The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: incumbent
Kansas Republican Voices An Incumbent’s Lament

Kansas Republican Voices An Incumbent’s Lament

By Kathleen Hennessey, Tribune Washington Bureau

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — On the eve of an election that could end his 33-year career in Congress, GOP Sen. Pat Roberts stood Monday in a tight Republican Party office, the head shots of GOP heroes staring at him, and offered up what could only be called an incumbent’s lament.

On the campaign trail, senators are punching bags. Voters have lost faith in their government. His opponent doesn’t even understand the institution he wants to join. In short: It’s rough out here.

“It’s been a tough year for any incumbent,” Roberts said, looking up at walls filled with portraits of George H.W. Bush, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Bob Dole.

That the Kansas conservative was the one delivering the monologue was a bit of a twist. This year, it’s largely Democratic incumbents bracing for a bruising election day on Tuesday — thanks to a tough lineup of red state races, President Barack Obama’s deflated approval rating and months of unsettling news from home and abroad.

But perhaps because of his anomaly status Roberts feels the pressure all the more. Deep in a ruby red state, with conservative credentials and decades of service, even Roberts is on the ropes. Even he was having to explain his role in a divided government. Even he has had to distance himself from Obama’s agenda, he said.

“I think the president, quite frankly, has moved so far left and has made people so frustrated and upset that if you’ve even been within the city limits of Washington — the federal limits of Washington — you’ve got a real challenge on your hands to explain to people that you’ve been opposed to the Obama agenda all along,” Roberts said. “People are so frustrated and angry that they’ve lost faith in their government.”

Roberts’ trouble comes from more than just proximity to the city limits of Washington. It has also been a result of how infrequently he’s been in the city limits of his hometown of Dodge City. The senator has taken heat for allegedly taking up residence in northern Virginia and spending too little time in his home state. He didn’t help his cause when, to defend himself, he explained: “Every time I get an opponent — I mean, a chance — I come home to Kansas.”

Roberts has had other trouble — including a tea party-aligned primary challenge and a Democrat who withdrew at last minute, leaving him in a one-on-one faceoff with wealthy businessman and independent Greg Orman.

Orman has played coy about his partisan sympathies and has not said whom he would support for Senate majority leader. He suggested his allegiances may change from issue to issue, a notion that really riled Roberts, a dedicated party loyalist, on Monday.

It’s “Jim Jeffords on steroids,” he said, referencing the Vermont Republican-turned-independent whose party switching gave Democrats control of the Senate.

“This whole thing that he would be an independent and he would just go look for good ideas, or people who had good ideas. And maybe he’d get with them and they could fix things,” Roberts said. “That just is not how the Senate works. It may well be how a lot of people think it should work but that’s not the case.”

Roberts took umbrage at other notions coming from his opponent’s campaign. Orman had dismissed a group of touring Republicans stumping for Roberts this weekend as “a Washington establishment clown car.” Former Sen. Bob Dole was among them. “You don’t call Bob Dole a clown,” Roberts declared. The Orman campaign says the candidate wrote an email to Dole explaining he did not intend to call Dole a clown.

Orman once invested in a shrimp farm in the Nevada desert, Orman noted, adding that such an enterprise was not a “mainstream” Kansas business.

In the end, the senator says he believes Kansas voters were coming around to his view of the race. They were becoming more skeptical of Orman, he suggested, and coming home to the familiar.

As he looked out at volunteers crowded into the small office, he whittled his pitch down to just a few words.

“You know me,” he said. “You know Pat Roberts.”

Photo via Wikimedia

Interested in more national and political news? Sign up for our daily email newsletter!

Texas Republican Congressman Loses To Tea Party Challenger In Runoff

Texas Republican Congressman Loses To Tea Party Challenger In Runoff

By Michael A. Memoli, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — The oldest member of Congress became the first incumbent to lose a primary election in 2014, as former U.S. Attorney John Ratcliffe edged 17-term incumbent Rep. Ralph M. Hall in a Republican runoff in Texas.

In a year when many veteran lawmakers are leaving voluntarily, Hall, 91, had hoped to serve one final term representing voters in northeastern Texas. But the combination of his advanced age and a motivated core of tea party voters in the low-turnout race proved too difficult to overcome.

