Terry McMahon's Awesome Blog

Well, that's depressing. Matt Brown was probably my favorite Senate candidate this cycle, and now we can discuss his candidacy in the past tense. I really liked the guy, so I'm pretty disappointed, but there are other great candidates who haven't sat down for coffee for an hour with me, so here's hoping Sheldon Whitehouse wins this Senate seat in November.

I think there are a couple other issues to address here, the first being that I am campaign poison. Many of you will recall that I've worked on three campaigns, none of which came close to winning, and now the 2006 campaign in which I've gotten the most involved (though not much, really) is the first serious Senate campaign of the cycle to withdraw. Awesome. Go Ned Lamont!

My other problem is that the way Brown dropped out is really depressing, even more so than losing my favorite candidate. He got ensnared in a campaign finance scandal: the Hawaii, Massachusetts and Maine Democratic Parties all donated to his campaign, then a couple days later a lot of his maxed-out contributors donated almost the same amount to those state parties. This looks like a finance-limits end run, in which Brown's donors could contribute above the federal limit in money that would all go to Brown eventually. (That's illegal.)

Brown said those state parties were just helping him out on their own volition, and he asked his supporters to donate to them to be nice back. That could be, but the trouble is, there's really no reason for out-of-state parties (especially hawaii) to be getting involved in an RI Senate primary. Like what does the Hawaii Democratic Party care whether it's Brown or Whitehouse?

What complicates this is that there's no bright-line rule, and politicians do similar stuff all the time. Imagine, if you will, Senate candidates challenging Republican incumbents in Rhode Island and Connecticut the same year. The two candidates could host fundraisers for each other, giving each candidate the benefit of the other's donor pool. Sure, you can't do an exact tit-for-tat, but it looks like the Matt Brown situation is somewhere in the middle. The FEC did investigate, but as far as I know they haven't reached any conclusions.

I'm disappointed for two reasons. First, I suspect if Brown had apologized and returned the money right away, saying everything he did was legal but he didn't want a hint of impropriety, he would have been more or less okay. So whether it was the people who made this questionable fundraising decision, or the people who told him to stonewall, what wound up happening is my favorite candidate wound up dropping out of his race because of staff error. I don't begrudge the people who were working for him (this is a LOT easier to say in retrospect, plus, I certainly made my share of staff error*), but it still sucks. And no, I have no solutions for how candidates can avoid getting tanked by a staff mistake, but I'm still complaining.

The second reason this brings me down is why it happened. Note that Matt Brown wasn't lying about his past, switching his issue positions depending on his audience, making ridiculous policy stands, or even being a bad public speaker. He lost because he was desperate to raise money. That's what really gets me about this. If we had public financing like a whole bunch of other places, where it always works just fine, Matt Brown would have had a fair shot to make his case and, in my opnion, win himself a Senate seat. But we don't have public financing, and candidates for office have to spend at least 40 hours a week fundraising that they could spend learning the issues and talking to voters. As a result, the primary skill for winning elections is fundraising ability, which I guess is a neat trick but not really something I care about in an elected official. I've believed for a long time that public financing would go a long way to clean up our political system, and now our current system has just claimed a true all-star.

OK, one last thing bothers me. I really wanted to know if Matt Brown, with a fair shot, could have won this race. Now we never will.

(*I want to add that I've gone on the record as publicly blaming staff error, without mentioning that it was my own error, even though it wasn't my fault! Campaigns can be rough sometimes.)

Posted by Terry McMahon at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I'm still not sure I've grasped the essence of Florida congresswoman, Senate candidate, and liberal bete noire Katherine Harris. In 2000 she seemed like your run-of-the-mill Republican partisan, performing her Secretary of State duties as favorably as possible for the candidate for whom she was Florida state co-chair. (Incidentally, I still can't believe Secretaries of State are allowed to endorse like this. How is that not a conflict of interest?) Then it turned out that she comes from some unbelievably preppy background, making her out to be a country-club Republican and either more or less unpleasant depending on your mood. I've heard tell since that Harris is actually one of the kindest souls you'd ever meet in politics, which for all I know could be true. I mean, theoretically someone nice could run for office and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous Democrats and liberal reporters, right? Maybe?

In any event, now I have to reconcile all that with the possibility that Katherine Harris might just be really friendly. She has a history of curious poses, and now there are photos and anecdotes of Rep. Harris, shall we say, leaning on, of all people, a college reporter. Yes, this is worth all the italics. What on earth could she be thinking? At least we know what the kid was thinking:

"I had my face in my notepad a lot, because everytime I looked up she was so close to me."

