Michigan Votes For Republicans Today But Is Now Less Likely To Vote Republican In The Fall

February 28, 2012 — Ron Chusid

The Republican primary battle is ending in Michigan and the candidates will be moving on to suck up to the voters of different states. Just watch. Tomorrow Mitt Romney will be telling the residents of other states that their trees are the ones which are the right height. At the moment it is not possible to predict the winner. Romney retook the lead in most polls but a Public Policy Polling survey did show momentum moving in Santorum’s direction at the last minute. Another last minute poll from Mitchell Research/Rosetta Stone shows Romney taking a slight lead in a race which could go either way.

In what might be a sign that Romney’s internal polls are not going well,  Romney is talking about the possibility of a Santorum victory:

Battling for his critical home state of Michigan on Tuesday, Mitt Romney accused Republican rival Rick Santorum of trying to “kidnap our primary process” by getting Democrats to tip the very tight race in favor of Pennsylvania’s former senator.

Flanked by volunteers at his campaign headquarters, Romney conceded that — as recent polls suggest — Santorum might win, and he pointed to his rival’s robo-calls encouraging Democratic crossover voters to turn out in the open primary.

“I think the hardest thing about predicting what’s going to happen today is whether Senator Santorum’s effort to call Democrat households and tell them to come out and vote against Mitt Romney is going to be successful or not. I think Republicans have to recognize there’s a real effort to kidnap our primary process. And if we want Republicans to nominate the Republican who takes on Barack Obama, I need Republicans to get out and vote and say ‘no’ to the dirty tricks of a desperate campaign,” the former Massachusetts governor said.

This is yet another flip-flop for Romney who has admitted to crossing over to vote in a past Democratic primary for strategic reasons:

ABC News’ Jonathan Greenberger Reports: Republican presidential candididate Mitt Romney offered a new explanation today for why he supported a Democrat in 1992.

That year, Romney, then a registered independent, voted for former Sen. Paul Tsongas in the 1992 Democratic presidential primary.  He told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, in an interview that will air Sunday on “This Week,” that his vote was meant as a tactical maneuver aimed at finding the weakest opponent for incumbent President George H.W. Bush.

“In Massachusetts, if you register as an independent, you can vote in either the Republican or Democratic primary,” said Romney, who until he made an unsuccessful run for Senate in 1994 had spent his adult life as a registered independent. “When there was no real contest in the Republican primary, I’d vote in the Democrat primary, vote for the person who I thought would be the weakest opponent for the Republican.”

It would be devastating for the Republicans should Romney lose. Matthew Dowd raised the possibility of Republicans looking for another candidate:

“If Rick Santorum wins tonight it’s the equivalent of a 9.0 on a Richter scale. I mean it is going to shake Washington, it’s going to shake Republican establishment it’s just going to shake things to their very core,” Dowd told me. “And I think what you’re going to see are the conversations that have been going on behind quiet doors saying we need another candidate in this race.”

It is possible that GOP leaders could fudge the rules, which are vague as to the commitment of delegates to a candidate, to enable another candidate to win. Should they do this, I wonder how many unhappy supporters of the current candidates will feel betrayed by the party and stay home or vote Democratic. Keep in mind how angry many of the PUMA’s were about the defeat of Hillary Clinton, which was done fairly under party rules. Resentment could be even greater if party leaders alter rules to help a new candidate. Even should Romney win, the fact that Santorum has posed such a challenge to Romney has highlighted his weaknesses. Should Romney win narrowly, it might be important as to whether the media presents this as a win for Romney or a close win where Romney looked weak and failed to meet earlier expectations.

I doubt that Michigan would have voted Republican in the general election, but the state had been listed as a battle ground state. Dowd says this is no longer the case:

Ten days ago, Michigan was a major battleground state for the general election, Mitt Romney was looking to reconnect with the middle class in his home state, and Rick Santorum was gaining momentum after three big wins and looking at maybe becoming the first Catholic nominated by the Republican party. The Obama campaign was so concerned about Michigan being in play for the fall that it brought President Obama there to give a major speech and made plans to spend valuable ad dollars in the state.

