…or were Mitt Romney (r).

From Blue Girl, August 23, 2006:

Talent Abdicates Responsibility to Troops

While Ike Skelton (D-MO 4th) is holding the Bush administration responsible and asking the tough questions from his seat on the House Armed Services Committee, Senator Jim Talent (R-W’s Back Pocket) is missing in action over in the Senate chamber. Talent has a seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, but after reviewing the minutes of SASC meetings, I can verify that he has missed 65 of 95 meetings. I am certain that the men and women fighting and dieing a half a world away in an illegal war that Talent voted to authorize (he votes the way he is told by Bush and the RNC a staggering 94% of the time) don’t mind him abdicating his responsibility to them. They are only the ones in the desert, ill-equiped because three years of combat has taken it’s toll on their vehicles and equipment and facing tour extensions as violence flares in Iraq.

Think about that for a moment, Missouri voters. We have two simultaneous wars going on, and the junior senator from our great state can’t be bothered to show up for meetings of the Senate Armed Services Committee 68.4% of the time….

[emphasis in original]

Half the battle is in actual showing up. And doing the job you were elected to do.

Now there’s this drivel:

Talent takes on new roles on defense, U.S.-China policy

In Washington

By Robert Koenig, Beacon Washington correspondent

6:51 am on Tue, 02.05.13

WASHINGTON – If Mitt Romney would have been elected president, there’s a good chance that the former Midwestern GOP senator testifying at the Senate Armed Services committee last week would have been Jim Talent rather than Chuck Hagel.

Talent, a former U.S. senator and House member from Chesterfield, was a senior adviser on defense and security issues to Romney and was on nearly every pundit’s short list of potential cabinet nominees, with several pegging him for a future secretary of Defense….

….Instead of being in the hot seat in a new presidential administration, Talent has added a couple of new assignments to his portfolio this year: He will serve on a panel that advises Congress on the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Review and is one of a dozen members of another advisory panel on U.S.-China economic and security issues….

Apparently showing up isn’t high on the list of essential qualifications for potential republican administration cabinet secretaries.

“…He will serve on a panel that advises Congress on the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Review and is one of a dozen members of another advisory panel on U.S.-China economic and security issues…”

If he shows up to meetings.

Ah, the old “it was an oversight on defense oversight” should come out at any moment – if anyone ever bothered to do a little bit of research and ask questions instead of regurgitating inside the beltway conventional wisdom.

So Roy Blunt finally decided that the chorus condemning Todd Akin had reached sufficient decibel level that he could safly join in. Not all on his lonesome, however, but safely ensconced in a group of other of Missouri’s mainline GOP establishment, former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and former Senators Kit Bond, John Danforth and Jim Talent, who, jointly, want us to know that:

We do not believe it serves the national interest for Congressman Todd Akin to stay in this race. The issues at stake are too big, and this election is simply too important. The right decision is to step aside. …

Blunt, it seems, is also willing to let it be kown that, as a very influential Republican, he has spoken to Akin privately several times since he (Akin) managed to put the GOP’s anti-women policy proposals in the spotlight, “urging” him to, basically,  get the hell out of Dodge.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the GOP has been preparing its 2012 electoral platform. And guess what? Except for the pseudo-medical mumbo-jumbo that half of the GOP probably believes – at least when safely in private – there’s almost no light between what Akin was saying about abortion policy and what the rest of the GOP wants to enshrine in the document that is intended to encapsulate what they stand for:

CNN reported on Monday that the draft of the GOP’s official 2012 platform calls for a federal ban on abortion with no exception for rape and incest survivors — the same policy Akin was trying to defend when he asserted that victims of “legitimate rape” have a natural bodily mechanism that prevents them from getting pregnant.

