Archives for August 2007

WAPO’s Chris Cillizza reports from Yearly Kos, where longtime Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg had some advice for the assembled progressive bloggers:

Think big. As in, big gains for Democrats in both the House and the Senate in 2008. “Do not think conservatively,” said Greenberg during a panel discussion on the impact of Iraq on polling and the coming election. “The idea of a 50-seat-plus majority is real.”

Greenberg wasn’t the only Democratic strategist predicting huge gains. Tom Mattzie, Washington director of MoveOn.org, insisted that a path existed to a 60-seat majority in the Senate after the 2008 election.

Why the rosy predictions?

Because the 2006 election in which Democrats regained majorities in the House and Senate was a “small point along the way,” according to Greenberg, and the data continues to suggest that the political environment is worsening almost daily for Republicans.

In making the case for Rodney Tom, he and his surrogates routinely dismiss Darcy Burner’s ’08 prospects. “She had her run,” state Rep. Chris Hurst smugly told the Seattle P-I, complaining that she “came up short … in what was probably the best year in 40 years to run as a Democrat.” The intended message to Democratic primary voters is two-fold: 1) Burner only did as well as she did because of unusual national trends; and 2) those trends won’t be present in 2008.

Yeah, um, that’s right… Burner went from complete unknown to within inches of victory, simply by riding the Democratic tide. It had absolutely nothing to do with her smart campaign, her relentless hard work, and a force of personality that won over hundreds of passionate grassroots volunteers. I could write dissertations refuting premise number one, but suffice it to say that it is just plain insulting, and I’m not so sure that Tom, Hurst and their buddies would derisively dis Burner like that if she wasn’t, you know, a girl.

But premise number 2 — the heart of the Tom campaign’s critique of Burner — is just flat out refuted by the numbers. Indeed, Greenberg’s polling data suggests a steadily deteriorating political climate for Reichert and his House colleagues:

The Republicans are in trouble – almost as much trouble as they were in 2006. Democrats are not only ahead in the most competitive Republican districts (Tier 1), but they also lead by 3 points in the second tier, less competitive Republican seats, which means there might well be additional Congressional seats at risk beyond the 35. The extent of Republicans’ vulnerabilities suggests that Democrats can take their advantage far into Republican territory in 2008. This pattern that allowed the Democrats to take 30 seats in the last mid-term election could well take Democrats up to 20 in the Presidential, unless confounded by intervening events. There really could be another wave election.

Unlike the Democratic incumbents, Republican members in competitive districts face a range of trends that are working against them, reflected in their deteriorating margin – a 10-point net swing against them since mid-June.

Tom and his boosters imply that Darcy blew it, repeating over and over again that the coming election will be nothing like the previous one, as if that were a fact. But if Tom and Hurst et al are such geniuses at predicting Democratic waves — or the absence thereof — why didn’t any of them run in 2006? By January of last year it had already become obvious to amateurs like me that something BIG was potentially coming in November, yet the DCCC failed to recruit a single experienced candidate to challenge the one-term Reichert.

Compare that to this cycle, with both Tom and Hurst drooling to get into the race after state Rep. Ross Hunter’s ill health knocked him out. If 2008 is gonna be such a tough year for Democrats, why were so many formerly timid Democrats suddenly so anxious to get into the race?

Because they know Reichert is vulnerable. Burner proved it. And now they just want to brush her aside in a cycle they assume will be very good for Democrats indeed.

I’m filling in all week for Frank Shiers, Monday through Friday, from 9PM to 1AM on Newsradio 710-KIRO. More updates from Yearly Kos throughout the night; expected callers include David Sirota and LiberalLucy, who will also give us the latest on the Michigan state senate blocking access to liberal blogs. Later in the show, fellow HA blogger Will comes into the studio to talk transportation and other local issues.

Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

From The Other Side:

I feel bad for the people of Yakima. I can’t believe that they have to choose between Jim Clements and Curtis King. The Yakima Herald did a rundown of yesterday’s debate.

King lashed out at Clements for expanding health care coverage for kids. Then, he criticized Clements for making it easier for public schools to raise money.

While King is a cold hearted punk, Clements has his drawbacks. He totally blows it while pandering to the local GOP base with this one:

During a discussion on illegal immigration, Clements complained that the suspect in the recent abduction and murder of a 12-year-old Tacoma girl was a noncitizen with a criminal record who should have been “sent home” with Mexican president Vicente Fox following his historic visit to Yakima last year.

The suspect, however, is from Thailand.

Nice! Somebody get a map for the “porch dog.”