But that was then.

Now, after the Romney and Santorum campaigns, Michigan is likely off the fall map of battleground states.  It looks again reliably Democratic – not because of anything the Obama team has done, but because of the nature of the contest between Romney and Santorum, which has alienated many independent voters and created a tremendous divide.  This isn’t a good sign as the Republican nomination contest moves into other battleground states like Ohio next week.

Posted in Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Michigan News, Mitt Romney, Politics, Polls, Rick Santorum. Tags: , , , , , . 1 Comment »

Gingrich Becoming The Next Not-Romney Candidate

November 11, 2011 — Ron Chusid

There might be a major shake-up underway in the Republican nomination race. Polls such as the McClatchy-Marist poll show Cain falling and Gingrich now turning it into a three-way race.  If Gingrich doesn’t self-destruct like Perry and Cain, it is possible that Gingrich could win the nomination.

There are enough conservatives who do not want Mitt Romney to win that, should they unite behind one, Romney could still be denied the nomination. At this point Romney is looking a lot like Hillary Clinton did four years ago.  If Gingrich could win in Iowa, come in a respectable second in New Hampshire, and then go on to win in South Carolina, he could go on to win the nomination. There might be a protracted fight between Gingrich and Romney, with other conservatives also picking up votes, with Romney unable to gain over fifty percent of the delegates. The questions will be whether Gingrich can maintain his momentum when he becomes the target of other candidates and whether enough conservatives start to back him.

Posted in Herman Cain, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Politics, Polls, Rick Perry. Tags: , , , , , . 3 Comments »

The Perils Of The Mandate Issue

September 27, 2011 — Ron Chusid

The Democrats are facing a new political land mine next fall, and it appears that many Obama supporters fail to appreciate the danger. The Obama administration has decided to fast track the individual mandate  so that its Constitutionality will be decided by the Supreme Court next year. Looking at the arguments in favor of this strategy in the linked article,it would certainly be better for supporters of the mandate to have the case argued by the Obama administration as opposed to a Republican administration should Obama be defeated, but the prominence of this issue can be harmful to Obama’s reelection chances.

Election Law Blog has another argument which has been widely repeated today, seeing it as favorable for Obama whether or not they rule that the individual mandate is constitutional.

If the Court strikes down the law, Obama makes more of an issue of a Court out of control (think FDR) during the 2012 campaign (something I suggested in this Slate piece).  If the Court upholds the law, this takes some of the wind out of the argument likely to come from the Republican presidential nominee that the health care law is unconstitutional.  No lose before the election.  Sometimes, you can win by losing before the Roberts Court.

The problem is that mandates will now be a major issue for Republicans to talk about going into the 2012 election, and it is possible that their consideration of the issue could be postponed until next fall. Obama needs to sell Americans on the benefits which they will receive in the future from the Affordable Care Act, but arguments over the mandate will dominate the discussion. Win or lose, this will fire up the conservatives and also impact moderates who backed Obama in 2008. If the court rules in Obama’s favor, those who object to the mandate will still object. If the court rules against him, this only strengthens the ridiculous claims from the right that Obama is pushing far left ideas. Only those who already support the Democrats will be swayed by the argument that the Roberts court is out of control if they rule against the mandate.

Unfortunately many liberals fail to understand the visceral opposition which Americans have to being told what to do. Obama realized this during his primary battle with Hillary Clinton when he opposed the mandate. Unfortunately, while actual legislation was being written Obama appears to have forgotten the political problems with the mandate. Health care reform is necessary, and the mandate might be the easiest way to get around the free-rider problem, but there are other ways. We could have open enrollment periods like the voluntary Medicare Part D program, with those who purchasing outside of such open enrollment periods being subject to the old insurance company rules. There could be higher premiums for those who sign up later, as is also done with Medicare Part D, to make up for the premiums not paid into the system when the individual was younger and healthier. There could be financial penalties, possibly enforced by the IRS, upon those who cost the government money by seeking health care coverage after failing to purchase insurance to compensate for this cost to society. Bankruptcy laws could be changed so that people who declined insurance when available cannot easily eliminate debts for health care.