Posted by Terry McMahon at 5:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Time has an article on incoming White House chief of staff Josh Bolten and his five-point plan for optimizing Republican victories in November. The philosophy is that Republican gains are pretty much out of the question at this point, so they're going to play to the base to stem the tide as much as possible. I have no idea if this is the right thing to do when independents have turned on your party, so I can't comment politically. But wasn't playing to the Republican base the idea when they were trying to win the general election in 2004? Dammit Karl, throw me a bone here.

In any event, here are the five prongs of the GOP electoral pentagram, with the benefit of my riotously successful analysis:

1. Immigration enforcement at the Mexican border. After the huge protests in the streets of most major American cities, I no longer think immigration is an electoral winner with anyone but the Republican base. So to the extent that's what Bolten's trying to do, it's a good plan. But Hispanics have been voting Republican more and more in recent elections, and a soft approach to illegal immigration might have proven the tipping point, denying Democrats one of their longtime bases of support. The hardline approach by the Bush administration, though, might turn Hispanics away from the Republican Party for decades. There's local precedent to this theory: conservatives in California successfully passed Proposition 187 in 1994, a voter initiative that barred illegal immigrants from non-emergency social services. But doing so turned enough Hispanics away from the Republican Party that California went from being a presidential swing state as late as 1992 to being one of the most Democratic states in the country. If the administration's tone in 2006 has the same effect nationally, fantastic.

2. Change the tone of discussions on the economy by winning over Wall Street. Basically they want to extend the tax cuts on stock dividends and capital gains. Now, I have family members who are Republicans entirely because of capital gains taxes, but I was pretty swayed by John Edwards' argument that taxes should be higher on income acquired through wealth (i.e. not doing anything) and lower on income acquired by work (i.e. we encourage people to work hard to make money). As for the political ramifications, I have no idea, but this policy plank reminds me of 1993 when the early Clinton administration focused almost exclusively on cutting the deficit (an idea noticeably absent here) to convince Wall Street bond traders that the economy was sound enough to justify their investment. It worked then. With the deficit still in terrible shape, I would be surprised if these tax cuts won Wall Street over.

3. Better PR. Now, see, I'm biased, but I thought the reason that the Bush administration was getting such negative press on Medicare, Iraq and the economy was that they were doing a terrible job on all three fronts, not that they weren't trying hard enough to promote their successes. But Josh Bolten disagrees, so away we go. Trouble is, I think the president's credibililty is too far gone for his arguments on any of these fronts to succeed, assuming they even exist. Which, let's be honest, I don't.

4. Take a hard line on Iran. Yikes. I mean, this could very easily go like 2002, where Democrats get stuck between wanting to look tough on national security and wanting to stand up to the president. Of course, if Democrats come up with a viable alternative for dealing with Iran, or if Democrats stick together in saying that Iran's not a real threat but the issue is just a political game the Republicans are playing, this may not prove an electoral winner. My knowledge of the policy here is limited, so I don't know if Iran's a threat or not, but there's got to be a hefty chunk of Americans no longer willing to trust the administration on anything having to do with Middle Eastern threats. In any event, Democrats should really have no problem coming up with a tough anti-terrorism policy that takes into account Iran's actual menace.

5. Do a better job courting the press. Wasn't this #3? This mostly involves hiring Fox News' fair-and-balanced analyst Tony Snow to be Scott McClellan's replacement as press secretary. I guess having someone more, you know, effective than McClellan might not be a bad idea. How this will stem losses in November, though, I'm not sure.

Funny how reading that made me more optimistic than when I started. Go team!

Posted by Terry McMahon at 5:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

First off, adorable baby alert:

I know the column's too narrow here to see the whole thing, so go here for the full version. CLICK THE LINK. Isn't he a cutie???

Other things going on:

• Speaking of photos of really new things, these are supposedly screenshots from a magazine of a game for Nintendo's upcoming Revolution console. It looks good, but, again, it comes out of a magazine. Note again the fascinating hand-held control structure.

• Chuck Klosterman, who's like Bill Simmons without the sports, writes about sports here, specifically, the five problems for us as baseball fans and Americans upon Barry Bonds' steroid-fueled passing of Babe Ruth on the career home run chart. All told, it's a fascinating read.

• This is not news, but an interesting revelation. I remember as a youngster reading an anecdote in a Baseball Hall of Shame book about an English-speaking and Spanish-speaking outfield combo who kept colliding with each other, so the English-speaking guy learned to say "Yo la tengo!" which is Spanish for "I got it!" Hilarious, no? Cross-cultural communications at its finest.

  In any event, years later I discovered (never very closely, sorry) that there's a band called Yo La Tengo, and I always thought that was the weirdest coincidence: a band with a phrase as its name is weird enough, and then it's the punchline to one of those weakly amusing baseball stories of years past. Could the band have possibly gotten its name from the same story I read? As I just discovered, absolutely. The outfielders were Richie Ashburn and Elio Chacon on the 1962 Mets.