Nor could there be when you stop to think about it. After all, the VP pick, Rep. Paul Ryan, very publicly joined Brother Todd to promote legislation that would have denied federal funding for abortions in the case of “forcible” rape – a somewhat more precise way to say what Todd meant when he was talking about “legitimate” rape. Ryan has also sponsored “personhood” legislation that would effectively give the full panoply of legal rights to a fertilized cell, while denying the rights of the woman involved in hosting it.

And even worse, the personhood part of this radical anti-abortion brew has been endorsed by Mitt Romney. Arguably, the “personhood” strategy is even more dangerous than the “forcible rape” ruse to limit abortions. Some critics hold that personhood legislation could be used to even ban contraceptives. Of course, all that was before Akin’s ineptitude turned up the heat, and Romney’s campaign decided that he’d better forget about his former pandering to the radical anti-abortion base and pretend to be “moderate” – at least for now.

The real question for Messrs. Blunt, Ashcroft, Talent, and Bond is to ask how they can unload on poor, dim Akin and still support the GOP platform this year. And then we will want to know if Roy and his pals will ask Romney and Ryan to once and for all, forcefully repudiate their past, embarrassing radicalism – or step down for the good of the party?

According to Michael Mahoney, GOP establishment darling Ann Wagner, accompanied by GOP legislative has-been, Jim Talent, will hold a news conference to kick-off the Wagner general election campaign for the newly configured 2nd House district.  Mahoney’s preview speculates that they’ll give us a look at Wagner’s campaign strategy:

They’ll go after president Obama’s record on the economy. They’ll claim he “failed”, and cite the fact that the unemployment rate has been over 8% for 42 months. They’ll also promote the ‘America’s Comeback Team’. That’s the name the Romney campaign has rolled out after the weekend selection of Paul Ryan as Romney’s running mate.

In other words, they’ll not deviate from standard GOP slogans. It’s just so much easier to paint-by-numbers.

Touting the “come-back team” (because we would “come-back” to failed Bush administration policies?), while decrying the economy is, of course a predictable  approach, but not without risk, given what we now know about Paul Ryan’s role in planning the the last three and a half years of GOP congressional obstructionism, a course of action meant to do nothing more than damage the President by stalling the economic recovery – regardless of how much harm such a strategy would do to regular Americans.

Robert Draper in his recently published book, Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the US House of Representatives, writes that Ryan was one of the GOP congressional leaders who attended a dinner in Jaunary of 2009 in which just this policy of obstructionism was explicitly planned:

During a lengthy discussion, the senior GOP members worked out a plan to repeatedly block Obama over the coming four years to try to ensure he would not be re-elected.

Draper is not alone. Greg Sargent comments on what he calls “juicy nuggets” in Michael Grunwald’s new book, The New New Deal, that:

… shed new light on the degree to which Republicans may have decided to deny Obama all cooperation for the explicit purpose of rendering his presidency a failure – making it easier for them to mount a political comback after their disastrous 2008 losses.

Sadly, what’s also predictable is the probable willingness of the traditional press to report GOP slogans without comment in preference to ferreting out the more complex truth. Although I’d love to be wrong, it’s not likely that any intrepid Missouri newsman will challenge Wagner and Talent to respond to the now well-substantiated allegations of orchestrated, intentional obstructionism and so take ownership of the slow-as-syrup economic recovery their Grand Old Party has engineered.

*Slightly edited.  

Remember former GOP Senator Jim Talent, the guy Claire McCaskill defeated in 2006? Just last fall some on the right were hoping that the putative  “intellectual powerhouse” might be willing to take her on again in 2012. The GOP Missouri senatorial field remained Talentless, of course,  and he moved on to a position at the right-wing Heritage Foundation. Currently, he is also counted among the ranks of Romney surrogates. In this regard, Dave Weigel reports that:

… the Romney campaign held two surrogate conference calls today, giving Idaho’s Gov. Butch Otter and Missouri’s former Sen. Talent (and others) space to trash Santorum. Talent did what he’d refused to in January: He criticized Santorum for supporting Medicare Part D. And then a reporter on the call pointed out that Talent had supported the same bill.

