QoD: Tim Pawlenty on Current State of Republican Party

One has to wonder if McCain might have done better with Pawlenty or Crist.

“The Republican Party is going to have to adhere to its principles, because they are foundational and they are important. But they need to be presented in a hopeful, optimistic, up-tempo, modern, practical way, and that’s not what we have been doing recently. We’ve become too petty and angry in many aspects. That’s unappealing to swing voters.”

-Tim Pawlenty, 02.23.09

QoD: Anonymous Liberal on Grandstanding Governors Refusing Stimulus Aid

“First there would be nothing principled about refusing Federal stimulus money. These very same governors routinely accept all sorts of federal money. In fact, if you rank states according to the ratio of federal money received per tax dollar contributed, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alaska are all in the top 4. South Carolina and Idaho are in the top 20 and receive significantly more in federal money than they contribute.

These politicians are not standing up for principle. They are grandstanding. Most of them (particularly Palin, Sanford, and Jindal) are trying to raise their national profile and give themselves a talking point to use in a future presidential run.

Moreover, they are doing so in direct contravention of the interests of their own constituents. These folks are not federal office holders. Their duty is to look after the interests of the people of their respective states, not to police the federal budget. If they were CEOs of a corporation or trustees of organization or trust, this kind of action would be seen as a breach of their fiduciary duties. They would get sued. And rightfully so. By turning down federal stimulus money, they would be inflicting harm on their own citizens.”

-Anonymous Liberal, 02.20.09

QoD: Josh Marshall on Republican Strategy in MN Senate Recount

“…it’s worth considering what Republicans are getting — not by keeping Coleman’s hopeless effort alive but far more importantly by delaying Al Franken’s swearing in.

The Stimulus Bill battle is a good example. The Dems needed Specter, Collins and Snowe to get the thing through. With Franken they would have needed only two of those votes. I don’t know precisely what each of them wanted. But I don’t think there’s much doubt that would have led to a less watered-down bill. And it seems quite possible that that missing vote will play a similarly consequential role in the weeks ahead. Perhaps in the months ahead.

The court process has to play itself out. There’s no way around that — though the judges seem ready to strangle Coleman. But we could do with a little more recognition of the fact that this is not about getting Norm Coleman into the senate. It’s about paying money to give the Republicans a few more months of leverage against the Democrats 59 seat majority.”

-Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo, 02.18.09

QoD: Rahm Emanuel on Benchmarking White House Progress

“Having been in two separate White Houses, within our third week, given our set of accomplishments — well, measure them up.”

-Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s Chief of Staff, who also served as a senior adviser in Clinton’s administration.

QoD: Joe Klein on Obama’s Working with Congress

“It pains me to watch normally reasonable colleagues overreacting to Obama’s situation now–which is far less dire than Clinton’s was. Some form of stimulus will pass. If it doesn’t revive the economy, then more stimulus will be passed. Obama’s maintaining the proper balance of reaching out to Republicans, making some compromises, but staying firm on the need for a bill that includes public works as well as tax cuts. A Republican Senator, a vocal opponent of the bill, told me the other day: “The guy has really impressed us. We may not vote for the bill, and he may have to learn that you have to give us more than he wants to give us to make us happy, but he’s made a really strong start that will work to his benefit down the road.”

…The legislative process is as ugly as a wart. We only notice it when an earth-shattering monstrosity like the stimulus bill comes gallumphing down the track, but there is no such thing as elegant legislation. You always have to throw in a little sweetener–the museum of organized crime in Las Vegas, the military kazoo band, whatever–if you want to cobble together the votes needed to win. This is business as usual–and Barack Obama is guilty as charged: he’s trying to get this thing through the old-fashioned way. So what? What’s new is his priorities: his efforts to put the needs of the working poor and the unemployed ahead of the wealthy, to build a new green economy, to fund inner city education and remake the health insurance system. That is what the American people voted for after an era of Republican neglect. The messiness of the current process is not only inevitable, it also says very little about Obama’s ability to deliver on those very necessary goals.”

