Oh, No! Election Day is Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010...

Let's Poke Holes in the Anti-Incumbent Hype

Conservatives certainly are angrier and more mobilized than I’ve seen them in years, and in many races they are lining up behind conservative candidates who criticize incumbent Republicans for not being conservative or confrontational enough.

And in a few Democratic primaries, more liberal voters and activists have taken on incumbents not identified with the party’s left (Specter and Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln, for example).

But come November, we will have a rather traditional midterm election. Angry voters will turn out to vote against the party in charge. And that’s why, ultimately, 2010 will be remembered as a Republican wave election, not an anti-incumbent year.

Oh, No! Election Day is Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010...

Nevada gubernatorial candidate Rory Reid (D) is on the air with his first campaign ad and it’s missing one thing: his last name.

Reid, the son of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), doesn’t say his name at any point during the ad, but it prominently features his campaign logo, “Rory 2010.”

Observers noticed that throughout the gubernatorial primary, Rory Reid seemed to distance himself from his father, who faced high disapproval ratings from voters. …

Rory Reid’s website also neglects to mention his last name on its main banner, which reads “Rory 2010.”

Settlement Was Paid in Whitman Shoving Incident
By BRAD STONE

SAN FRANCISCO — During her 10 years as chief executive of eBay, Meg Whitman, the Republican candidate for governor of California, was known as a demanding leader who did not hesitate to express displeasure with employees who failed to live up to her standards.

But on one occasion, she was accused of going too far — and paid for it.

In June 2007, an eBay employee claimed that Ms. Whitman became angry and forcefully pushed her in an executive conference room at eBay’s headquarters, according to multiple former eBay employees with knowledge of the incident. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter was delicate and was deemed to be strictly confidential.

The employee, Young Mi Kim, was preparing Ms. Whitman for a news media interview that day. Ms. Kim, who was not injured in the incident, hired a lawyer and threatened a lawsuit, but the dispute was resolved under the supervision of a private mediator.

Two of the former employees said the company paid a six-figure financial settlement to Ms. Kim, which one of them characterized as “around $200,000.”

An agreement to keep the matter confidential was also part of the settlement, and the authorities were not involved.

Ms. Whitman was counseled in the matter, the former eBay employees said, by the company’s human resources lawyers and by Henry Gomez, then president of the Skype unit at eBay and now a senior adviser to Ms. Whitman’s campaign.

Ms. Kim still works at eBay and is now a senior manager for corporate and executive communications. At the time of the incident, she had recently joined eBay from the Gap. She left the company for about four months, returning to work in October 2007 after the matter was resolved.

When reached by telephone on Monday, Ms. Kim said the issue was a “private matter” and declined to comment. Later, in an e-mail message, Ms. Kim said she and Ms. Whitman had overcome their differences.

“Yes, we had an unfortunate incident, but we resolved it in a way that speaks well for her and for eBay,” Ms. Kim said. “And ultimately, I came back to the company, which is not something I had to do.”

The Whitman campaign issued a statement signed by Ms. Whitman that described Ms. Kim as a “respected colleague and valuable asset to the company.”

“In any high-pressure working environment, tensions can surface,” the statement said. “Young Mi and I had a professional disagreement, which we put behind us. She and I continued to work together at eBay, where I valued her skilled counsel and thorough professionalism.”

Ms. Whitman won the California Republican primary for governor last week by boasting of her management experience and an unwillingness to “let California fail.”

Central to her résumé, which does not include any political experience, is her tenure running eBay, during which she took a small auction site with 30 employees and expanded it into a Fortune 500 company with 15,500 employees.

Interviews with many former eBay executives who worked with Ms. Whitman suggest that the episode with Ms. Kim, and the behavior alleged, was an anomaly.

They say Ms. Whitman was demanding and would often express sharp bursts of anger toward employees whose work or preparation she found lacking. But they knew of no other similar accusations.

According to several current and former eBay employees, the incident with Ms. Kim took place on the morning of June 1, 2007, when Ms. Whitman was preparing for an interview with the news wire Reuters on an online virtual world called Second Life, where people appear as cartoonlike avatars.