His defeat ensures that the new Congress that is sworn in next year will be the first without a World War II veteran. Rep. John D. Dingell, D-Mich., the only other current lawmaker to see combat then, is retiring.

The race wasn’t just about ideology.

“It was a combination of Hall’s age, longevity in Congress and being a former Democrat — but it probably took all three of those things to doom him, not any single one,” said David Wasserman, who analyzes House races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

Hall had led the GOP field in the initial March 4 primary but failed to win an outright majority. Prominent tea-party-affiliated groups lined up to endorse Ratcliffe, 48, saying conservatives needed a fresh face in Washington.

But Hall, whose name is enshrined on a local parkway and airport, argued that no one had opposed the Obama administration more vigorously and he asked for the chance to fight the president’s policies right through to the end of his term.

Ratcliffe launched an ad in the closing weeks of the runoff campaign specifically mentioning Hall’s age.

“Hall has served admirably,” Ratcliffe says as the camera pans out to show his young daughters playing behind him. “But after four decades in Washington, the problems are getting worse, not better.”

Hall faced the age issue head-on. In his opening television ad, he pointed to the wrinkles on his face as a sign that he was battle-tested.

“When you battle Nancy Pelosi as much as I have, you’re bound to get a few wrinkles,” he said in the ad.

A more recent ad from Hall’s campaign portrayed him as a “Navy veteran and statesman” whom conservative voters could trust, while claiming that Ratcliffe’s legal firm had lobbied in favor of the president’s health care law.

As of Tuesday, 25 members of the House had announced plans to retire this year, more than half of whom had served in Congress for two decades. Seven senators are also retiring.

Voter turnout for the Hall-Ratcliffe runoff was down about a third from the primary. Ratcliffe’s campaign manager said that represented a major advantage.

“The higher-intensity voters who aren’t happy with the status quo and want someone like John in there are turning out at a much higher propensity,” said Daniel Kroese. “There’s a reason why runoff elections normally spell trouble for incumbents. A majority of people voted against him, and you have a higher-intensity turnout later.”

With 92 percent of the precincts reporting Tuesday, Ratcliffe had 21,539 votes and Hall had about 19,000. In the March primary, Hall had nearly 30,000 votes to Ratcliffe’s 18,891.

In a statement, Ratcliffe thanked Hall for his service and said, “I entered this race because I want a better path for America than the one that we’re on right now.”

His victory marked the first triumph for outside conservative groups over an incumbent Republican lawmaker this year. The Club for Growth, which endorsed Ratcliffe after the primary, spent $50,000 on a direct-mail campaign to boost his candidacy and helped raise $130,000. The group targeted Hall for his previous support of earmark spending.

Tea party forces also scored a major victory in the race for Texas lieutenant governor, where state Sen. Dan Patrick defeated incumbent David Dewhurst. For Dewhurst, who was seeking a fourth term in the state’s No. 2 job, it was his second major primary defeat. In 2012, he lost in the GOP primary runoff for U.S. Senate to Ted Cruz.

Photo: Bill & Heather Jones via Flickr

Obama To GOP: Bring It On

WASHINGTON (AP) — Maybe even more than the Republicans, President Barack Obama is looking forward to the GOP picking a candidate to challenge him.

For now and months to come, Obama is an incumbent with no specific rival, a campaigner against various forces but not one in particular.

He is running against a staggering economy. And Congress. And himself — that history-making version of Obama that many voters remember from 2008.

The longer it takes for Republicans to rally around a nominee, the more the election remains a referendum on Obama and jobs. That’s not what the White House and his campaign eagerly want: a clear choice between the president and another candidate who holds starkly different views about how to improve the economy.

With polls showing his approval rating in the low 40s, Obama even contended on Monday that he’s the underdog.

“I don’t mind — I’m used to being an underdog,” the president said in an interview with ABC News. “And I think that at the end of the day, though, what people are going to say is, who’s got a vision for the future that can actually help ordinary families recapture that American dream.”

With no control over when he gets an opponent, Obama is now waging what amounts to a proxy campaign against the eventual Republican nominee.