-Joe Klein, 02.05.09

QoD: D.L. Hughley on Bush Lying

“Now I listened to those tapes and I’m not going to hide my affinity for this guy. I never met him before then but to me we have become such a trivial place that we will impeach a man for having sex, or lying about having sex with a woman. In California we will impeach a guy because he raises taxes on license plates because energy gets out of control. We’ll impeach a guy for saying some things on tape. But a man can take us to war and lie and we won’t do a damn thing about that. That makes me so mad.”

-D.L. Hughley

(Hat Tip: John Amato at Crooks & Liars)

QoD: Alan Grayson on Rush Limbaugh

“Rush Limbaugh is a has-been hypocrite loser, who craves attention. His right-wing lunacy sounds like Mikhail Gorbachev, extolling the virtues of communism. Limbaugh actually was more lucid when he was a drug addict. If America ever did 1 percent of what he wanted us to do, then we’d all need pain killers.”

-Florida Rep. Alan Grayson

Hat Tip: Down With Tyranny

QoD: Andrew Sullivan on Obama’s Centrism & Entitlement Reform

“…given that the possibility of a second great depression requires massive borrowing for a year or two, entitlement reform may be unavoidable. How do you persuade the global markets to lend the US more money in the short term if you do not show some small chance of getting back to fiscal sanity in the long term?

If Obama manages to leverage this crisis toward entitlement reform, he would become an historic president. It really would be Buchanan-Lincoln. I’ve spent too long in DC to believe it, but I can still hope can’t I? And the key thing this time around is whether we can build a grass-roots movement to support Obama in this, just as we did in the campaign. Raise the retirement age, means-test social security, raise Medicare premiums for the affluent. After what has amounted to a generational war on the under-40s under Bush, re-balancing is actually a moral cause.”

-Andrew Sullivan, 01.16.09

QoD: Josh Marshall on RNC Chair Fiasco

“I see the GOP’s devious plan to become the party of southern whites over the age of 50 continues apace.

Wholly unable to confirm this, but I’m told the talk is now that Mike Duncan may have to perform in black face at the upcoming RNC meeting to remain a credible candidate for the job.”

-Josh Marshall, TPM

QOD: Matthew Dowd on Bush

“Katrina to me was the tipping point. The president broke his bond with the public. Once that bond was broken, he no longer had the capacity to talk to the American public. State of the Union addresses? It didn’t matter. Legislative initiatives? It didn’t matter. P.R.? It didn’t matter. Travel? It didn’t matter.”

-Matthew Dowd, Bush’s pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign.

Quote of the Day: David Brooks

“Unlike past Democratic administrations, they are not just handing out jobs to the hacks approved by the favored interest groups. They’re thinking holistically — there’s a nice balance of policy wonks, governors and legislators. They’re also thinking strategically. As Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute notes, it was smart to name Tom Daschle both the head of Health and Human Services and the health czar. Splitting those duties up, as Bill Clinton did, leads to all sorts of conflicts…

Believe me, I’m trying not to join in the vast, heaving O-phoria now sweeping the coastal haute bourgeoisie. But the personnel decisions have been superb. The events of the past two weeks should be reassuring to anybody who feared that Obama would veer to the left or would suffer self-inflicted wounds because of his inexperience. He’s off to a start that nearly justifies the hype.”

-David Brooks, 11.21.08

Quote of the Day: Richard Clarke

“Obama’s election has taken the wind out of al Qaeda’s sails in much of the Islamic world because it demonstrates America’s renewed commitment to multiculturalism, human rights, and international law. It also proves to many that democracy can work and overcome ethnic, sectarian, or racial barriers.

Obama’s commitment to withdraw from Iraq also takes away an al Qaeda propaganda tenet: that the U.S. seeks to occupy oil rich Arab lands. His commitment to defeat al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan also challenges their plans. Most of all, by returning to American values the world admires, Obama sets al Qaeda back enormously in the battle of ideas, the ideological struggle which determines whether al Qaeda will continue to have significant support in the Islamic world.”