• I was talking to someone in Alaska a while back, and she was shocked to discover that at one point in the past Alaska actually had Democratic senators. I hope that conveys how anachronistic it seems, then, that one of those Democrats who used to represent Alaska in the Senate is running for president. He was an anti-war Democrat during Vietnam, and he's going to be anti-war again. This is the first time I've seen someone run for president who hasn't served in office in 26 years. In any event, he's the first official candidate.

• I always love Wikipedia entries on the occult that are presented straight. "In similarity to her Thelemic counterpart The Great Beast 666, Babalon is seen as being both an Egregore and an Office, the taker of this office is known as The Scarlet Woman." I had no idea. Also, I'm pretty sure the real Great Beast has a better grasp of punctuation.

• But if you want to see something really horrifying, look at Wikipedia's list of famous Scientologists. The number of people you'll lose faith in will be outstanding. Mary Bono? Soleil Moon Frye?? Patrick Swayze?!? I hope Xenu really is the time of your life, Swayze.

• In news almost as traumatic as putting billions of souls around volcanos and blowing them up, releasing their souls into the atmosphere, someone in San Diego just made a video of the bottom of the 10th inning of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. The second-greatest baseball comeback ever? Or just a horrible, horrible moment? Check out the video and decide for yourself.

• Are you going to try to tell me I didn't need a new cell phone with a camera? Look at this:

  

  And this:

  

  Again, for the full versions click here and here. Did I keep it like that? Looks like you'll have to call me on my new number and find out!

  Posted by Terry McMahon at 1:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Joe Klein has his share of hits and misses, but his Time column on the consultant class is a winner. I've had my issues with the Democratic consultant establishment, but I've rarely found a better example of why than when Klein talks here about the Al Gore campaign with top consultant (and, I believe, native Rhode Islander) Tad Devine:

In early 2003, I had dinner with several of the consultants who advised Al Gore in the 2000 presidential campaign. I asked them why Gore, a passionate environmentalist, had spent so little time and energy talking about the environment during the campaign. Because we told him not to, the consultants said. Why? I asked. Because it wasn't going to help him win. "He wanted to talk about the environment," said Tad Devine, a partner in the firm of Shrum, Devine & Donilon, "and I said to him, 'Look, you can do that, but you're not going to win a single electoral vote more than you now have. If you want to win Michigan and western Pennsylvania, here are the issues that really matter—this is what you should talk about.'"

Gore won Michigan and Pennsylvania, but he lost an election he should have won, and he lost it on intangibles. He lost it because he seemed stiff, phony and uncomfortable in public. The stiffness was, in effect, a campaign strategy: just about every last word he uttered—even the things he said in the debates with George W. Bush—had been market-tested in advance. I asked Devine if he'd ever considered the possibility that Gore might have been a warmer, more credible and inspiring candidate if he'd talked about the things he really wanted to talk about, like the environment. "That's an interesting thought," Devine said.

The worst part is that the Gore consultants were wrong about their conventional advice too. New Hampshire is a swing state with two conservative Republican senators, both of whom are reliable environmentalists. Why do they support such a traditionally Democratic cause? As always, some of it is honest belief, and some of it is that New Hampshire is a pro-environment swing state. Al Gore lost New Hampshire by less than Ralph Nader's total in that state; if he had talked more about the environment he almost surely would have won New Hampshire, and the election. It's one thing to stand for what you believe in and lose. Sacrificing your principles and losing anyway is something else entirely.

The whole article is fascinating; go read it.

Posted by Terry McMahon at 1:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Congratulations to Laura, Peter, and last but not least Smore, now hereby renamed Anderson Williams Kovacs. As of Sunday, 4/9 at 5:30pm, Laura and Peter have a son. And I have a nephew! I still remember when Laura and I were little, and now she has a baby of her own! Very exciting. I also remember last summer, when we kept waiting to see if Laura was pregnant, and a couple of times it looked like maybe, and no, then it looked like maybe, then pretty sure, then almost definitely, and now, let's say we were confident that this time, Laura was pregnant. The new mommy and daddy will both be great parents (the rest of the family's not too shabby either), so as long as we remember to raise him Red Sox, the little boy's going to be all set. Congratulations to everybody!!

Posted by Terry McMahon at 8:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A couple things I don't want to let slide:

• First off, Mom, I'm joining the Navy.

• Next, I'm pretty sure I'm the only person I know who has ever valued the beauty of city skylines. In any event, this guy came up with a list of the top 15, with nice photos to boot. I like Shenzhen.

• Finally, you guys know I like following politics, but sometimes I think negative attacks go too far. It's hard to find the exact point where a legitimate complaint crosses the line, and I think it's this. What a dick.