The end result would be the same–most but not all would obtain health insurance. The difference politically would be tremendous. Republicans understand this and, as is generally the case, will come out ahead politically even when they are generally wrong on health care policy. The irony is that mandates are an old Republican idea which they only recently abandoned in order to use the issue against Obama. The Democrats should have known better than to adopt this old Republican idea.

Posted in Barack Obama, Courts, Health Care, Hillary Clinton. Tags: , , . No Comments »

Republican Fringe Ideas Help Obama’s Reelection Prospects

September 6, 2011 — Ron Chusid

With Rick Perry moving into a  lead for the GOP nomination, there are some conservatives who recognize that his nomination could be a disaster of Goldwater-proportions. Joe Scarborough says there is “No way” Perry could beat Obama. Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review has a realistic column for Bloomberg arguing that Obama’s weakness is leading to Republican overreach, making it hard for Republicans to win in a general election. Ponnuru wrote:

Already the Republican primaries have seen candidates take positions that will be hard sells in the fall of next year. Both Bachmann and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, for example, want to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency. Polls suggest that while the public doesn’t consider environmental protection its top priority right now, it favors regulation and trusts Democrats over Republicans on the issue. Texas Governor Rick Perry has suggested that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional and that they should be replaced by state-run programs. There’s a reason no Republican candidate since 1964 has run on a platform anything like this one on entitlements: Both programs are extremely popular.

Perry has also suggested that he disapproves of the New Deal, seeing it as a moment when the federal government began to exceed the constitutional limits of its power. He hasn’t said he wants to undo the New Deal, but it’s not out of bounds for Democrats to make the charge, given the importance he attaches to constitutionalism.

In each of these cases, provocative positions have been met by silence from rival candidates. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney hasn’t come out in favor of abolishing the EPA or getting rid of federal entitlement programs, but he hasn’t denounced these ideas or even used them as an argument against the electability of the candidates who have advanced them. Evidently he believes either that the primary electorate doesn’t think these positions are politically toxic, or that it doesn’t consider electability a key concern.

If Republican voters had electability on their minds, they would also want to see the candidates address issues that concern the broader public: how to get wages growing again after years when they stagnated even during periods of growth; and what to replace Obama’s health-care reform with. But the candidates feel no pressure from primary voters to outline plans on those issues, and haven’t done so. Instead, they are focused on issues — such as the alleged threat of “sharia law” and the heavy share of income taxes paid by the rich — that are of interest only to the party faithful.

Ponnuru prefaced this discussion by a discussion of Obama’s difficulties in getting reelected, and hopefully underestimated Obama’s political skills:

Obama has never had to demonstrate great political skill in his general-election races. During both of them, he was blessed with good luck (a fringy opponent in his Senate race, and a collapsing economy during his presidential run).

To limit the discussion to general-election races ignores a major achievement in defeating Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Although the economic situation made it difficult for a Republican to win in 20o8 (while giving Republicans an edge in 2012 due to the short memories of American voters), Obama still did run an excellent general election campaign. On the other hand, the manner in which the Republicans won the spin wars over health care reform and the stimulus after Obama took office do leave cause for concern. Obama’s chances are helped considerably due to his potential opponents being bat-shit crazy. He might also be helped by falling in the polls now, forcing him to campaign more as he did before be was elected.

Posted in Barack Obama, Barry Goldwater, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Politics, Rick Perry. Tags: , , , , . 5 Comments »

Perry’s Palin-Style Surge

September 1, 2011 — Ron Chusid

It is not surprising that, soon after entering the race, Rick Perry has moved to the lead in the Republican race considering the weakness of the field. As Governor of Texas, he avoids the problems of candidates (and potential candidates)  such as Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin of not appearing qualified to hold national office. By taking extreme conservative positions, he avoids the problems of candidates such as Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman. He has even taken a lead over Obama in the latest Rasmussen poll, although if you believed the results from this right -wing polling outfit  the country would be far to the right of where it is now, Hillary Clinton would have beaten Barack Obama, and a Republican would already be in the White House.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t think it is possible for Perry to take a lead in the legitimate national polls. I would not be at all surprised if Perry doesn’t enjoy a huge bounce, similar to the one which Sarah Palin briefly enjoyed. Once people learn more about his ideas and past, his public support will undoubtedly fall. For the sake preserving a United States which the founding fathers might still recognize, I sure hope that happens before November, 2012. Otherwise we will believe that the ancient Mayans were right.

