poll.
Other recent polls:
Twitter opinion analysis shows even split between parties
Social media hasn’t been around long enough for pundits to determine how accurately it reflects the mood of a nation, but Democrats grasping for positive news might take hope from a shift in the tone on Twitter.
Our analysis of some 1.6 million tweets since August, using sentiment analysis software from market research firm Crimson Hexagon, shows a more favorable trend for President Obama’s party in recent weeks.
When we first examined online sentiment back in the summer, we found considerably less enthusiasm among Twitter users for the Democrats than for the Republicans.
In mid-September, however, there was a shift, with the number of pro-Democratic tweets rising to meet the pro-GOP numbers and eventually surpassing them. This dynamic has held relatively stable for the last month as you can see from this graph:
This movement is a continuation of the trend we noticed in mid-September. Pro-Democratic numbers began to pick up then amid the rise in the profile of the conservative Tea Party movement within the Republican party.
There has been an interesting move in negative sentiment as well since late September – the 23rd to be exact. That day saw a spike in anti-Republican tweets, many of which were potshots taken by GOP opponents at the party’s “Pledge to America,” which was officially unveiled that day.
The NY Times published an article on this trend yesterday, but given the new-ness of the sentiment analyisis tools the politcal campaigns are using, gauging public opinion via Twitter is still a bit premature. Here’s the article, and a link to a blog explaining the accuracy of sentiment analysis tools:
http://www.domusinc.com/blog/2010/11/usi ng-social-media-to-gauge-political-suppo rt-and-trends/
“Obamacare” could help Democrats in 2012
Republicans are aiming their guns at health reform as they campaign to win midterm control of Congress on Tuesday, and many Democrats are ducking the issue.
But come 2012, the overhaul pushed through by President Barack Obama could help him and his fellow Democrats get re-elected.
Republicans accuse Democrats who voted for “Obamacare” of supporting a government takeover of healthcare. Many promise to repeal the reform passed in March after contentious debate and extended medical insurance to millions of Americans have none.
But public opinion on the law has improved — according to Democratic pollsters Stan Greenberg and Celinda Lake — and will work for Democrats in the presidential and congressional elections two years down the road.
“Every day that passes, healthcare gets more popular,” Lake said at a forum hosted by Health Affairs magazine.
“Candidates have changed their rhetoric from repeal to repeal and replace. They’ve noticed, as we have, that voters don’t want to start all over again,” she said.
Listen to audio from the forum, provided by Health Affairs.
You must be joking. Premiums in CT up by 47%, CA up by 30%. And the full effect will not be felt until 2014. We will not know just how much additional premiums will cost till then. The elimination of high deductible policies is going to produce premium increases in triple digits.
Then Medicare will be cut by $500 billion, and 23 million new patients will be added with no increases in numbers of doctors, nurses, or hospitals. This is going to make people wair months, or even years just to see a specialist. Then a Government bureaucrat will have to deny treatment to the elderly because the budgets will be cut. That is, unless a member of Congress pressures the decision makers in return for campaign contributions. Some call this a bribe.
And compounding the problem is that several of my Doctors have said they did not enter into medicine to be overruled by an administrator who is not a Doctor. So, they will retire, or be forced out of practice by the combination of an unrealistic fee structure and crushing paperwork and reporting requirements.
So, costs will go way up, fees paid to medical practitioners will be subpar like today’s Medicare payments, there will be many Doctors who will retire or quit medicine making waiting lines unnaceptabie, or even impossible. This is the situation today in Hawaii where there are islands which just do not have Doctors in high risk specialities.
What a deal! Higher costs, less choice, rationing of health care, long waiting times, unavailability of Doctors, crowding out of senior citizens with immigrants who will vote for the Democrats and will demand even more services.
And we are expected to like this. Wrong.
Feds unlikely to launch campaign finance probe anytime soon
For weeks, leading Democrats have castigated pro-Republican special interest groups involved in the current election campaign for what they describe as secretive fundraising practices.
In an effort to call further attention to the activities of groups like American Crossroads GPS, a political fundraising committee which GOP guru Karl Rove helped to set up, some prominent Democrats and non-partisan election watchdogs have written law enforcement agencies demanding official investigations.
But there is little indication that any relevant agency is going to launch an in-depth probe anytime soon.
In early October, the liberal activist group MoveOn.org sent a letter to the Justice Department demanding that it investigate allegations that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had received election-related funds from unspecified foreign sources — something the Chamber emphatically denies. A similar request for an investigation was sent by Senator Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, to the Federal Election Commission.
Around the same time, two political finance watchdog groups, the Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21, sent a letter to the Internal Revenue Service requesting an investigation into whether Crossroads GPS is violating its status as a tax-exempt organization by spending too much of its time and resources on electioneering.
Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, also sent a letter to the IRS requesting that it conduct a broad “survey” of such tax exempt groups to see if they are following the rules or merit further inquiry.
Groups targeted by pro-Democrat and liberal activists for such complaints, including the Chamber of Commerce and Crossroads GPS, insist they are operating entirely within the law and vigorously deny any wrongdoing.
Pelosi: Go back home. You have already played a big part in driving the Democrats in the ground.
Good bye
Good riddence