So we’ve had our little teases. A Texas primary here, an Illinois primary there. Throw in a couple of special congressional elections. Nice, but hardly satisfying. Well, starting this month, the primaries come non-stop: three states on Tuesday the 6th, two on the 13th and six more on the 20th. And let’s not forget the …
So how do you run your campaign in 2014 if you’re a Democrat and your president’s job approval numbers are not so good? That’s the question host Ken Rudin put to Democratic pollster and strategist Anna Greenberg in the latest installment of the Political Junkie. Greenberg acknowledges the weak numbers, the disappointing foreign policy and the history of the party …
You remember Rep. Michael Grimm? He’s the Staten Island Republican who made national headlines the night of the State of the Union address, when a TV reporter asked him on camera about an ongoing corruption investigation that was said to include the congressman. Grimm walked away but later, with the cameras still rolling, he came …
In most cases, we know the difference between a good president and a bad one. We re-elect the good ones and we send the bad ones packing. But how do historians see them? How does Harry Truman, for example, leave office with an anemic 23% approval rating and wind up as a “Near Great” president? And …
The 19th Congressional District in southwest Florida is solidly Republican and has been since it was created in 1972. Vacant since Rep. Trey Radel (R) resigned in January following his arrest for buying cocaine from an undercover cop, the winner of today’s GOP primary will likely be the district’s next House member. But it’s been …
With the 50th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act — and with the revived reputation of President Lyndon Johnson — comparisons between LBJ and Barack Obama are being made. Johnson, who left office in 1969 with the cloud of Vietnam hanging over him, is remembered as a master tactician who, with huge Democratic majorities in Congress, pushed a …
Edwin Edwards probably put it best. “The only way I can lose this election,” he famously once said, “is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.” That, in a nutshell, describes the tolerance for scandal in Louisiana. Or at least the understanding of it. Edwards, a former congressman …
Once, he was the most powerful and perhaps the most feared member of the House. Now, at 87 and more mellow, and five years removed as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. John Dingell has announced he will not seek another term to the seat he was first elected in 1955. Nearing 60 …
Rep. Doc Hastings, a Washington State Republican who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, announced last week that, at 73, it was time for him to retire. A close ally of John Boehner, the decision has to be another disappointment for the speaker, who pushed the House to pass a clean debt ceiling bill on …
And then there was none. The announcement on Thursday (1/30) that Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) will retire after this year means that the Democratic House class of 1974 — the group of 75 Democratic “Watergate babies” who came to Congress in the election of November 1974 — will be no longer. Waxman and his fellow …