The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza takes a look at the latest trend among Democratic candidates -- including our own Baron Hill -- and how targeting the Republican Party's anti-Social Security policies could open the door to a winning strategy for November.
At least a half-dozen Democratic House candidates as well as several Democratic Senators in tight re-election races have featured claims that the GOP wants to either privatize or eliminate the retirement plan entirely in new television ads, and party strategists promise there are far more commercials to come.
"When Leader John Boehner, Paul Ryan and House Republican leaders put privatizing Social Security and dismantling Medicare into their budget they drew a bright line: House Republicans fight for Wall Street, while Democrats fight for seniors who've worked hard and played by the rules," said Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee communications director Jen Crider.
A new ad from Indiana Rep. Baron Hill (D) is indicative of the tone and content of Democrats' attacks on Social Security.
Ultimately, the success or failure of this strategy will depend on how effectively Republican candidates can either distance themselves from the ideological watchdogs of their party or articulate a more nuanced position that hides the true motives of their legislative overlords.
On both fronts, Todd Young seems to be failing, and that means good things for Baron Hill.
Another great ad from the Hill campaign, as they continue to press their advantage against Todd "I refuse to talk about my hatred of Social Security" Young.
In case you were wondering, this television spot will be running more than the few times Young's fake TV campaign will.
Via Lesley Stedman Weidenbener, exciting stuff for a campaign that one would have been forgiven for thinking was on some sort of extended summer vacation:
Republican Todd Young on Monday launched his first general election ad in his bid to unseat Democrat U.S. Rep. Baron Hill, criticizing the incumbent's votes for a health-care law and energy legislation.
Young ran several commercials during the four-way GOP primary last spring. But his new 30-second ad - which will begin running Monday night on cable stations throughout the 9th District - is his first since May.
The ad features Young, an attorney who lives in Bloomington, talking straight to the camera. But the message focuses more on Hill's actions in Congress than it does on Young's background or qualifications.
Wait, Todd Young doesn't want to talk about his apparently-non-existent policy positions in this election?
Shocking.
More shocking, perhaps, is the fact that friend-of-the-site Lesley Stedman Weidenbener (and her other media cohorts) fail to mention the most important thing about Todd Young's advertising campaign: it doesn't exist.
Word on the street is that Young's total ad buy was... wait for it ...four thousand dollars in cable spots.
He might as well have stood out on a corner shouting for a few hours.
Considering the unwarranted flak that the Ellsworth campaign received for their one-hundred thousand dollar ad buy earlier this cycle, I can only imagine the media will be quick to call Young on his stunt. Meanwhile, Baron Hill is still up, and still going strong.
House Minority Leader John Boehner spent last week rolling out the Republican Party's economic platform, which as near as anyone can tell, would consist mainly of fervent complaining about President Obama.
As Newsweek found, though, beneath the gruff, orange-ish exterior of Boehner and the Republican policy agenda is an inconvenient truth.
There's only one problem with Boehner's message: so far, the things that Republicans have said they want to do won't actually boost employment or reduce deficits. In fact, much the opposite.
By combing through a variety of studies and projections from nonpartisan economic sources, we here at Gaggle headquarters have found that if Republicans were in charge from January 2009 onward-and if they were now given carte blanche to enact the proposals they want to-the projected 2010-2020 deficits would be larger than they are under Obama, and fewer people would probably be employed.
The math is pretty straightforward.
I recommend checking out the whole thing, but the short version is that you can't pay down the national debt with fiery rhetoric and tax cuts for the wealthiest one-percent.
For all of their optimistic tough talk as of late, Dan Coats' first venture into television advertising certainly reeks of desperation:
"I became ambassador to Germany the day before 9/11. Germany was a crossroads in the war on terror. 9/11 hijackers were members of a German-based cell. I'll never forget visiting wounded American heroes from Afghanistan and Iraq at our military hospital."
"My opponent voted to close Guantanamo and move terrorists to the U.S., where they could have the same legal rights as Americans. As your senator, I'll fight the move."
That's right, folks -- this election will be about jobs, jobs, jobs, and also TERRORISM!
As noted in the Starexamination of Coats' spot, the votes being cited in the advertisement weren't even remotely about what the ad says they were.