It is surely only because Talent is an intellectual powerhouse that he is able to sustain such internal contradictions. Of course, the person who designated him such added at the time that “he is regarded favorably by many Tea Partiers,”  which does rather speak to the limits of the initial judgment.

The headline from CNN:

Romney assembles top-notch foreign policy team

(CNN) – On the eve of his foreign policy speech at The Citadel in South Carolina, former Massachusetts Gov. and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney announced selections for his foreign policy and national security team….

….Romney’s 22-member team of special advisers also includes former Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman and former Missouri Sen. Jim Talent….

[emphasis added]

Top notch? More like retreads.

This must mean that you don’t have to show up for meetings.

from Tony Messenger on Twitter:

Republican Mitt Romney announces Missouri endorsements from Jim Talent, Tom Schweich, Tom Dempsey, Tim Jones, and Sam and Jeff Fox.

Talent endorsed Romney in 2008 as well (presumably Romney’s 2008 state director will not return to that job in 2012)

Tim Jones endorsed Giuliani for a period of time, before switching to McCain after Giuliani’s “vacation in Palm Beach” strategy failed to work.

The support of Jim Talent, Matt Blunt, Rod Jetton, Bryan Pratt, Jason Crowell, and Ron Richard was good for 3rd place and 29% for Romney in 2008. So maybe Jim Talent, the Auditor, the Floor Leader, Tom Dempsey and others can get Mitt over 30% this time.

Romney’s strongest areas in 2008 were Cape Girardeau, St. Charles County, Columbia/Jeff City, Jackson County, Buchanan County. So Romney’s key to victory is getting his group of suburbanites to outvote the SW Missouri Huckabee voters and the voters who are skeptical of Multiple-choice Mitt.

Missouri Republicans still on the draft board (with their 2008 endorsements listed) include Kit Bond (Giuliani), Steven Tilley (Giuliani), Jo Ann Emerson (Giuliani), Peter Tweeter Kinder (Thompson), and John Danforth (McCain).

So when it comes to picking candidates 9 months from election day. Missouri’s prominent Republicans had a mixed record in 2008.

When I moved to St. Louis, Jim Talent was still in the Senate. He seemed to be a prototypically white-bread, nice Republican boy, who went along with whatever the Bush administration required of him. He certainly didn’t seem to be particularly profound – which is why I’m so amazed to hear Missouri conservatives speak of him as an “intellectual powerhouse” – although perhaps that’s not so remarkable in a state that can send people like Vicky Hartzler and Billy Long to Washington. He did, after all, do time as a Fellow at The Heritage institute where they do make some pretense of having standards, and he’s certainly capable of stringing a couple of coherent thoughts together.

But perhaps I was misled by Talent’s bland persona. Perhaps he does have at least some sort of intellectual integrity capacity. The reason I say this is because of something I read in David Catanese’s column in Politico in which he speculates that Talent is backing away from Missouri’s 2012 Senatorial contest. Among the possible reasons he posits for Talent’s lack of enthusiasm for the race is the following (emphasis added):

It’s not that he doesn’t believe he couldn’t best Steelman in a primary — it’s whether taking up a bruising intra-party fight before a rough-and-tumble general election with Sen. Claire McCaskill would be worth the time, energy and resources.

“The primary bothers him. He saw how broke and battered [Kenny] Hulshof was in August and he doesn’t want to be forced to take positions out of the mainstream,” said another Missouri source who has had conversations with those close to Talent.

Does being forced to take positions out of the mainstream perhaps mean being forced to kowtow to obstreperous, intellectually vapid Tea Partiers – something that  Sarah Steelman, who is agressively campaigning for the nomination, seems more than willing to do? Does this intellectual powerhouse maybe see the Tea Party as a lose-lose proposition? First you lose your integrity, then you lose the general election.

