Pelosi pulls a Boehner

In the 2010 midterms elections, GOP women took to tweaking their male rivals with a "man up" chant. The obvious point: Even I've got more balls than this guy.

Democrats aren't about to cede  ground on this ridiculous point. House Speaker (soon-to-be minority leader) Nancy Pelosi shows, in a similar ball-kick to House Republican minority leader (soon-to-be Speaker) John Boehner, that she can play the gender card just as well. (Via The Hill):

"You know what? He is known to cry. He cries sometimes when we’re having a debate on bills. If I cry, it’s about the personal loss of a friend or something like that. But when it comes to politics — no, I don’t cry. I would never think of crying about any loss of an office, because that’s always a possibility, and if you’re professional, then you deal with it professionally," Pelosi (D-Calif.) told the New York Times magazine.

Symbolic NPR vote fails, symbolism succeeds*

Republicans in the House of Representatives rushed their first big vote of the lame-duck session: An effort to cut funds to NPR over a recent decision to fire Juan Williams for his remarks about Muslims on the Bill O'Reilly show. The effort failed, as the New York Times reports.

Indeed, the vote was symbolic. Had Republicans really wanted to cut NPR they would have waited until January, when they will have the majority and will be able to get partisan legislation passed. Instead, GOP leaders determined that it would be better to throw some early red meat to their most conservative constituents, force Democrats to side with spending taxpayer money on the "liberal media," and avoid an early partisan fight that would paint Republicans as more interested in revenging a Fox New employee than in doing the public's business.

(Note: I am a producer at an NPR-affiliated station, KCRW, though I don't work for NPR.)

*Update: And speaking of Fox News, chairman Roger Ailes compared NPR executives to Nazis because the firing of Juan Williams brought the Holocaust to mind. Ailes later apologized, saying he was "angry" and chose the wrong word.

Here's his angry ad-lib:

“They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don’t want any other point of view. They don’t even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda. They are basically Air America with government funding to keep them alive.”

The cost of political warfare

Want to know how much money is being spent on that annoying candidate ad? Wesleyan University has a database for that:

Transparency and government responsiveness depend critically on real-time publicly available information disclosing efforts to influence elections. The Wesleyan Media Project tracks and analyzes all broadcast advertisements aired by or on behalf of federal and state election candidates in every media market in the country. Throughout the course of the 2010 election cycle, we will provide real-time information on the extent of corporate and union spending in federal election campaigns across the country, who specifically is doing that spending and which candidates are benefiting.

Comings and goings

J. Patrick Coolican has joined the LA Weekly as a web editor and reporter. Coolican comes from the Las Vegas Sun, where he covered politics. It is no coincidence that Weekly editor Drex Heikes served as deputy managing editor of the Sun during much of Coolican's tenure there.

Poizner, the anti-pornographer*

Insurance Commissioner and Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner has launched an attack ad accusing his opponent, Meg Whitman, of profiting from pornography.



*UPDATE: Whitman gets the Dick Cheney endorsement. Cheney rips Poizner for having given money to the Gore-Lieberman campaign in 2000.

Tumulty jumps to Washington Post

Karen Tumulty will leave her job as national political correspondent for Time magazine, where she's led coverage of health care reform, to become the national political correspondent for the Washington Post. Politico

NYT political team

Beat changes continue at the New York Times.

With chief political writer Adam Nagourney slated to become the paper's L.A. bureau chief, White House correspondent Jeff Zeleny will be elevated to lead political writer for the paper, Politico reports. Matt Bai, who writes for the New York Times Magazine, will become a regular columnist/analyst for the paper, and Jim Rutenberg will do political investigations.

This is a boon for the Times. For my money, Bai is second only to Ron Brownstein when it comes to smart political analysis.

(found via Romenesko)

California's center-left looking center-right

A new Field Poll has former eBay executive and Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman far ahead of her primary challenger, Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner.

This comes as no surprise.

What does is the news that Whitman edges out Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown, who had until recently been seen as the overwhelming favorite going into November.

From the Sacramento Bee:

Whitman ... overtook Brown in a possible general election matchup, winning the support of 46 percent of likely voters compared with Brown's 43 percent, the poll found. Brown had led Whitman by 10 percentage points in the January poll and by 21 points in October.

Apparently, independent voters are leaning conservative in this election, which means Brown will have to step up his campaign earlier than he might have otherwise.