Republicans who consider electability as opposed to extremist right-wing philosophy and the anti-Americanism/anti-intellectualism of the so-called Tea Party will realize that Perry is a potential disaster, but they might not have a choice. If the election can be limited to a vote based upon the economy in 2012, then there is the danger that Perry, and even Bachmann or Palin, could actually win, regardless of the fact that Republican economic ideas are responsible for creating and prolonging the recession. If Obama has any success in broadening the playing field to a vote as to what type of American voters really want, Obama still can win big. Republicans already have the burden of running with their Congressional votes to essentially abolish Medicare.  Add to that Perry’s opposition to Social Security, support of theocracy over liberal democracy, and support for plutocracy over capitalism, and we could see a replay of 1964, assuming the Democrats can actually get their message out.

It is far too early to predict the GOP race, but many pundits are now describing it as a battle between Romney and Perry. The two have one thing in common. Both have taken more moderate positions in the past, and have more recently espoused nutty right wing views to improve their position it the GOP. The difference is that, despite pandering to the far right on a number of issues, Romney has avoided a handful of extremist views while Perry has gone as far right as possible without donning a white sheet or brown shirt, giving him far more credibility on the right.  Plus having actually implemented a health care plan similar to Obama’s is a far more serious offense than just writing in support of Hillary Clinton’s plan as Perry once did. After all, the plan which passed is essentially the Republican counter-proposal to Clinton’s plan with most leading Republicans already being on record as supporting its features in the past.

Perry’s entry does alter Romney’s game plan. Until now, Romney has been able to get away with raising tons of money while generally keeping a low profile and limiting attacks upon him. He must now campaign more openly and  gamble by showing that Perry is too radical to become president, recognizing that doing this might actually endear him even more to Republican primary voters. At least having Romney and Huntsman exposing Perry’s most radical viewpoints will make things easier for Obama should Perry become his opponent, potentially reducing his national support to Palin-levels as soon as he is nominated.

Posted in Barack Obama, Health Care, Hillary Clinton, Jon Huntsman, Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney, Politics, Polls, Rick Perry, Sarah Palin. Tags: , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Obama And The End Of The Post-Partisan Era

August 31, 2011 — Ron Chusid

Barack Obama attracted many independents in 2008 with his “post-partisan” approach to politics, but this turned out to be far more effective for campaigning against an unpopular incumbent as opposed to governing. Regardless of how much Obama wanted to compromise, the Republicans made opposing everything Obama supported their major goal. Obama’s support of moderate economic policies and a moderate health care reform plan did not prevent bogus claims that Obama is a socialist who supported a government take-over of health care.

As long as Obama’s popularity was soaring far above that of Congress, it was difficult to criticize Obama for maintaining this approach despite my fears that he would eventually suffer in the polls if the economy remained bad. In recent weeks his popularity has dropped, even if it remains well above that of Congress and of Republicans. A recent Pew Research Center survey showed that “Currently, 57% of Democrats say Obama should challenge the Republicans more often, while 32% say he is handling relations with the GOP about right. ” This is up from 37% in April who said Obama should challenge the Republicans more. The number of Independents who want Obama to stand up more to the Republicans has increased from 30% to 36% since April.

The importance of doing this extends beyond these poll numbers. Considering that public opinion regarding the economy typically lags actual improvement by several months, it is likely that a poor economy could cause an incumbent president to lose votes in 2012. It is essential that Obama make the case that it was Republican policies which caused the recession, actions of Congressional Republicans which have hindered recovery, and that further Republican polices will make matters worse.