I just got an email from a minor Democratic mucky-muck complaining about my playful jabs at Rodney Tom, and warning that I shouldn’t be “interfering” in a local primary. The emailer flattered me by suggesting I had some “influence,” but then went on to chastise me for using it “irresponsibly.” Apparently, my aggressive support of Darcy Burner just “isn’t fair.”

Well, you know what…? Life isn’t fair. And in poking fun at Tom’s early missteps and misstatements, well, that’s kinda the point. We bloggers do have some influence these days, and we almost uniformly intend to use it in support of Darcy. Rodney Tom isn’t our guy, and for a candidate whose primary campaign theme seems to focus almost exclusively on electability, well, that’s not a very good place to be.

Tom’s boosters keep pushing the “Darcy can’t win in November” meme, but the real question mucky-mucks should be asking themselves is whether Tom has a path toward winning in August? Well, he ain’t gonna get any help here.

In the comments recently, I had a good discussion with Tuor about the wastefulness involved with sending American taxpayer dollars to places where corruption is rampant due to political leaders who aren’t held accountable because they have close ties to a lucrative natural resource. Places like Alaska:

Gravel will be in Alaska later this month for a speech in Anchorage. He will appear before an Anchorage civic group, Commonwealth North. He goes north with mixed feelings. He’s concerned about the corruption scandal and what that does to the state’s reputation nationally. He says Alaskans were too fast to embrace all the federal largesse Stevens sent home, wasted too much of the money and instead should have invested in creating a world-class education system.

Oops… almost forgot! I’m filling in all week for Frank Shiers, Monday through Friday, from 9PM to 1AM on Newsradio 710-KIRO.

Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

Eric Earling offers up what passes for “insight” over at (u)SP:

Darcy Burner’s campaign actually did a pretty good job of hiding how liberal she actually is during the 2006 cycle. If you paid close attention to her campaign rhetoric and some interviews you could catch the fact she fits right into the netroots. But her campaign did a good job of keeping her on message, for what that was worth. What will happen now that it’s to her advantage to proclaim her liberal, progressive bona fides in order to win a primary?

In 2006 Reichert ran on his own record and against her lack of experience as well as against her position on taxes (one of the few topics about which she actually spilled the liberal beans). What happens when she proudly proclaims her position on health care, foreign affairs, etc. to secure her left flank in the primary season? What kind of ammunition will that provide for November 2008?

See, this is exactly why Republicans consistently lose races on the Eastside and statewide — because they have absolutely no idea where the political center is anymore. Eric’s pal Stefan likes to dismiss bloggers like me as the “nutroots,” as if repeatedly calling us crazy automatically makes it so, and while Eric, to his credit, avoids the puerile pun, he seems to have bought into Stefan’s definition. The right has so relentlessly demonized the word “liberal” over the past couple decades that they have no idea what it means anymore.

Consider Eric’s example of a perceived political minefield facing Burner in the 2008 cycle on the issues of “health care” and “foreign affairs.” Burner wants to bring our troops home, whereas Reichert continues to support the president’s failed policies in Iraq. Just last night Reichert backed the president again by voting nay on a bill that would extend health insurance to children of the working poor. And Burner…?

“Let me be absolutely clear: I would have voted differently. In Congress I will fight to provide health care for all Americans, particularly our children. Not only is expanding the Children’s Health Program the right thing to do, funding most of the increase through a hike in the cigarette tax is something that I know the people of the 8th Congressional District would support.”

Tell me, on these two major issues, which candidate is out of step with the district?

On Iraq, health care, reproductive rights, climate change, gay rights, protecting our wilderness, domestic wiretapping and any number of other hot button issues, Burner finds herself smack dab in the mainstream of 8th CD voters. There’s a reason why the Reichert campaign and their surrogates focused almost entirely on dismissing Burner as just some ditzy girl — if voters had voted on the issues, Burner would have won by a comfortable margin.

Next time Eric wants to provide a little insight into the 8th CD race, he might want to base his analysis on something other than outdated assumptions.

This week’s Birds Eye View Contest is posted.

Yup, that’s my daughter Katie, at overnight camp in the Poconos with her Philadelphia cousins, learning how to shoot a rifle. Righties beware: we’re raising a new generation of liberals, who know how to fight back.

lolreichert!

I’m filling in all week for Frank Shiers, Monday through Friday, from 9PM to 1AM on Newsradio 710-KIRO.

We’ll be covering the Minneapolis bridge collapse all night long, with frequent updates from CBS News. Also joining me in studio will be two first time candidates, Keri Andrews, running for Bellevue City Council, and Maureen Judge, running for Mercer Island City Council. (And yeah… Maureen is my ex-wife.)

Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

When Rep. Dave Reichert cast his Nay vote this evening against the Children’s Health and Medicare Protection Act, he didn’t just cast a vote against providing health care to millions of American children, he voted directly against the financial interests of Washington state. The bill not only provides health coverage to children in working families earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but can’t afford insurance, it also more than doubles federal funds available to Washington state to cover uninsured children. According to a press release from Rep. Jay Inslee:

Until now, Washington and 10 other states were penalized for expanding health insurance coverage to children in families with incomes just over the poverty line before the popular State Children’s Insurance Plan (SCHIP) was enacted in 1997. Since enactment, they’ve had to fight every few years to spend even a fraction of unused federal funds to cover children at this income level. States that didn’t cover these children a decade ago have had no such limitation on the use of federal SCHIP funds.

A permanent fix for this inequity was included in the Children’s Health and Medicare Protection (CHAMP) Act, H.R. 3162, legislation that would provide $50 billion in new funding for SCHIP and Medicare. It was secured last week by U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee, when the bill was being considered by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over SCHIP. He, along with U.S. Reps. Jim McDermott, Norm Dicks, Adam Smith, Brian Baird and Rick Larsen, then pressed House leadership to keep the Washington state fix in the bill that was considered on the House floor today.

“It’s been an uphill battle to end this injustice,” said Inslee. “The feds shouldn’t have shortchanged kids in Washington when SCHIP was set up a decade ago.”

The bill passed 225 to 204, no thanks to Reichert and the rest of our Republican delegation, who all voted against the interests of Washington state, and with their President Bush. Keep this vote in mind next year when our editorialists laud Reichert for his “conscience-driven independent streak.”

Arnold Relman writes about the pharmaceutical industry in The New Republic. His column is a response to a book by Richard Epstein that blames excessive regulation for stifling innovation when it comes to developing new drugs. Relman picks apart Epstein’s arguments and shows what has happened to the pharmaceutical industry as it has tried to be seen as maintaining a commitment to America’s health while also being beholden to their shareholders.

Epstein comes from the school of thought that believes that health care should be an individual responsibility and that government should not be involved. In this mindset, the forces of the marketplace will theoretically produce the optimal result. What we’ve discovered as we’ve moved more and more in that direction is that it doesn’t happen. The desire to maximize profits in the pharmaceutical industry has often run contrary to what the average American sees as the optimal result. Drugs are incredibly expensive and the companies have tremendous power to limit our ability to find alternatives. In addition, the regulatory mechanisms don’t go away, the pharmaceutical industry just uses them to protect their market position. A good example of this is how the pharmaceutical industry has strong-armed the FDA into keeping people from being able to import cheaper drugs from Canada.

While the pharmaceutical industry has maintained that the high cost of drugs are a result of the need to recoup the costs of R&D, Relman points out that even the former CEO of Merck disputes that claim. The high costs of drugs are based upon what the market will bear for that drug. And as we’ve discovered with health care in general, market forces tend to work better for the things we want than for the things we need. As a result, America’s pharmaceutical industry is one of its most profitable sectors, even as they continue to complain about the high cost of doing business. Drug prices don’t go down over time, they usually go up.

Pharmaceutical companies have given us a lot of new drugs in the past decade or so. Many of them, as Relman notes, are copycat drugs that do things very similar to existing drugs. The market contains a number of anti-anxiety medications, cures for erectile dysfunction, and cures for diseases like restless leg syndrome that we never knew we had. In the end, the system skews towards drugs that are cheaper to produce (many of which appear to be more recreational in nature), which are then heavily advertised to doctors and patients, while fixing more life-critical conditions are a lower priority. Even for the life-critical drugs, Epstein argues for less regulation in the certification process and maintains that safety concerns will just shake out as doctors and patients discover the benefits and drawbacks of particular drugs on their own.

One particular area of the pharmaceutical industry, though, creates some conflict among two traditional factions of the Republican Party. Highly addictive drugs used for pain management are a major source of concern for social conservatives, but have been a major cash cow for certain firms with close ties to high-profile Republicans. Purdue Pharma, the makers of OxyContin, is one company that has had to surf this divide. Some of Purdue’s top execs recently received probation and were fined over $600 million for misleading the public as to how addictive their drug was.

The verdict against the executives was different from the more traditional way that anti-drug officials in the DEA have attacked this problem – by going after doctors who specialize in pain management. Because of the addictiveness of OxyContin (which came to be called Hillbilly Heroin), many doctors were accused of supporting illegitimate drug use and found themselves being aggressively and often unfairly prosecuted. It took action from people who’ve lost loved ones in order for those who manufactured this drug to be held accountable for lying about its medical properties.