Nagourney looks westward

Adam Nagourney, chief political correspondent for the New York Times, has indicated he's going to step out of the position and move to Los Angeles, possibly to become the Times' LA bureau chief. Jennifer Steinhauer, who currently holds that position, is expected to head back to Washington to cover Congress, Politico reports.

The Politico article mentions White House correspondent Jeff Zeleny and political correspondent Jim Rutenberg as possibly Nagourney replacements. I'd throw White House reporters Peter Baker into the mix as well. Of course, much depends on how the Times decides to structure the beat.

Another possibility is Matt Bai, who writes chiefly for the paper's Sunday magazine. Bai is one of the smartest political analysts out there.

One lingering question is whether this transfer means the New York Times plans to challenge the Los Angeles Times more directly on its turf?

Capitol Weekly, LA Times team up

Sacramento political coverage is increasingly dependent on blogs to push stories, everything from the Sacramento Bee's Capitol Alert to Rough & Tumble. With that in mind, the Los Angeles Times has joined forces with the Sacramento-based Capitol Weekly to produce a blog about California politics in the run-up to the November elections.

The blog is called, coincidentally enough, "California Politics," and the contents can be found here or here. The primary writer for the blog is Capitol Weekly editor Anthony York, but other reporters are contributing, including Shane Goldmacher, who was a driving force behind the success of the Sacramento Bee's Capitol Alert before he got hired away by the Times.

Health reform passes House

The House of Representatives just passed the Democratic health care reform bill by a vote of 220 to 215 -- 39 Democrats voted against the bill and one Republican, Rep. Joseph Cao of Louisiana, voted for it. The bill needed 218 votes to pass.

Asymmetrical politics

Liberal hearts will rejoice at the shape of Steven Benen's graph showing a Republican Party in disfavor in most of the United States - everywhere but the South, it seems, where the favorable rating runs just 13 points ahead of the unfavorable.

But the graph also highlights a problem for Democrats. The asymmetry between Democratic power in Washington and Republican popularity may make it harder to push a progressive agenda. As anyone who's watched California's budget battle unfold, the incentive to compromise disappears when only one side has any real ownership of a policy. As in asymmetrical warfare, an enemy overwhelmed by conventional force will turn to unconventional means to gum up the works. Honest brokers become hard to find. Negotiations break down as factions, unconstrained by any sense of political ownership, become ever more provincial and extreme. As the health care reform debate shows, the party in power has to reach much further across the aisle to try to build a center; meanwhile, the power vacuum gets filled by corporations, which demand legislative changes without the filter of elected (read: accountable) officials.

Of course, it will not always be this way. To say the GOP will remain in the minority is as silly as Karl Rove's prediction that the party would be a permanent majority. A recalibration seems almost inevitable. It remains to be seen, however, whether the asymmetry leads to a lasting electorate shift (as conservative Democrats migrate back to the Republican Party) such that the default position of American politics is center-left instead of center-right.

Behavioral-science politics

The Obama campaign enlisted some top names in the field of behavioral science to help craft its winning message, and now the Obama White House is doing the same in crafting policy. Michael Grunwald of Time magazine has the story:

It's no coincidence that Obama's budget proposes an ambitious program of automatic-enrollment pensions for workplaces that don't offer 401(k)s or that his stimulus package has billions of dollars for smart meters. Behavioral science — especially the burgeoning field of behavioral economics that has been popularized by Freakonomics, The Wisdom of Crowds, Predictably Irrational, Nudge and Animal Spirits, which is the new must-read in Obamaworld — is already shaping dozens of Administration policies. "It really applies to all the big areas where we need change," says Obama budget director Peter Orszag.

Thug politics in Cudahy

Freelance reporter Jeffrey Anderson and LA City Beat senior editor Matthew Fleischman detail the rough politics of Cudahy, a city with about 26,000 residents, 1,000 registered voters, and "a dark side":

The images are grainy, but surveillance video from the night of October 26, 2008, is clear enough to show a hooded thug run up to the home of Cudahy City Council candidate Luis Garcia and hurl a brick at his front window. Seconds later, Garcia emerges from his house in a full sprint, clad only in his underwear, chasing after the assailant.

In the last 18 months, police reports show unknown assailants have launched a half dozen similar attacks on his house and property – including a Molotov cocktail assault that scorched the front end of his truck just feet from his home.