  Posted by Terry McMahon at 12:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I have no honest idea how well I can give political advice, but there are a couple here I think are definite winners.

First up is Tom DeLay, who recently announced his upcoming resignation from Congress so that the GOP can still win his seat in November. Whether that happens is up in the air, but conventional wisdom in DC holds that the bigger problem for Democrats is that their charge of a "culture of corruption" has lost its prime example.

In general I think this argument is ridiculous: Republicans run against Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean in every election (and Ted Kennedy before them) regardless of who's on the ballot, and tying pretty much any Republican in the country to Tom DeLay is not hard. But if Team Democrat's not up to it, keeping DeLay front and center as the symbol of Republican excess is even easier:

And it became more and more obvious that I can do more outside of Congress right now than inside.

Second example is a little more innocuous, but in a close race it could prove a decisive edge. I feel kind of bad for Christopher Shays, actually; he seems like a pretty reasonable, well-adjusted and normal guy who's stuck in a DC political culture that values party loyalty above rational, independent thought. That is tough. But still, don't say stuff like this:

"This Congress needs to be rescued," said Rep. Christopher Shays, Connecticut Republican. He added that members are being put on the defensive and need to tell voters: "We aren't as corrupt as you think."

UPDATE: I got this awesome IM from a friend on an '06 Senate race:

Unfair? Who cares?

How about: Image juxtaposition: Diane Farrell pic next to Capitol pic with the following: "Diane Farrell wants to reform Congress" to Chris Shayes and Tom Delay with names underneath to jail bars and "Chris Shays says 'we're not as corrupt as you think'" to Farrell looking into the camera and saying, "I'm Diane Farrell and I approved this message because, when it comes to reform, Chris Shays just doesn't get it anymore."

It plays on DeLay, it plays on reform, and it plays on Shays' age (he's getting up there, or at least looks it).

Posted by Terry McMahon at 12:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ABC News, 4/3/06:

Breaking News from ABCNEWS.com:

SOURCE: REP. TOM DELAY SAYS HE DOES NOT PLAN TO SEEK RE-ELECTION

Me, 1/15/06:

Now, here's where it gets interesting: Stockman is running as an independent. He apparently still holds a grudge against Lampson, you know, given that Lampson beat his sorry ass, and he's doing this to get revenge. I suspect he thinks DeLay won't even make it to Election Day, and he wants to be there to be a viable Republican in the event DeLay's departure happens after the filing deadline. Good thinking, that.

Posted by Terry McMahon at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

• Sometimes when politicians lie it's really upsetting and sad. Other times though, it's simply hilarious. What's great is the arrogance of the accompanying statement - we're right, the terrorist sympathizers on the left are misleading you. I love when political hacks try to prove counter-intuitive claims by making stuff up out of thin air. Wasn't with you before, dude, sure not now.

• Anybody recognize the signature on this drawing? I'll give you a hint: if you haven't spent much time at a certain house in South Kingstown, RI, you didn't need to read that last sentence.

• Continuing my theme of annoying commentary on how successfully my law school career is going without me doing anything, the new and infallible US News law school rankings came out. Whereas NYU used to be #5 to Columbia's #4, in an earth-shattering shift NYU and Columbia are now tied at #4. And to think I had thought I got smarter on Tuesday just because I had done the reading.
  (On a side note, if any of you buffoons out there want to talk to me about why I chose NYU Law, email me or leave a comment.)

• I saw Thank You For Smoking last weekend, and I'm going to see it again tonight. On the one hand, winning arguments has been an interest of mine for some time (maybe I should say "getting into arguments" ...), but on the other hand, I strongly recommend reading this Roger Ebert review, which should convince all but the biggest moron to go see it. You're not a moron, are you?

• Speaking of being a moron for liking something, I read this American Prospect piece on Al Gore and I almost want him to run for president in 2008. Fortunately, the piece isn't really about politics much at all. Apparently he's an updated version of the Al Gore he was when he was in the Senate; i.e. on the cutting edge of all the issues and generally awesome. There are historical reasons to support him too: the last time a former House and Senate member spent two terms as Vice President before losing a disputed presidential election and then successfully ran for president eight years later was Richard Nixon, and literally everything about that administration was good.

• This is too funny not to watch: a short film (~6 minutes) of every cliche from 80s movie endings. It's called, bear with me here, "80's Ending." Thanks to Galvin for sending me the original link years ago, and for putting in the hours necessary to track it back down.

• Finally, if you're one of those people complaining about the Democrats not having any policies of their own, they just put out "Real Security: The Democratic Plan to Protect America and Restore Our Leadership in the World," which seems halfway decent, with one flaw: no bullet points. People, seriously, come on: we want 3-5 bullet points of the main parts of the plan. We can read the rest, you know, later.

  Posted by Terry McMahon at 5:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)