Mitch McConnell

I really don't know quite what to make of this breaking news story

Gregg withdraws as commerce secretary nominee

but it certainly does not paint New England Republicans in a good light (good thing I was born in Brooklyn, ;) )

I also don;t know where this leaves us for the 2010 election in NH. Will Gregg return as a candidate, or an embarassed lame duck?

And I'm also not sure who look worse after all is said and done--Obama's incompetent vetters or Mitch McConnell's inept management of the senate minority? One hopes for the Republic's sake it will be the former, but who knows?

Since none of our so-called leaders are going to present an alternative economic recovery package, I'll do it myself.  Items are in no particular order except the order in which they came to me.

1) Slash the Corporate Income Tax Rate to 15% - The United States currently has the Second Highest Corporate Tax Rate in the World.  This puts our companies at a gigantic competitive disadvantage internationally and retards both job growth and the stock market here at home.  Cutting corporate taxes will spur a business led investment boom in the United States.

2) Make Bush Reductions in Capital Gains and Dividends Permanent - While I would love to slash these grossly counterproductive rates further, that's not feasible politically at the moment.  The next best thing would be to send a permanent signal to financial markets.

3) Abolish the Employer Half of the Payroll Tax - As liberals frequently point out, 80% of taxpayers pay more in payroll taxes than income taxes.  They deserve a big tax cut.  This will also act as a major job creation mechanism.

4) Pass Colombia, South Korea, and Panama Free Trade Agreements - This move is more symbolic than substative, however, it is crucially important.  Passing these agreements would signal to our trading partners that the United States will not turn protectionist like we did in the 1930's.

Passing the Colombia agreement would also weaken an increasingly despotic Hugo Chavez.

5) Establish a 15% flat rate on All Income - This will leave Americans with more money to spend, invest, or do whatever the heck they want to do with it.  It will also do away with the deadweight loss from tax code complexity.  Many other Countries have done this successfully.

Should this prove politically unfeasable, we should still strive to do this for everyone except the top income tax bracket.

6) Create A National Market for Medical Insurance - Rising Medical Costs have been a major economic drag for the past decade.  While the reasons for this are worthy of their own blog post, creating a national market for Medical Insurance instead of 50 separate state markets is the easiest way to lower costs.

7) Drill, Baby, Drill - In addition to harming those nice guys in Tehran, Moscow, and Caracas, increased energy production at home will create oodles of jobs.  It might even make the auto bailout a moot point.

8) Immeadiate Expensing for Business Investment - This will also create a boom in business investment.

9) Boost Defense Spending - This is a policy I support for other reasons.  That said, defense spending has a higher Keynesian Multiplier than anything President Elect Obama is proposing.

10) Abolish the Alternative Maximum Tax - This wildly unfair tax should just be abolished.  I don't care about the rationale.

11) Abolish Sarbanes/Oxley - This onerous regulation, passed during the Enron panic, drives capital and businesses overseas without preventing fraud at home.  Repeal of SarBox would ignite a stock market boom!

12) Abolish Mark to Market - This obscure accounting rule forces companies unnecessarily to lower the value of their assets relative to what they could be sold for.  This was a major factor in the credit freeze.

13) Abolish the Death Tax - Any change in tax policy that both antagonizes liberals and hurts Warren Buffet must be a good idea.

Red State is unhappy with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. (Note: I used to work in the Senate Republican Communications Center under Sen. McConnell.  Perhaps that biases me, or perhaps that gives me a unique viewpoint, but I'm trying to make an objective analysis of the landscape here)

The idea that Mitch McConnell is protecting us from the Democrats is bullcrap.  We should collectively rip off his jaw and shovel the crap back down his throat that he’s been serving us. [...] Mitch McConnell is privately screwing us just like Obama is doing to the left, but because he makes Harry Reid cry on queue, people love him.  It’s almost like Reid and Durbin know it and are happy to cry on cue if it means conservatives stay rallied to McConnell.

I really do appreciate Erick Erickson's frustration - the conflict between ideals and the politically possible is a particularly difficult tension for libertarians -  but Sen. McConnell is not the problem. The problem is a Senate an inch away from a 60-Democrat majority.  There is simply no way he can stop the Democrats.  That, not McConnell's personal preferences, is the important factor right now.  Sen. McConnell can either...

• Compromise, lose and cobble together the best deal we can get (sometimes on the proximate legislation, sometimes on other potential legislation), or...
• Be righteously indignant and go down in flames. Total defeat.

So, yeah, Senate Republicans are not protecting us from bad legislation.  Against almost 60 Senate Democrats, that's what you do.  You lose. 

Senators DeMint, Coburn and some others want to fight, and that's great. We need fighters...but we need the parliamentarians, the deal-makers, too.  The fact that individual members can pick fights does not mean the entire Senate Republican caucus can do so.

If a fighter was elevated to the Republican Leader position, one of two things would happen: (a) they would be unable to hold the Republican caucus together behind a tougher ideological agenda, or (b) they would be forced to moderate to hold the caucus together.

Some hills are certainly worth dying on, but the Senate Republicans can't all die on every hill.

Yes, McConnell isn't likely to lead a Republican revolution. But nobody is right now. Leadership is almost certainly going to come from the outside.  The Republican Congress is just trying to execute the best retreat possible.