Benjamin Wittes, a Brookings Institution expert on the legal issues surrounding the war on terrorism, said Ellsworth's explanation for his vote is "perfectly plausible." Wittes also says the ad incorrectly implies that terrorist detainees brought to the United States for trial would have expanded rights than if they were kept at Guantanamo.
Put another way, that creaking sound you heard on Friday was Dan Coats stretching the truth about as far as it will go. That's not something a confident campaign does, and this move may have had the inadvertent effect of revealing the insecurities of the Republican's campaign.
I think the doom-and-gloom headline of this Washington Post piece belies a silver lining for Hoosier Democrats in this hotly contested race:
It was candidates such as Ellsworth who enabled the Democrats to conquer frontiers that mostly seemed beyond their reach, places such as Evansville and Terre Haute, which stuck with the party in 2008 and enabled President Obama to become the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Indiana in 44 years.
Today, those gains are in jeopardy, with Democratic prospects following the downward trend of the economy and Obama's approval ratings. Ellsworth is running well behind in the race to replace Sen. Evan Bayh and has now become the face of the Democrats' reversal of fortunes across the Midwest. The state's two other vulnerable House Democrats, Reps. Joe Donnelly and Baron P. Hill, are battling to hold their seats, and Republicans could reclaim the district Ellsworth has represented for the past four years.
The dynamics raise a question larger than any one race - whether new Democrats have succeeded in expanding the political map in any sort of lasting way or whether candidates such as Ellsworth were just in the right place at the right time.
Although the screed spends a disproportionate amount of time listing off the reasons that Team Ellsworth faces an uphill climb toward victory in November, it also examines the reasons why Brad Ellsworth has been so successful during his brief time on the Indiana electoral scene.
And to answer the question posed in the above clip, the dominating back-to-back victories of Brad in both 2006 and 2008 make it abundantly clear that a ballot box fluke this was not. Perhaps inarguably, Ellsworth would have coasted to another win this year -- he certainly hadn't attracted any attention from Republicans prior to his movement up the ballot.
In short, he's a strong candidate in a year of weak Democratic enthusiasm. That may make him a "symbol" of the times for pundits abroad, but at the end of the day, none of that detracts from Ellsworth's allure as a campaigner.
I believe, folks, the political term of art for the state of Mitch Daniels' fledgling national political career is "too big for his britches." I'll leave the latest to friend-of-the-site Lesley Stedman-Weidenbener:
Gov. Mitch Daniels said Tuesday he'll request that federal officials send Indiana more than $434 million in newly approved stimulus funds for schools and Medicaid, even though he opposed the legislation.
Federal officials said last week that governors must request the money, a move that put Daniels and other Republican governors in a tough spot because they had publicly criticized the $26 billion state aid package.
But on Tuesday during a visit to O'Bannon Woods State Park, the governor said he would make the request.
This request was even more tricky for Daniels, who last we checked, signed a letter of support for such spending prior to his appearance on national television, wherein he slammed said spending, wherein the media slammed him for being a hypocritical political opportunist.
Posting has been light over the last week, and will probably stay that way over the next few days. Yesterday marked my last first day of school, and my nineteen-year strategy of waiting until the last second to buy school supplies once again left me little time to dedicate to the online trade.
Furthermore, Hoosier Democrats are set to descend upon bee-yoo-tee-full French Lick this afternoon, and I plan to be one of them. For those that have never bore witness to the Indiana Democratic Editorial Association's four-day shindig, you're truly missing out.
Regardless, here are a few stories I've been neglecting, in brief. Be on the lookout for sporadic updates through Sunday as time and sobriety allow.
State Treasurer candidate Pete Buttigieg continues to generate solid press in his bid to toss out right-wing extremist Richard Mourdock.
In the Fightin' Ninth District, Republican candidate Todd Young continues to dodge questions about his position on Social Security reform. Apparently their strategy is to "explain away" his Ponzi scheme remarks. Methinks this isn't the best course of action, but considering we're talking about a team that has yet to demonstrate a single impressive strategic move in this campaign, it sounds pretty par for the course.
The assault continues. If I am a Ninth District Republican, I'm about to slip into panic mode:
The Indiana Democratic Party launched a new website today, THEREALTODDYOUNG.COM. The new website reveals the truths behind the radical Republican candidate Todd Young and further illustrates just how out of touch Young is with traditional Hoosier values.