-snip

On March 3, the 1.2-square mile city in southeast L.A. County will hold just its second election in 10 years. The last election, in 2007, ended in a razor-thin, 33-vote defeat for Garcia and his running mate Daniel Cota, amidst allegations of electioneering and gang influence at the polls. That same election saw challenger Tony Mendoza drop out of the race after receiving telephone death threats.

Of split infinitives and simulacra

From the moment slave owners declared all men to be created equal, American politics has fostered an interesting relationship between truth and representation. Successful politicians seem to find ways to reconcile the schism in the minds of the electorate. They speak in metaphor and yet we call it plain speaking. They use symbolism and yet we call it authenticity.

For those inclined to think about such things, Tuesday's inauguration provided a few hiccups that might at first be dismissed as "things not going smoothly," but really offer us a glimpse between the seams.

First, there was the live quartet that didn't play live. Would it have been better had we been told the musicians would be simulating an earlier performance? Would we rather have heard the recording without all the false gestures? Should the performance have been scrapped if the musicians couldn't play live? If you enjoyed the performance of the performance, does it really matter?

Then there was the fumbled oath of office - Which has more meaning to us, word order or speaker's intent? Does speaking a word out of order do more damage to the oath's authenticity than adding words that aren't in the text? Does a second oath lack potency if it wasn't broadcast on television the way the first oath was? What if Obama had taken the second (or even the first) oath in private - the Constitution makes no demand that the oath be taken publicly?

Delgadillo for AG

Patrick McGreevy of the Los Angeles Times reports that Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo is positioning himself to run for state Attorney General in 2010. Delgadillo ran in 2006, but got trounced by Jerry Brown.

Words work plan

Policy and politics aside, the craft that went into today's inauguration speech reminds us of the importance of words.

In our public sphere, we have lived through an era of increasingly imprecise and careless language; a time in which 'short' became a substitute for 'pith' and buzz a replacement for clarity; a time in which we concluded, in fear and in shock, that words might fail us, that description might hinder us, that definition might deceive us. We let inarticulateness stand for authenticity, and chose reaction as the truest form of storytelling. We embraced soundbite punditry, calling it a smart solution to busy lives, but really to conceal that we no longer had much to say to each other. Online and on TV, we chose echo location over thoughtful deliberation.

And, so, as the information age spreads at an accelerated pace, we look into the vast empty reaches waiting to be filled and realize we have not said much about who we are or what we mean. Now is the time to put words back to work - to better understand the consequence and significance of what we're doing, where we're going and what we've done.

Locals in DC

KCRW is posting dispatches and video from Washington, DC in the runup to Inauguration Day. We'll also have three days of inauguration-related coverage on "To The Point," starting today with a discussion about expectations and reactions within the African-American community.

San Gabriel Valley Tribune business reporter Ryan Carter is blogging about his inauguration experiences here.

Celeste Freemon at Witness L.A. is covering the inauguration and associated festivities using her iPhone here.

Taking both roads

In the wake of the terrorist-sympathizer-tinged attacks against Barack Obama, some in the media have busied themselves constructing a rescue-boat narrative that says John McCain is desperately trying to dial back the nastiness, but that he has been thwarted by some invisible hand.

Here's Roger Simon of Politico making that case:

There are those whispering in McCain’s ear that if he gets into the gutter, he can get into the White House. Ads are not enough, they tell him. He must launch the attacks personally and without reservation.

But honor is still an important word to John McCain. He would like to win the presidency and retain his honor.

Some tell him he cannot do both. At this point, however, he is trying.

A second, emerging narrative is that McCain has welcomed the invisible hand even as he appears to take the high road on the stump - and that the invisible hand carries the fingerprints of Karl Rove.

Which narrative is more true?

The GOP tactic of negative attack is now so routinely attributed to Rove that it may not matter if he's involved personally or the ghost in the machine.

But Simon's argument fails to take into account very recent history. In St. Paul, Republicans spent two nights tearing into Obama (including from a VP nominee he never really respected) before McCain came out on the third to give a speech heavily laced with post-partisan rhetoric. At that point it was clear McCain had embraced cognitive dissonance in an effort to simultaneously whip up the base and run a campaign of ideas and honor. What we are seeing now is the downside of an inherently unstable strategy that held together only as long as McCain remained tied or ahead in the polls. With the base now worried about a loss, they have amplified the attacks to the point that the ideas side is being drowned out. McCain must now spend time and energy trying to regain control in a turbulence of his own making.

Clever comeback

John McCain used Paris Hilton in an ad, now she uses him in an ad of her own. No gut buster, but amusing.