Perhaps I am overly concerned, considering Obama’s other advantages as an incumbent. Allan Lichtman, an American University professor who has a formula which predicted every presidential race correctly since 1984, has predicted Obama will win reelection. However there really have not been many presidential elections which were very difficult to predict since then, and I also think there is wisdom to the old Clinton mantra that, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Of course the Obama political team which beat Hillary Clinton and then went on to an easy victory in the general election is not stupid either. Presumably they were continuing the same strategy as long as Obama was doing well in the polls, and  now realize that they must change their message. I have seen a number of indicators that they plan to take a harder line against the Republicans, including today’s article in The Hill:

President Obama is preparing to fight a political war this fall on two fronts — the first against Republicans who want his job and the second against Republicans who want to make his job more difficult.

Obama is taking dead-aim at the latter group, targeting Congress in a fall offensive that the president’s reelection campaign hopes will bruise the overall GOP image beyond repair…

When GOP lawmakers return, the president and his team are ready to deliver a flurry of attacks, castigating Congress for inaction on jobs, being on the wrong side of taxes and eager to destroy social safety net programs. If Obama and his team have their way, Americans will come to see every Republican as a Tea Party extremist.

The president previewed this effort when he started throwing jabs while on the road in August.

At a stop in Michigan and repeatedly during his Midwest bus tour, Obama lashed out at Congress for imperiling the economic recovery and playing politics that caused the country’s credit rating to be reduced at a time when he was working for a grand compromise.

The president is still talking about compromise, but his tone and posture indicate he is more — or at least as — interested in combat…

And there’s a bonus to beating Congress to a pulp that officials think will pay off next year.

By forcing the GOP to take positions on such key economic issues as the payroll tax cut and tax cuts for the rich, Obama and his team are hoping to draw out and lock down the president’s 2012 challengers.

Example: If the debate turns on Republicans trying to gut Social Security, then expect the Democratic National Committee to connect the dots from Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the new GOP presidential front-runner, who once wrote that Social Security was “a Ponzi scheme.”

Posted in Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Congress, Economy, Hillary Clinton, Independents, Politics, Polls, Republicans, Rick Perry. Tags: , , , , . 1 Comment »

Quote of the Day

June 10, 2011 — Ron Chusid

Congressman Weiner reportedly called Bill Clinton to apologize for his behavior. After Bill suggested that Weiner also call Hillary, Weiner said, ‘Don’t worry, I sent her a text.’” –Conan O’Brien

Posted in Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Humor and Satire, Television. Tags: , , , . No Comments »

Inside The Fox Propaganda Machine

May 22, 2011 — Ron Chusid

Fox (I refuse to call it Fox News) has always been a rather curious outfit. We have often seen authoritarian political parties utilize propaganda outfits comparable to Fox, but I do not believe we have ever had a situation where the propaganda outfit has come to dominate the party. New York Magazine has an article on the founding of Fox and events there, including the removal of Glenn Beck.

The full article is well worth reading. The article, like many I have read about Fox, shows that Roger Ailes as opposed to Rupert Murdoch (who considered endorsing Obama over McCain) is the bigger problem there:

Even Rupert Murdoch, sensing the shifting tectonic plates, contemplated a move to the middle. In the summer of 2008, Ailes confronted Murdoch after he learned Murdoch was thinking of endorsing Obama in the New York Post; Ailes threatened to quit. It was a politically vulnerable time for Ailes. Murdoch’s children were agitating for a greater role in the company. Ailes surely understood that their politics, along with those of then–News Corp. president Peter Chernin and communications adviser Gary Ginsberg, differed greatly from Murdoch’s. The tensions surrounding Ailes played out in the publication of Michael Wolff’s Murdoch biography. Matthew Freud, husband of Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth and a London-based PR executive, encouraged Wolff to portray Fox as a pariah wing of the News Corp. empire. Ailes was furious with Wolff’s account, which was critical of Fox, and Rupert, seeking to quell the turmoil, offered Ailes a new contract. This corporate victory, not to mention Fox’s profits, ensured that Ailes remained unscathed by the succession games playing out among the Murdoch children.