Ms. Kim was briefing Ms. Whitman for the interview that morning by writing talking points on the whiteboard in Ms. Whitman’s personal conference room at eBay’s headquarters in San Jose, Calif.

Details of the dispute are somewhat vague, since no one else appears to have witnessed it. But according to employees familiar with the incident, Ms. Whitman became angry with Ms. Kim before the interview, partly because Ms. Whitman felt unprepared for the conversation with Reuters.

Ms. Kim later told at least one colleague that Ms. Whitman used an expletive and shoved her. According to one of the eBay employees knowledgeable about Ms. Whitman’s version of the incident, Ms. Whitman said that she had physically guided Ms. Kim out of the conference room.

Ms. Kim left eBay’s offices later that day, and in the ensuing weeks, Ms. Whitman tried to reach out to Ms. Kim several times to apologize, according to one former eBay employee close to Ms. Kim. Later, eBay suggested supervised mediation to resolve the matter, and Ms. Kim agreed.

The mediation took place in the San Francisco office of Jams, a private dispute resolution service that employs many former judges, the former employee said. Jams did not respond to requests for comment.

Ms. Whitman announced she was leaving eBay a few months after the mediation, in January 2008. She had said early in her time at eBay that she anticipated staying at the company for a decade. The company was under a variety of pressures at the time, as its stock sharply declined because of a stagnant auctions business and competitive advances from the likes of Amazon.com and Google.

On the campaign trail and in debates against her primary opponents, Ms. Whitman has been a steady presence, although she has been criticized as being awkward with the news media.

In March, she drew fire when she declined to take questions from assembled reporters at a campaign event in Oakland that the campaign had called an “open press stop."

The fact that she is held in high regard by some former colleagues has been a point of pride for the Whitman campaign. In the campaign’s second statewide television advertisement, four former eBay executives and one former eBay board member praised Ms. Whitman’s leadership style.

Kesha Rogers, the winner of a Democrat primary for Congress in Texas, is interesting. She is a 33 year old African-American who won 53% of the votes against two opponents who split the remaining 47%.
She has allied herself with the Lyndon Larouche Youth Movement. I don't know much about them. I vaguely recall they are against globalization and our membership in the UN.
Her district in the suburbs of Houston includes many NASA workers, upset with Obama due to his restructuring of our space mission. One of her campaign slogans was "Save NASA. Impeach Obama." Another was "Send me to Congress, and we can send our children to Mars."
She also toted around a poster of Obama with a Hitler-esque moustache drawn on with a Sharpie.
It should also be noted that this was an open primary with no proof of party membership required.
There are several A2Kers in the area. I will ask them for comments and will add this contest to the ones we are watching on the other thread.

History shows how difficult it is for the president’s party to pass on blame to an earlier administration. In 1982, Republicans lost more than two dozen House seats because of a recession that eventually pulled the country out of a stagflation that occurred during the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blaming Carter for the nation’s problems two years after voters threw him out of office didn’t work for Republicans in 1982, and it isn’t likely to work any better for Democrats this year.

http://rothenbergpoliticalreport.blogspot.com/

It's looking more and more likely that Wisconsin will be in the top tier of competitive Senate races this fall. Russ Feingold leads challenger Ron Johnson by only two points, 45-43. Johnson is polling closer to Feingold than Tommy Thompson was as he contemplated a potential campaign.

Wisconsin voters are evenly divided in their feelings about Feingold with 42% giving him good marks and 42% think he's doing a poor job. Feingold's reviews are nearly completely polarized along party lines, with 71% of Democrats approving of him and 72% of Republicans disapproving. Independents are also against him by a 39/46 margin, reflecting their unhappiness with most all incumbents across the country right now.

Wisconsin. The model is not really willing to bank very much money on Russ Feingold being beaten by some no-name based on Rasmussen polling alone, especially with Feingold's approval numbers still being okay-ish. If other pollsters start to show the same thing, as PPP has hinted that they might, it could start to feel differently.