A General gets to tell the troops where to go.  A Senate Minority Leader has to ask the troops where they want to go, and figure out how to do something with the many different answers.  Mitch McConnell's job is the art of the possible...and at the moment, very little is possible.

I just sat down with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell today. I asked him what the message coming out of the very short conclusion of Congressional action this fall. The key thing is that there will be two actions. The Democrats will abdicate their responsibility to pass appropriations bill and just pass a Continuing Resolution.

The second will be an energy bill. This is not a bad issue for Republicans. In fact, it is an outstanding issue. "Drill Here, Drill Now" seems to have hit a significant nerve for the American people. That will be the significant political fight of the month. That's old news.

But consider this idea from Marc Ambinder:

Sarah Palin is, quite simply, the celebrity of September. Interest in her will be enormous. Just as Democrats painted on Barack Obama's blank canvass in January and February of 2007, Republicans and independents will get the chance to fill in their view of Gov. Palin. She's the new thing. The object of curiosity. The press and the larger media will obsess over her and her family and her life. 

 If Palin talks about energy for the next month, an area that she knows extremely well. So the dominant Congressional political issue happens to converge with her strongest issue both in terms of subject expertise and narrative.

And who will she be attacking? Congressional Democrats.

She will move the ball on the issue in Congress. She will move the ball on the politics surrounding Congress. And she will demonstrate expertise on an issue critical to her narrative.

Trifecta.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell – who pollster.com’s trend estimate currently pegs as more vulnerable than Susan Collins, Norm Coleman and Mary Landrieu – launched a relatively early negative spot this week against his opponent Bruce Lunsford.  McConnell seems to have learned the lesson of Hillary Clinton’s recent defeat and is looking to sink his opponent before he has a chance to surge.

McConnell is making the savvy, ruthless play here.  Most people would be amazed to hear this, but politicians usually hate running negatives and resist doing it until they feel threatened.  That’s bad strategy.  Negatives are much more effective early against a challenger who hasn’t been defined yet.  It’s much harder to make negative information stick to a guy voters already have an image of.

By hitting Lunsford early, McConnell is also knocking him off message, disrupting his image building campaign and dragging him down into the “just another politician” mud.  For an incumbent who has had a very hard time cracking the 50%, threshold that’s crucial. 

I’ve been critical of McConnell’s incumbency-oriented media strategy, which Lunsford’s early advertising has made clear he plans to exploit, but McConnell’s decision to go negative early will make it harder for Lunsford to take off.  He still needs to offer a more compelling rational for his own reelection, but McConnell has bought himself some time.

“Lunsford Gas Tax”:  McConnell’s first negative is a solidly done, standard-issue hit piece.  It pounds hard on a key issue, sticks to one simple message and aims to sandbag Lunsford’s outsider message by portraying him as a quasi-lobbyist.  The visuals are dominated by gas pumps and soaring prices, it’s easy to take a cheap shot and knock this style as visually “uncreative,” but it’s very on message and at the end of the day effective.  The shooting style is also deliberately un-stylized, which ads credibility in a state like Kentucky where voters are suspicious of glossiness.

Real Voter Takeaway:  Bruce Lunsford doesn’t care that gas prices are stretching my family’s budget to the breaking point.

Two days ago, I floated a theory about the awful string of special elections this spring. The specials in IL-14, LA-6, and MS-1 all followed Democratic primaries in those states, while the Democratic nominating contest was going on. Meanwhile, special elections in OH-5, MA-5, and IN-7, ending in mid-February, yielded results well within expectations with slight boomlets for the Republican candidates. All of these primaries occurred well before Democrats had been primed to vote in the Presidential primary in those states.

This theory is bolstered by this chart posted on Open Left a month back:

Promoted by Patrick.

Yesterday, the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza highlighted Elizabeth Dole and Mitch McConnell’s campaign advertising strategies, and the “vote for the incumbent who brings you goodies” message they’ve used in their early tv spots. 

They're making a huge strategic mistake.  Both candidates are firmly identifying themselves as part of Washington and part of the problem.  Jim Inhofe’s new ad on the other hand, is a strong example of how an incumbent should highlight their accomplishments without appearing too “Washington.”   (Full disclosure, I work for a media firm that didn’t produce any of these spots, even the one I like.)  

Here are the three ads Cilizza highlights: 

• Republican media guru Alex Castellanos has an interesting frame on the future of conservatism: Governing is too important to be left to the government.
• KY-SEN: The netroots is touting a Rasmussen poll showing Democrat Bruce Lunsford ahead of Mitch McConnell 49-44. Whether this poll is bogus or the results of Lunsford's post-primary name ID bounce, it's a wake-up call. Being tagged as a Washington Republican/appropriator is a liability everywhere, even in a state that seems destined to vie with Utah/Wyoming for the biggest McCain blowout in November. Still, I'd rather have bad polls in a sleeper race like this first materialize now than after Labor Day so there's self-awareness and time to correct.
• AK-1: Republican primary challenger and Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell is even or ahead of Don "Bridge to Nowhere" Young in AK-1. Parnell is one of the good guys -- a Sarah Palin Republican trying to put away one of Congress's most corrupt appropriators. This could be THE primary race of the cycle. Give what you can.

 Update from Soren: Stu Rothenberg doesn't buy the poll and points to one with McConnell up 11.