Moe Lane

He’s gotten himself a shiny new null statement:

Martin O’Malley would like to be called a “performance-driven progressive” now, @rubycramer reports. buzzfeed.com/rubycramer/mar…

— McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) April 9, 2013

God, I’d love to know what sequence of market research surveys created that Frankenstein’s Monster of a buzzphrase. Although I’ll just say this right now: if O’Malley thinks that trying the tired old I’m a pragmatist, not a liberal wheeze* is going to make up nationally for being soft on crime and against basic civil rights… heh.

Moe Lane

*I don’t expect liberals to agree with Liberal Fascism, but they should at least read it.

As my dear, departed father used to say – and, hopefully, still does – it’s good to want.

Many Democrats would no doubt dearly love an uncontested primary amounting to the stately coronation of [Hillary] Clinton. It would spare them a spectacle akin to, say, the 2012 GOP primaries, in which another prohibitive front-runner came out on top, but only after a grueling process of fending off a seemingly endless procession of challengers. It may never get that bad for Clinton…

Yeah, it would get that bad for Hillary Clinton, and for a reason that Tod Lindberg doesn’t bring up until the last paragraph: Vice President Joe Biden.  You see: I may think that it’d be dumb for Joe Biden to run for President.  You may think that it’d be dumb for Joe Biden to run for President.  The Democratic party’s base may think that it’d be dumb for Joe Biden to run for President.  But Joe Biden doesn’t think that it’d be dumb for Joe Biden to run for President, and he’s the guy with access to the state party organizations and leadership cadres and Rules Committees. (more…)

…we (‘we’ being the GOP) will probably be more or less given the Presidency by the American electorate.  This bald statement will annoy, amuse, bemuse, confuse, enrage, and/or challenge a goodly number of my colleagues, readers, and/or lurkers, regardless of partisan identity: when it comes to the dueling visions of history, virtually the entire political blogosphere seems to have signed off on the Great Man theory.  And there are, perhaps and forgive me for saying this, personal reasons for some to feel this way.

For example, the thought that maybe Barack Obama didn’t win the election in 2008 because he was just that devastatingly powerful is, in its way, equally subversive to both the Left and the Right’s narrative.  Many on the Left don’t want to hear that they picked to lead them a schlub who can’t run the government, and many on the Right don’t want to hear that they lost to one.  but he is, and he can’t, and by 2016 the electorate will be as tired of seeing his face and the people that he hangs with as the 2008 electorate was of seeing Bush’s face and the people that he hung out with*.

(more…)

Nah, not at all.

OMG RT @edhenrytv: Jindal killing it at #Gridiron — says he’s talking to Sen Elizabeth Warren “as one Indian politician to another”

— John Ekdahl, Jr. (@JohnEkdahl) March 10, 2013

Not Bobby.

Awesome! RT @edhenrytv oh my — Jindal said he doesn’t think VP Biden recognized him: “He asked me to get him a slurpee”

— Brian Faughnan (@BrianFaughnan) March 10, 2013

(more…)

Or is at least angling for a VP slot in 2016. From The Corner:

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida says the Senate’s fiscal-cliff compromise, which passed the upper chamber early Tuesday, was a political mistake.

“I just couldn’t vote for it,” Rubio told reporters. “I ran, just two years ago, on the idea that I wanted to be part of solving the long-term problems this country faces. Time and again, we’re given choices here that don’t involve that.”

Via Hot Air Headlines.  Of the other four GOP holdouts… oh, I am a cynical evil giraffe this morning.  Suffice it to say that these Senators have their reasons, and that I expect that Mike Lee’s and Rand Paul’s are ones that I would actually like.

All right, I admit it: I briefly stopped reading this TNR piece (H/T: Hot Air Headlines) in order to quote from it, because the excerpt was just too good to pass up.

TYPICALLY AT this point on the political calendar, a sitting vice president scrupulously downplays his interest in ascending to the top job. The thought of course consumes him, but actually discussing it strikes him as breathtakingly gauche. Vice presidents as varied as Walter Mondale, George H.W. Bush, and Al Gore all gamely hewed to this script.

And then there is Joe Biden.

…Yes. Yes, there is. (more…)

That’s what the Telegraph thinks, at least. Hard to say whether the British paper’s distance from the situation help or hurts its judgment, but they’ve found an interesting poll:

A recent poll by the Clarus Research Group found that Hillary Clinton had a 75 per cent approval rating compared to 51 per cent for the man who defeated her in their epic battle for the Democratic nomination.

[snip]

The woman who was one of the most polarising figures in American politics now has a glowing 65 per cent approval rating among Independents and healthy 57 per cent among Republicans.

Even sworn enemies on the Right marvelled at her toughness in refusing to concede to Obama until the bitter end in the summer of 2008 and now view her as more hawkish than the president.

(Poll here: H/T Hot Air Headlines.) Just off the top of my head: being ‘more hawkish than the president’ isn’t exactly hard, and while the VRWC is sympathetic towards the way that her primary opponent’s campaign apparatus used a largely gender-based attack strategy against her last year I predict that said sympathy will evaporate like dew in August if she ever becomes the Democratic nominee for President*.  That may not matter, given that a 65% approval rating among independent voters (almost double that of her boss) is enough to make any thoughtful politician stop with her coffee cup halfway to her lips.

Lastly: man, aside from SecState Clinton and Bush appointee SecDef Gates, those are wretched numbers for independent voters across the board.  Although VP Biden’s are arguably just ‘awful.’

Moe Lane

*Nothing personal, Madame Secretary.  Strictly business.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.