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Wednesday, November 29, 2006
A just-defunct campaign ad
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We’ve already told you that U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston of Savannah lost his bid this month to become House Republican conference chairman, an influential leadership post even if the party is now in the minority.
But we’ve neglected to point you to his campaign ad for the race, a video e-mailed to GOP members of Congress. Kingston is ever the new media guru.
“I do this because so many of you haven’t been returning my phone calls anyhow, and it saves all of us a little time,” Kingston begins in the video. The planks of his platform: the return to a unified message for House Republicans, harkening back to 1994’s Contract with America, and a shift in financial strategy.
“Let’s be realistic. the K Street money is going to drift away from us. We’ve got to get back to grassroots fund-raising,” he said.
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The Bushies swing to Mitt Romney
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s Mitt Romney week, at least in the South.
A day after a key South Carolina operative, Warren Tompkins, joined his team, Romney’s Commonwealth PAC announced that Eric Tanenblatt, senior managing director at McKenna, Long & Aldridge and Gov. Sonny Perdue’s former chief of staff, will head up Romney’s finance team in Georgia.
And quite a team: Nancy Coverdell, wife of the late Sen. Paul Coverdell; Fred Cooper, the general chairman for Bush ’08; James Edenfield, CEO of American Software and Joe Rogers Jr., CEO of Waffle House.
That list leaves out a ton of party positions this group has held. The bottom line is that this is a big chunk of the core Bush crowd in Georgia, going back to before the elder Bush became Bush 41.
It’s not a total sweep. We have it on good authority that state GOP chairman Alex Pointevint will eventually pledge his personal allegiance to Sen. John McCain. But Romney has put down a big footprint.
We’re told it’s only coincidence these announcements are coming just as Sen. Bill Frist takes his cards off the table. But it’s not irrelevant. Frist is a Southerner closely allied to Bush, and at one time he was thought to have an inside track on the Southern Bushies. Romney’s moving fast to put himself in the same position.
Thank you, voters. May I have another?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Casey Cagle, the Republican lieutenant governor-elect, just announced a two-day, 11-city tour to thank voters for their support this year. Or at least, that’s the reason he offers.
A cynical observer drained of all humanity might think that this victory lap could also be a kick-off for the ‘10 race for governor.
The tour begins Dec. 13 in Augusta, and will conclude the following evening in Forsyth County.
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Cathy Cox goes to Washington, and still doesn’t like paper ballots
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
She went to talk about the mechanics of November’s elections. Nothing to do with an ‘08 race for the U.S. Senate.
With only a few weeks left as Georgia’s secretary of state, Cathy Cox was part of a panel discussion with other election experts at the Pew Research Trust offices in D.C.
She cautioned against making paper voting receipts the “official” ballot in recounts.
To do so would be “an incredibly bad decision,” Cox said, according to our colleague Scott Shepard up in Washington.
Some experts have advocated paper receipts as a backup to new electronic voting machines. But Cox said paper ballots are not always reliable, as witnessed in Florida during the 2000 presidential vote recount.
In the Nov. 7 election, Georgia experimented with a paper back-up on voting machines in three precincts across the state. Cox said machines were slow and experienced snafus like paper jams.
Cox, a Democrat, also was critical of Republican measures passed in Georgia to require voters to present a photo ID. Cox said the legislation was “a solution for a problem that there was no evidence existed.”
What’s good for King & Spalding
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
King & Spalding brought a high-powered panel from its Washington office together for an interesting breakfast session Wednesday on what to expect from the new, Democratic-majority Congress. The future for either party is still murky, but from the firm’s point of view, things are looking up.
There’s likely to be a whole range of congressional investigations, and that should be “a great benefit from the standpoint of the firm,” said former Sen. Daniel Coats (R-Ind.). In other words, if a corporation, an agency or a government official gets hauled up before a committee, they’ll need good lawyers. He’s not the only lawyer thinking this way, as you can see here
“We believe our abilities with respect to Congressional investigations are second to none,” Coats said.
Joining Coats was former Sen. Connie Mack (R-Fla.), Thomas Spulak, who has held a number of top Democratic staff positions on the hill, and George Crawford, until last year Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s chief of staff, who “might prove to be the very best hire anybody’s made in Washington,” said Ted Hester, a senior partner in the Washington office.
Spulak warned that for a time, anyway, Washington lobbyists face a different climate in which they won’t be able to provide so much as a cup of coffee to a House member or staffer (the Senate, more jealous of its prerogatives, isn’t expected to be nearly as stringent in its rules), with a good chance they will be required to disclose much more about their business connections and campaign contributions than before.
“We’ll probably see some prosecutions,” Spulak, who has been general counsel to the House, said.
Mack’s 1988 Senate race was, as he said, a kind of eerie forerunner of the ballot issues that came up again in the 2000 presidential election in Florida. So it was interesting to hear him say he thinks the controversy over Florida’s 13th Congressional District could come down to a vote on the House floor.
That’s the race for Rep. Katherine Harris’s old district, where Democrat Christine Jennings is challenging the 364-vote election margin of Republican Vern Buchanan, claiming that some 18,000 votes cast in other races from predominantly Democratic precincts didn’t show up in the hotly-fought Congressional race.
Spulak, who was chief of staff to legendary Florida Democrat Claude Pepper, said the memory of the 1985 fight over the Indiana 8th District, in which the House voted on party lines to seat a Democrat who had not been certified as the winner by the state. Many in Washington date the rise of a more activist GOP, and the decline of congressional Democrats, to that vote.
But Mack said aggressive coverage of the ballot issues in the Florida race may force the issue, leading to what could be a moment of high drama in the new Congress.
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Another switcher in the House may be in the works
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Don’t want to be too mysterious, but there was a particular fellow at the state Capitol today who suggested that Republicans may gather up one more switcher, maybe two, to their ranks before the Legislature convenes in January.
He seemed to be familiar with the topic, and so we pass it on.