This outcome shouldn’t be a surprise. In a profit-driven system, Purdue Pharma’s actions were perfectly rational. Admitting that your product is as addictive as heroin when crushed into a powder is bad for the bottom line. So instead, they hired now-Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani to lobby in support of the drug. They paid the father of a victim of an OxyContin overdose, Steven Steiner, to travel around the country to campaign against medical marijuana, a drug that has some similar uses to OxyContin, but is much safer (and yet still illegal at the federal level). And to underscore how much pull they had, people at high levels of the Justice Department tried to get the Virginia prosecutors to go easy on Purdue.

OxyContin can be a very useful drug for people living with severe pain. The solution is not to ban doctors from ever prescribing it any more than it’s not the solution to allow the free market to dictate how it’s marketed and sold to the American public. The answer is to ensure that government oversight provides both patients and doctors with the most accurate information possible and give them the freedom to make the most informed decisions possible, not to criminalize addiction so that people aren’t afraid to help others or get help. The FDA and the DEA should exist to protect us, not the pharmaceutical companies.

You know, if you’re gonna send out a fundraising letter slamming your opponent, it might be a good idea to remove you opponent’s name and address from your mailing list:

You can read a PDF of the entire letter here; given the context of this race, it’s kinda hysterical. In a transparently lazy, boilerplate attempt to scare up some contributions, Jane Hague writes fearfully generically about her mudslinging opponent, and warns that the primary election is a “little more than six weeks” away. Only problem is, the primary election is about three weeks away, having been moved this year from September to August, and her opponent… well… it’s hardly fair to say she even has one.

As usual, Hague is running unopposed in the Republican primary, and the Dems were so disorganized this year that they’ve found themselves in the nearly impossible situation of running a write-in campaign against perennial candidate and HA regular, Richard Pope. So all this talk about needing money ahead of the primary to fend off a well-funded campaign of “personal destruction”…? Well, it’s um… what’s the word I’m looking for here? Oh, I know: lies.

If that’s the kind of respect she shows people who give her money, imagine how she treats those who only give her their votes? And why would anyone give money to a candidate so lazy, she can’t even pick up the phone and ask her consultants to write a fundraising letter specific to this year’s campaign? This deserves a thorough fisking.

“My opponent has a long track record of running campaigns that focus less on the issues and more on negative — and often personal — attacks.”

I assume she’s talking about Richard, who has a long track record of running campaigns that pretty much don’t focus on anything, except maybe planting a handful of yard signs.

“I expect outside special interests to spend heavily in an attempt to scare people into voting against me.”

Dollars to donuts, the bulk of Richard’s campaign war chest this year will be spent on the filing fee.

“Sadly, I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion — from what’s already being said to the media and special interest groups — that my opponent has no intention of focusing his campaign on the real differences between us on the issues.”

Again with the “focus” crap. This is what… Richard’s twelfth race in as many years? He runs for a different office every election. Clearly, the man suffers from a debilitating form of political ADD. I wouldn’t worry about his focus.

“It seems clear that my opponent will instead engage in the kind of politics of personal destruction we so often see back in the other Washington.”

Your opponent is “engaged” in a hotly contested primary battle with a write-in candidate. ‘Nuff said.

“I promise to remain centered on a positive vision for the Eastside, but I also must be prepared to respond to any negative attacks made by my opponent.”

Define “negative attacks.” Would that include falsely accusing your opponent of negative attacks he lacks the resources (financial and otherwise) to launch?

“Help me raise the financial resources necessary to respond to an opponent who’s more about degradation and destruction than solving the problems we face.”

“Degradation and destruction”…? Who does she think her opponent is… Osama bin Laden? I’ve got nothing against Richard — and even admit to an odd fondness for the guy — but this is Richard fucking Pope we’re talking about for chrissake! Hague already enjoys a modest $226,546 to zero fundraising advantage over Pope; what kind of addition “financial resources” does she need?

“The bottom line is this campaign is going to be hard fought.”

The bottom line is this campaign is a cakewalk. The bottom line is Hague has needlessly gone on the attack against an opponent who rarely campaigns outside the comment threads of a handful of local blogs. The bottom line is Hague is a liar, shamelessly fleecing her fellow Republicans for money that would be better spent elsewhere.

And the bottom line is, Hague knows that this is the last time she runs unopposed, virtual or otherwise; like the remaining vestige of the once dominant Eastside GOP establishment, she’s frightened for her political future. This campaign isn’t about this campaign, it’s about fattening her larders for 2011, when a host of qualified Democrats will be drooling at the opportunity to take down Hague in her formerly Republican district.

This is to get my lame post off the top…