It was a dramatic reset to the Republican race for president this weekend with a big victory for one candidate, the exit of another and the entrance of a third.
Making the rounds on the morning talk shows today, Michele Bachmann took a victory lap in Iowa this morning after winning the Ames Straw Poll, but the political fight for Iowa's attention has just begun.
"Obama is my strategy," Bachmann said on ABC's "This Week." "I intend to be the nominee of the Republican Party and to take him on and to defeat him in 2012."
Perhaps the bigger game changer in the Republican presidential field Saturday happened 1,200 miles away from Iowa with Texas Gov. Rick Perry announcing his candidacy at a Republican gathering in South Carolina.
"It is time to get America working again, and that's why with the support of my family and unwavering belief in the goodness of America, I declare to you today as a candidate for president of the United States," Perry said
Perry, who will now challenge Bachmann for the social and Christian conservative vote, is making his first appearance as a presidential candidate in Iowa tonight.
Perry's first stop in Iowa was in Bachmann's hometown of Waterloo. And in an apparent challenge to protect her territory, Bachmann changed her schedule and stopped at the same dinner in Waterloo that Perry attended.
As Perry and Bachmann prepare for a political showdown in the Republican presidential primary, the crossing of the two candidates' paths makes for political theater.
This wasn’t something I felt compelled to do six months ago or even three months ago,” Perry said. He was hopeful that “one of the people in our group would explode out and take off and everybody in American could get behind them. That hasn’t happened. My wife basically said, ‘Listen, our country is in trouble and you need to do your duty.’ And that was a pretty clarion call for me.”
Perry and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) will be speaking tonight at a fundraiser for the Black Hawk County GOP. Perry was mobbed as soon as he entered the historic Electric Ballroom. He high-fived a boy wearing an “Americans for Rick Perry” T-shirt, kissed a 100-year-old woman’s cheek and discussed rain totals with farmers.
When one man called him “Mr. President,” Perry replied, “Hey listen, I got a whole lot of asking to do before anything happens out here in Iowa.”
Perry said his campaign in Iowa would be similar to his campaign to become Texas’ agriculture commissioner in 1990.
“Going to a lot of small towns, going to a lot of picnics, going to lots of fairs. Oh yeah, man, we’re going to spend a lot of time in Iowa,” Perry said. “These people, as you’ll hear in my remarks, are a lot like the people I grew up with, mostly agriculture oriented, small-town folks, so we’re going to have a good time, getting to know them better.
Tags: Michele Bachmann ,Obama casts ,Texas economy ,Bachmann and Rick
Happened to watch the election returns from Wisconsin on MSNBC Tuesday night, and if you're honest, you know it was a rough night for progressives. It started to be noticeable on Monday when Ed Schultz (or "Big Eddy" as he likes to call himself), started to have a haunted look. He was out there in Madison surrounded by Union types who would cheer, or boo, or moo on cue, but despite his bluster, you just knew things weren't shaping up the way he'd hoped.
Ed kept going on about how the evil Republicans had poured in all this money, but the recall forces had the enthusiasm and the ground game.
Eddie may have trouble differentiating between enthusiasm and desperation. What he didn't explain is that after all the sound and fury of the recall effort, his team actually lost ground in each of the six special elections this week..
The numbers are still a little hazy, but it appears that the two sides spent around $35 million on the recall, all in an effort to punish Republican State Senators who voted for the Budget Repair Bill Governor Walker introduced in February. This controversial legislation was crafted to cure a $3.6 state billion deficit, and required state employees to contribute 12.6% of the cost of their health insurance premiums and pay 5.8% of their salary into the Wisconsin Retirement System, ending the free ride they'd enjoyed previously. The other two most significant impacts were to limit collective bargaining rights for most public employees and to prohibit employers from collecting union dues.
The result was a political tantrum unlike anything seen in years. For weeks, protests in Madison the state capital dominated cable news shows with their distinct lack of civility. All 14 Democrat Senators fled the state to try to prevent a vote, demonstrators mobbed and camped out at and in the Capital building, Republican lawmakers were stalked at their homes, and local businesses were threatened if they did not join the effort to foil the Governor's legislation.
Though Walker might have moved too aggressively on the collective bargaining issue, most of his package was the kind of fiscal castor oil that states and the federal government will need to get their balance sheets in order. If incumbents in Wisconsin and elsewhere fear immediate retaliation that could cost them their jobs, it will make them even less likely to cut deals and make difficult choices.
Equally troubling is that the Wisconsin recalls have turned into magnets for shocking amounts of special interest money, sluiced into the state by conservative groups and pro-union organizations that see the recalls as an existential battleground. Estimates are that third-party groups have spent as much as $40 million on the nine recall elections, which would more than double the amount spent on all 116 of the state's legislative elections last fall.
Beyond Wisconsin, recall rage remains limited, in part because just 19 states allow recalls elof governors and state legislators. One is California, where voters recalled unpopular Democratic Gov. Gray Davis in 2003 and replaced him with Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, a switch that did little to solve the state's deep fiscal and political woes.
At the local level, where at least 29 states allow recalls, Governing.com says 57 mayors faced recall attempts in 2010, more than double the 23 the year before. In some places, recalls seem like political sport: Voters in Johnstown, Colo., tried to oust the mayor in part for his plan to switch from diagonal parking to parallel parking. But they're a sport states would be wise to limit. In an era of growing deficits and dwindling resources, the problems are far too serious to be left to endless second-guessing and permanent campaigns.
Obama's summer woes have dragged his approval rating to an all-time low, sinking below 40% for the first time in Gallup's daily tracking poll.
New data posted Sunday shows that 39% of Americans approve of Obama's job performance, while 54% disapprove. Both are the worst numbers of his presidency.
Obama's approval rating has hovered in the 40% range for much of 2011, peaking at 53% in the weeks following the death of Osama bin Laden.
But Americans' view of his job performance continued to tick downward as the debt-ceiling debate heated up. By the time he signed legislation averting a federal default, he was mired in the low-40% range.
Another 54% disapprove of Obama's performance.
Gallup says the results "are based on telephone interviews with approximately 1,500 national adults"; the margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Today's poll comes on the eve of Obama's bus trip that will take him to Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois in the coming days.
The polling setback comes as the Republican race to unseat him has kicked into overdrive. The past week has been dominated by the activity in Iowa ahead of the Ames Straw Poll, and the entrance of a new contender in Texas Gov. Rick Perry. The candidates have routinely assailed Obama's leadership in appealing to conservative activists who dominate this stage of the nominating contest.
Obama is set to launch something of a counteroffensive on Monday with a three-day bus tour of the Midwest, a trip that includes two stops in Iowa. The White House denied that the itinerary was politically motivated, however.
Tags: Perry Obama ,Pawlenty exits ,Bachmann wins Iowa