Larry Sabato, Director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, has summarized his admittedly very early take on the status of the 33 senate seats that will be up for grabs in 2012 in this table.  Not surprisingly, of the 23 seats now held by Democrats, Claire McCaskill joins Ben Nelson (NE), Sherrod Brown (OH), and Independent Joe Lieberman (CT) as “very vulnerable” – the most troubling category since it denotes a shakier status than the “potentially vulnerable” or “vulnerable” status of many of the other Democratic incumbents.

Sabato has this to say about his early-on expectations for the coming Missouri race:

This will be a barn-burner of a contest. Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill narrowly edged out Republican Sen. Jim Talent in the Democratic tilting year of 2006. Since 2008, when President Obama came within a whisker of carrying the Show Me State, Missouri has moved back toward the Republican camp, at least temporarily. McCaskill will be opposed by either Talent, who gives every indication of desiring a rematch, or former state treasurer Sarah Steelman. McCaskill has been a visible, forceful senator but she may be too liberal for Missouri, unless President Obama recovers strongly prior to November 2012. In any event, McCaskill is quite vulnerable.

So, when McCaskill twists and turns in the coming months, just remember that she fears the conventional wisdom that sees her tepid centrism as “too liberal.”

The philosophical question here? Is it better to adhere to one’s principles and go down fighting, or dance in tune to the music they’re playing at the time? Doing the latter may keep the real barn-burners at bay (Talent, Steelman, or, God deliver us, Peter Kinder) – assuming that the fancy steps McCaskill will be called upon to execute are ultimately successful. And of course, there’s always the possibility that McCaskill and her coterie of advisors are too tone-deaf in the first place to pick-up on the right political beat – which could change really, really fast as people get a load of the clumsy bunch of GOPers they just sent to Washington.

Public Policy Polling released a poll of the 2012 Missouri Senate race today, interviewing “515 Missouri voters from November 29th to December 1st.” The margin of error is 4.3%.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Missouri Senate Race Close

Claire McCaskill was involved in incredibly close races for Governor in 2004 and Senator in 2006 from Missouri and it looks like she’s in for another one as she seeks reelection to the Senate in 2012. McCaskill leads Sarah Steelman by 1 point (45-44) in a hypothetical match up and trails Jim Talent and Peter Kinder each by 2 points in them (47-45 and 46-44 respectively,) all results well within the poll’s margin of error….

Peter Kinder? It must be Twitter volume.

Early Look at Missouri Senate Shows Close Race [pdf]

“….Claire McCaskill’s accustomed to fighting close races and she may have to do it again,”said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling. “Missouri’s lopsided contest this year is likely to be a blip on the radar of the state’s overall trend toward close races….”

That is until all of the republican corporate surrogates start dumping their advertising dollars into the state.

Interesting crosstabulation:

Ideology – Obama Approval

Base [all]

Approve – 43%

Disapprove – 52%

Not sure – 5%

Liberal

Approve – 85%

Disapprove – 11%

Not sure – 4%

Moderate

Approve – 61%

Disapprove – 32%

Not sure – 8%

Conservative

Approve – 12%

Disapprove – 85%

Not sure – 2%

Ideology – McCaskill Approval

Base [all]

Approve – 43%

Disapprove – 44%

Not sure – 13%

Liberal

Approve – 80%

Disapprove – 13%

Not sure – 7%

Moderate

Approve – 58%

Disapprove – 26%

Not sure – 16%

Conservative

Approve – 16%

Disapprove – 70%

Not sure – 14%

So Claire McCaskill (D) has the same overall approval numbers as President Obama, but she slips among self identified liberals and moderates when compared to the president. She only has 4% approval over the president among self identified conservatives. True, she has significantly more undecideds in that group.

Ultimately, after the attack ad blitzes for the 2012 election the republican conservative base will come home.

Claire McCaskill (D) will need to decide if it’s a vain quest to keep tacking right and alienate more of the Democratic Party base in the hope that conservatives won’t follow their natural inclinations.

She might want to ask Robin Carnahan (D) how that worked out.