Every time he presents his jobs bill as a choice between helping the middle class or protecting the ultra-rich, every time he tells Democratic donors that his opponents’ approach to governing “will fundamentally cripple America,” he is previewing a campaign argument that he will apply against whoever his opponent is.

“What the president is saying now compared to what he’s going to be saying in May — I think there’s going to be a great symmetry between the two,” said David Plouffe, an Obama senior adviser in the White House and the manager of Obama’s campaign in 2008.

“We don’t sit around here saying, ‘We wish we had an opponent.’ We know that’s going to come,” Plouffe said. “When that day comes, we’ll be ready for it.”

The Republican electoral calendar is fluid and accelerating, with Florida’s decision to hold a late-January primary likely to prompt other states to move up their voting, too. Still, newly adopted Republican rules on how delegates are awarded will make it harder for any candidate to quickly clinch the nomination.

Republican insiders say their party’s battle could extend into May — meaning Obama would not have a specific challenger for more than seven months.

In the end, Plouffe said he expects Obama will face Texas Gov. Rick Perry or former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney: “It’s hard to imagine another scenario,” he said.

Obama’s campaign wing is already singling out Perry and Romney by name, saying they support policies the American people oppose. In a memo released Monday, the campaign criticized Perry’s assertion that Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme” and said Romney supports turning the program over to Wall Street.

But neither party expects most voters to start really paying attention to the race until it is down to Obama and an opponent.

In the meantime, the absence of someone for Obama to post up against presents him with both troubles and openings.

Running against alleged Republican intransigence in Congress isn’t exactly the kind of vision that voters can see and feel, or that inspires volunteers.

“Right now, understandably, totally legitimate, this is a referendum on Obama and Biden, and the nature of the state of the economy,” Vice President Joe Biden told a South Florida radio station last week. “It’s soon going to be a choice.”

Obama’s strategy is to use the fall and winter to outline a broad vision of how his ideas for the country differ from those of Republicans, and then fill in the details when a competitor emerges.

His themes are already there.

Obama’s policy speeches and his high-dollar fundraisers often center on a need for the wealthy to pay a bigger share to shrink the federal deficit and pay for education, research and the basic infrastructure of the country. He has been talking about opportunity for all and calling anew for a “big, generous vision of what America has been and can be.”

“In this phase, the president can soften the ground, no matter who the candidate is,” said Doug Hattaway, a Democratic strategist. “I see it as an opportunity. He has an opportunity to draw a very clear line between his vision and the Republican ideology, and let the Republican candidates do a hatchet job on each other.”

Karen Finney, a Democratic operative who served in the Clinton White House, said Obama’s effort to contrast what he is trying to do with the way congressional Republicans are standing in the way “reminds people what they like about him, which could also help his poll numbers.”

Most major polls suggest that Obama faces a challenging environment, at best.

The latest Gallup data show Obama’s national approval rating now is below that of all two-term presidents at the same point in their first terms, since Gallup began testing presidential approval regularly during the Eisenhower years. His overall approval rating is at 41 percent in Gallup polling.

Recent polling in swing states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania shows Obama competitive with Romney and Perry, a result that’s open to interpretation.

The White House insists that bodes well for Obama, because he already is carrying the weight of his troubles as the familiar incumbent, while his competitors have not gone through the scrutiny of the primary process or a full media vetting of their views. To Republicans, Obama’s current standing shows a weak incumbent who has blended governing and campaigning into one message.

“I don’t think people believe that he’s running on two tracks right now. He’s running on one track: Total attacks on Republicans,” said Ed Gillespie, a former White House counselor to President George W. Bush and one-time chairman of the Republican National Committee.

For all the debate about whether the election is a referendum on Obama’s leadership or a choice between candidates, Obama himself has leaned in public toward the former.

In an interview with a Kansas City, Mo. television station in July, he was asked who in the Republican field could beat him.

He never answered directly, but said if Americans feel he has been moving the country in the right direction, “I’ll win. If they don’t, I’ll lose.”

“That’s not to say the other candidate is irrelevant,” Obama added. “But it does mean I’ll probably win or lose based on their assessment of my stewardship.”

___

Associated Press Deputy Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta and AP Writer Ken Thomas contributed to this report.