-Richard Clarke

Quote of the Day: Thomas Friedman

“I covered a secretary of state, one of the best, James A. Baker III, for four years, and one of the things I learned during those years was that what made Baker an effective diplomat was not only his own skills as a negotiator — a prerequisite for the job — but the fact that his boss, President George H.W. Bush, always had Baker’s back. When foreign leaders spoke with Baker, they knew that they were speaking to President Bush, and they knew that President Bush would defend Baker from domestic rivals and the machinations of foreign governments…

Our current president never cared about this, so neither of his secretaries of state were particularly effective. Rather than having Colin Powell’s back, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld delighted in stabbing Powell in the back, particularly when he was on the road. But being close to the president is not enough. Condoleezza Rice had a close relationship with Bush, but Bush had no coherent worldview to animate her diplomacy, so all her travels added up to less than the sum of their miles.”

-Thomas Friedman, 11.18.08

Quote of the Day: bluegal

Life holds few guarantees, but I’ll bet the Ronald Reagan tribute at the 2012 Republican National Convention is going to be more awesome than ever!

-bluegal, Crooks & Liars

Quote of the Day: Gavin Sullivan

“If Phil Colins couldn’t sing and had never learned to play the drums, he might have remained a virgin indefinitely.”

-Gavin Sullivan

Quote of the Day: Gail Collins

“On the other hand, the most Lieberman accomplished with months and months of nonstop campaigning was to push McCain support in his home state of Connecticut to 38 percent. Treachery is bad, but inept treachery is easier to get over.”

-Gail Collins, New York Times

SHOCK: Barack Obama is Black AND White

The President Elect gives a shout out to inter-racial Americans. From the Huffington Post:

Obama said the family would prefer to adopt a puppy from an animal rescue shelter. “But obviously, a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me,” said Obama in a self-deprecating reference to his father from Kenya and mother from Kansas.

Quote of the Day: John Cole

“In short, America got seduced by the Republican sweet talk, we took them home into our bedroom for some good times, and instead of performance, it turns out the Republicans have a serious case of electile dysfunction. Rather than hold true to their “principles,” they chose to sit on the edge of the bed for eight years and tell us how good it was going to be, and we lost interest and fell asleep.

When we woke up, we realized that in one way, the GOP had kept their word, in a sense- we did get screwed. And we then had our own payback on Tuesday.”

-John Cole, Balloon Juice

Quote of the Day: Daniel Larison

“Still, the report that she refused to prepare for the Couric interview makes everything quite clear.  She wasn’t overwhelmed with scripted answers and talking points that they had been forcing on her–she was genuinely at a loss for coherent answers because she had not even attempted to prepare for the questions she would be asked, and so she tried to bluster her way through to rather calamitous results.  Far from being a distorted or misleading image of what Palin knew on her own, that may have been the clearest picture of her understanding of the issues that we had in the last two months.  In the last few days, I have seen remarks to the effect that “anti-Palin” conservatives are going to end up feeling foolish in the future for having doubted her qualifications, but with every passing day and each new revelation I am even more convinced that everyone who criticized her fairly on her record and statements will have no reason to feel that way.”

-Daniel Larison, conservative writer, 11.05.08

Quote of the Day: Anonymous Liberal

“I’ve been following politics long enough not to be shocked by how stupid it can be at times.  But the last few weeks of this campaign have tested even my tolerance.  I actually made myself sit through both McCain and Palin’s stump speeches on CNN this weekend.  Their core “substantive” message–here in the home stretch of a monumental presidential election–is so profoundly unserious that it borders on parody. In short, his argument is that Barack Obama may say he’s not going to raise your taxes, but he really is. And the proof is that he used the phrase “spread the wealth” during an encounter with a plumber (who’s not really a plumber).

This is really absurd stuff. It’s like the target audience here is a kindergarten class. There’s not even an attempt to make an actual policy argument anywhere in the speech. Honestly, I’ve never seen political discourse this dumbed down. It’s beyond pathetic.” – The Anonymous Liberal