By October 2008, Ailes recognized that Obama was likely to beat McCain. He needed to give his audience a reason to stay in the stands and watch his team. And so he went on a hiring spree. By the time Obama defeated McCain, Ailes had hired former Bush aide Karl Rove and Mike Huckabee and went on to assemble a whole lineup of prospective 2012 contenders: Palin, Gingrich, Santorum, and John Bolton.

It was, more than anything, a business decision. “It would be easy to look at Fox and think it’s conservative because Rupert and Roger are conservative and they program it the way they like. And to a degree, that’s true. But it’s also a business,” a person close to Ailes explained. “And the way the business works is, they control conservative commentary the way ESPN controls the market for sports rights.

Not surprisingly, the Obama administration was great for Fox, which pandered to paranoia about a liberal black president. It was not good if Fox desired to be seen as a legitimate news outlet:

Fox’s record ratings during the beginning of Obama’s presidency quickly put an end to Ailes’s fears that he would be bad for business. The network’s audience hit stratospheric levels as the tea-party rebellion provided a powerful story line that ran through Fox’s coverage. Sometimes Fox personalities took an active role in building the movement, something that Ailes was careful to check if it became too overt. In April 2010, Fox barred Hannity from broadcasting his show at a Cincinnati tea-party rally. “There would not have been a tea party without Fox,” Sal Russo, a former Reagan gubernatorial aide and the founder of the national Tea Party Express tour, told me.

But as Fox was helping to inflate the tea party’s balloon, some of the network’s journalistic ballast was disappearing. Starting in July 2008, a series of high-level departures began when Brit Hume, Ailes’s longtime Washington anchor, announced his retirement inside Fox. Then, three weeks after the election, David Rhodes, Fox’s vice-­president for news, quit to work for Bloomberg. Rhodes had started at Fox as a 22-year-old production assistant and risen through the ranks to become No. 2 in charge of news. His brother was a senior foreign-policy aide to Obama, and Rhodes told staffers that Ailes had expressed concern about this closeness to the White House. Rhodes privately told people he was uncomfortable with where Fox was going in the Obama era.

Fox managed to move even further to the right with the addition of Bill Sammon:

Meanwhile, Hume’s replacement, Bill Sammon, a former Washington Times correspondent, angered Fox’s political reporters, who saw him pushing coverage further to the right than they were comfortable with. Days after Obama’s inauguration, an ice storm caused major damage throughout the Midwest. At an editorial meeting in the D.C. bureau, Sammon told producers that Fox should compare Obama’s response to Bush’s handling of Katrina. “Bush got grief for Katrina,” Sammon said.

“It’s too early; give him some time to respond,” a producer shot back. “This ice storm isn’t Katrina.”

While the major bad guys of the article are Roger Ailes and Bill Sammon, another villain emerged: Hillary Clinton. During the primary campaign I had often noted how Hillary Clinton began to resemble a creature of the right wing far more than a liberal. The article confirmed what we had suspected about her:

There was bad blood left over from the campaign. In the bitter primary fight for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton’s advisers, led by Howard Wolfson, courted Fox and fed them negative research about Obama and John Edwards. “She made some kind of compact with Murdoch,” Obama’s former media adviser Anita Dunn told me.

As Fox continued to promote false right wing narratives, the White House attempted without much success to respond. Beyond the public response, David Axelrod attempted to utilize more quiet diplomacy, but found that this was futile:

While Dunn and others publicly engaged Fox, David Axelrod worked back-­channel diplomacy as the good cop. About a week before Dunn’s CNN appearance, Axelrod secretly sat down with Ailes at the Palm in midtown. They met before the restaurant opened to avoid drawing attention. Axelrod told Ailes they should try to defuse things and work together.

