News & discussion on house and senate races

So what's the worry? If I recall correctly (I do), you said (the House, at least) would be a "Dem rout".

Things not looking so rosy for your side, all of a sudden?

What garbage. The patron saint of the modern Democratic Party is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the modern Republican Party is trying to pull his New Deal down piece by piece.

Actually, I think that was more of a state thing than Federal.

One side note: the fellow who had more to do with locking up the Japanese Americans than anyone later got appointed to the US Supreme Court. His name was Earl Warren, and his name has become synonymous with courts granting recognition of civil rights to groups and individuals.

kelticwizard wrote:

What garbage. The patron saint of the modern Democratic Party is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the modern Republican Party is trying to pull his New Deal down piece by piece.

You mean the Franklin Delano Roosevelt who imprisoned several hundred thousands innocent Americans for the sole crime of descending from Japanese ancestors? That's your patron saint?

Seems pretty clear to me what he meant - way to go to pull a statement off into leftfield.

Campaign Gone South

Florida's Katherine Harris Continues Her Senate Race, Shedding Staff Along the Way

Washington Post
Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Katherine Harris, who is trying to become a U.S. senator, says she is writing a tell-all about the many people who have wronged her. This includes, but is not necessarily limited to: the Republican leaders who didn't want her to run, the press that has covered her troubled campaign, and the many staffers who have quit her employ, whom she accuses of colluding with her opponent.

She is vague about what, precisely, makes her a victim, but she says she has it all documented.

"I've been writing it all year," she says in that kittenish voice. She often smiles and cocks her head as if she's letting you in on a secret. "It's going to be a great book."

If it is, it may be one of very few things that go well for the two-term Republican congresswoman.

The Democrat she is challenging, Sen. Bill Nelson, was once considered highly vulnerable. Nowadays, according to recent polls, Harris is down by 26 or 35 points, approaching political rigor mortis.

"The only way Bill Nelson could lose this," says Darryl Paulson, a political scientist (and Republican) at the University of South Florida, "is if he got himself in a drug-induced stupor and ran naked down the main street of his home town."

"They can make the polls say whatever they want," Harris says. She says pollsters sometimes call her house and then hang up " 'cause we're not answering them the way they like."

The way Harris sees it, a vast left- and right-wing conspiracy, encompassing both the "liberal media" and the Republican "elite," is attempting to keep her out of the Senate. She says anyone could see the way the panel of questioners coddled Nelson at their debate last week. Her voice gets all high and mocking as she imitates them.

" Ooooh, Senator Nelson," she says. "I mean, come on."

Perhaps the worst blow to Harris's campaign has been the stories that have emerged from former staffers. They describe a Jekyll-and-Hyde candidate who can be seductively charming at one moment and pitch a temper tantrum the next, throwing a cellphone at a wall or a sheaf of papers at a campaign manager. Former chief adviser Ed Rollins, who managed Ronald Reagan's reelection to the White House in 1984, said working for Harris was like "being in insanity camp." He likened her staff to dogs that have been kicked.

Before he became the first of three campaign managers to quit, Jim Dornan programmed his cellphone to play the theme song from "The Exorcist" when Harris called.

During an interview in the livestock arena, amid the ghosts of her cousins' cows, Harris talks about two of her greatest passions: art and Israel. [..] After Harris's quote about the importance of electing Christians was published in a Baptist publication, her campaign went into damage control, issuing a press release discussing Harris's love for Israel and explaining that while she was speaking to a Christian audience, she really meant that "people of faith" should be involved in government.

Harris does love talking about Israel. She's proud that Israelis sometimes assume she's one of them and talk to her in Hebrew. She is a Christian but has called herself a "wannabe" Jew. During the bitterly contested recount in 2000, which she oversaw as Florida's secretary of state, she compared herself to the Biblical character Queen Esther, who risked her life to save the Jews.

She says that when her husband of 10 years, wealthy Swedish businessman Anders Ebbeson, asked her to marry him, she first extracted a promise that they could live in the Holy Land one day. She doesn't know why she's always been so fascinated by the country.

"I can remember riding my bike to piano lessons and thinking about Israel," she says. "I thought I was adopted for a while."

Several of her former staffers say they would have kept silent about goings-on in the Harris campaign if Harris herself had not publicly criticized them after they left, accusing them of being bad at their jobs, of putting "knives in my back" and of working with the Nelson campaign. They describe her as a micromanager, unable to trust her staff, prone to tears and rages over tiny things. They say she would rewrite speeches and press releases over and over. She would get upset if an aide hadn't brought her the correct coffee order from Starbucks. Dornan, the former campaign manager, says Harris was so concerned that only the best photographs of her went up on the campaign Web site that she insisted on going through every picture.

"It would be weeks and weeks and weeks before we could put anything up on the Web site," he says.

Dornan says he once infuriated Harris right before an event by setting it up so she could make a grand entrance. Instead, she wanted to greet supporters at the door as they arrived.

"She just goes completely ballistic," Dornan recalls. He says she yelled at him for 10 minutes and accused him of ruining her life. "I literally held the phone away from my ear, and everybody within a six-foot circle of me could hear her screaming."

They worried about what one former field coordinator called her sense of "religious mission." Two former staffers -- Rollins and another onetime campaign manager, Jamie Miller -- have said Harris told them that God wanted her to be a senator. Rollins adds, "She told me that she thought she could be the first woman president."

Sitting in the livestock arena, Harris laughs at the notion she'd ever want to be president. In the past she told the Palm Beach Post that she was complimentary of those staffers who performed well, but had problems with those who would "try to undermine" her. Now, she sidesteps the question of why she had problems with staff.

"It's going to be easily explained in my book," she says.

Thus far, she has put in approximately $3.2 million, which is, she says, "everything that I have liquid." Meanwhile, according to a financial disclosure report, her campaign has less than $1 million left. Nelson's campaign has nearly $7 million. Nelson has run seven ads since the primaries in September. Harris has aired only one and it started yesterday, according to campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Marks.

Harris turns stony when she's asked what will happen if she doesn't win.

"Haven't even considered it," she says in a tone that suggests a follow-up question would be foolhardy.

Later in the evening, while talking about her love for Queen Esther, she runs to the passenger seat of her SUV and seizes a Bible.

"I'll give you one verse," she says. "On the day that the enemies of the Jews had hoped to overpower them, the opposite occurred, in that the Jews themselves overpowered those who hated them."

What does that have to do with this race?

"November 7th," she replies.

Conrad Burns Is Abramoff's Little BitchBurns actually took at least $150,000 in bribes, more than any other lawmaker in America. Worse, Burns has been trashing Abramoff in public. You don't do that **** in the Mafia without Serious Consequences.

Abramoff friend describes Burns staff's ties to lobbyist [Billings Gazette]

Ain't A new poll in Virginia has the Dem, Mr Webb, ahead of Mr Allen, the Repub incumbent, by a point or so. I don't put a lot of significance in it.

One night in New Hampshire, after a few drinks at a pool hall in a college town, the conversation turned to the political troubles of another potential '08 contender. I told a story that had been making the rounds about how this politician once spit on his wife. Warner's huge jaw dropped and his face blanched. The table fell silent. "I guess that's not that funny to you, is it?" I muttered. He shook his head.