Party Chairman Dan Parker said the site was created after Young's continued failure to tell voters where he stands on the issues.
"Todd Young has spent his summer avoiding the issues," Parker said.
"Instead of telling people where he stands, Young has tried to distract the voters with scare tactics and Washington talking points. He has had two months to tell the voters where he stands on Social Security and still won't pledge to protect it from privatization. If he won't tell the voters where he stands, we will."
Personally, I hope this will be the first of a series of pretty hard-hitting attacks on Todd Young. My sense is that the Democratic leadership smell blood in the water, and realize that if they can keep Todd Young on his back heels through November -- as they have for the last three months, really -- they stand more than a decent chance.
At the end of the day, we're talking about a guy who apparently hasn't had consistent employment since he left the military years ago, and yet who by most accounts lives in a $650k house here in Bloomington. Family money funding a carpetbagging campaign headquartered in the People's Republic of Indiana University isn't exactly a recipe for success in the Fightin' Ninth.
And I say that as a card-carrying member of said People's Republic.
Just because it's from my hometown news-gathering partner, here's an update from Baron Hill's six-million mile march from one end of the Fightin' Ninth to the other:
I haven't quoted my main man Doug Masson for a while, which is a tragedy, because he's one of my first blog-reads every morning. To right this wrong, I present a positively Massonesque appraisal of the current flair-up over, well, not much of anything, honestly:
The "Ground Zero" "Mosque" is as aptly named as "Joe" the "Plumber." It's not a mosque, and it's not at ground zero. It's an Islamic community center and it's at like ground zero minus three blocks. But, it does seem to be shaping up as a pretty representative sample of our stupid political discourse. The narrative bears only a passing resemblance to the facts on the ground, then the cable news shows fill up with people shouting at each other about it, and the serious news people can't be bothered to talk about right or wrong, or even who is telling the truth, but only the implications for this week's poll numbers.
As Doug notes, it's also really none of our business. The last poll I saw showed a majority of Manhattanites didn't really give two hoots. Among other issues -- freedom of speech perhaps being the most notable -- I don't see why I should be particularly excited by the whole affair if people living where the thing is going to be built don't seem all that vehemently opposed.
One year later, one thing is clear: the stimulus bill has failed. One year later, not one net job has been created as unemployment rose from 7.6 percent to nearly 10 percent nationwide. Mr. President, millions of Americans are asking, "where are the jobs?"
At least 16 of the 65 companies at the job fair received funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, including Ball State University -- the location of the job fair -- and at least three more benefited indirectly from the stimulus. The impact the stimulus had on those employers was varied. Brevini Wind USA, Inc. of Yorktown, Indiana benefited greatly, receiving $12.75 million to open a new manufacturing facitlity that will produce parts for wind turbine manufacturers.
While Mike Pence might want to take credit for the benefits of a plan he opposed, national Democrats weren't willing to let this one go without a fight.
But Democrats say Pence's job fair is yet another example of Republicans taking credit for jobs created by the stimulus while at the same time criticizing the program. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee called the House Republican leadership "blatant hypocrites."
"If such blatant hypocrites like Mike Pence, Eric Cantor, and John Boehner had their way, the jobs in their districts that they've been trying to take credit for wouldn't even be there," DCCC spokesperson Ryan Rudominer said.
An interesting tidbit from the long-term care and assisted living periodical McKnight's:
Indiana cannot afford its $1 million share of a federal nurse background check initiative. It therefore will not participate in the program, the state said Monday.
Under the healthcare reform law, states could apply for a federal matching grant of 75% of the cost of implementing nurse background checks, up to $3 million. Spokespeople for both Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) and Indiana's Department of Health confirmed Monday that the state could not afford the expenditure in the current economic climate, the Indianapolis Star reported. Monday was the last day states could apply for the matching grants.
Indiana currently relies on the state's 120,000 registered nurses to self-report any criminal history when applying for or renewing their licenses. State nursing home resident advocates decried the decision, saying that state officials passed up an opportunity to protect Indiana residents in nursing homes, the Star reported.
For those keeping score at home, State Treasurer Richard Mourdock spent an estimated $2 million in tax dollars on his quixotic quest to take down the federal government.
And yet when it comes to spending $1 million to protect Hoosiers, Mitch can't find the coinage.
At least he's being honest about where his priorities are.
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