Going back to the 2008 campaign, Axelrod had maintained an off-the-­record dialogue with Ailes. He had faced off against Ailes in a U.S. Senate campaign in the early eighties and respected him as a fellow political warrior and shaper of narrative. But early on, Axelrod learned he couldn’t change Ailes’s outlook on Obama. In one meeting in 2008, Ailes told Axelrod that he was concerned that Obama wanted to create a national police force.

“You can’t be serious,” Axelrod replied. “What makes you think that?”

Ailes responded by e-mailing Axelrod a YouTube clip from a campaign speech Obama had given on national service, in which he called for the creation of a new civilian corps to work alongside the military on projects overseas.

Later, Axelrod related in a conversation that the exchange was the moment he realized Ailes truly believed what he was broadcasting.

News Corp will ultimately be controlled by younger, less conservative, members of the Murdoch family, and Ailes will not remain forever at Fox. There is question as to what will happen to Fox after Ailes retires, and of his legacy:

In the halls of Fox News, people do not want to be caught talking about what will happen to Fox News after the Ailes era. The network continues to be Ailes’s singular vision, and he’s so far declined to name a successor. One possibility in the event Ailes departs when his contract is up in 2013 is that Bill Shine could continue to oversee prime time and Michael Clemente would run the news division. But more than one person described fearing Lord of the Flies–type chaos in the wake of Ailes’s departure, so firm has his grip on power been.

This spring, the announcement by News Corp. that James Murdoch was being promoted to deputy chief operating officer triggered another round of speculation that the accession of the next generation would be problematic for Ailes. So far, James has had little interaction with Ailes. The last time the pair worked closely together was in the late nineties, when James was overseeing News Corp.’s dot-com properties and was briefly in charge of Fox’s website.

James likely witnessed his older brother Lachlan’s frustration over clashing with Ailes (one of the factors that caused Lachlan to leave the company). James has smartly avoided any major interactions with Ailes. Last year, when Matthew Freud criticized Ailes in a Times article, James immediately e-mailed Ailes to say that Freud wasn’t speaking for him. At a budget meeting with Ailes and Rupert a couple of weeks ago, James, who clearly hopes to run the company some day, praised Ailes for his outsize profits. But the future could be different. Rupert’s wife, Wendi, recently agreed to host an Obama fund-raiser with Russell Simmons. “She’s a big fan,” Simmons told me.

Last week, Ailes turned 71. He’s spending considerable time thinking about his legacy. It bothers him that he’s still regarded as an outsider. “He doesn’t want to be hated,” a GOPer who knows Ailes well said. “It really bothers him. You can’t gross a billion a year and retain an outlaw sensibility forever.”

Posted in Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, News Media, Republicans. Tags: , , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Samantha Power To Take Clinton’s Job?

April 3, 2011 — Ron Chusid

There is speculation that Samantha Power might become the Secretary of State following Hillary Clinton’s statement that she plans to step down after President Obama’s first term. I would prefer someone who isn’t as strong an interventionist, but it would be amusing to see Power take Clinton’s job. It was Samantha Power who resigned from the Obama campaign for calling Hillary Clinton a monster during the primary campaign.

Posted in Democrats, Hillary Clinton. Tags: . No Comments »

Obama v. Clinton

April 2, 2011 — Ron Chusid

Overall Obama is doing a great job and I never expected to agree with him on everything. I do find it annoying after the big primary battle that the decisions I disagree with the most are cases of Obama doing what Hillary Clinton would have done and I expected Obama to be different: the individual mandate, weakness on civil liberties, and going into Libya without Congressional approval.

[Above is my current Facebook status which has led to quite a discussion, along with a couple of de-friendings (plus several likes) . The statement that "overall Obama is doing a great job" received some objections. On the other extreme,  one person defriended me because of seeing any criticism of Obama at all as leading to President Palin. As I responded to her, no president should be above criticism. The fact that there can be much worse is no reason not to point out that there are areas of disagreement. On the other hand, I have no use for those who not only have disagreements with Obama but go from there to claim that he is as bad as Bush or as bad as GOP options for 2012.]

Posted in Barack Obama, Blogs & Social Media, Health Care, Hillary Clinton. Tags: , , , . 1 Comment »
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