Author: David Weigel

Andrew Young’s tell-all biography of John Edwards, hitting shelves next week, is surging in one Amazon.com category in particular.

#1 in “Conspiracy Theories,” but what about the book is false?

The senator from South Carolina has hired one of The Washington Times’ star reporters — and a frequent cable news guest — as his senior communications adviser. From the announcement:

January 25, 2010 – WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina), chairman of the Senate Steering Committee, announced he has hired Washington Times reporter Amanda Carpenter as senior communications advisor and speechwriter.

“Amanda is an exceptionally talented writer and I’m proud to welcome her to our team,” said Senator DeMint. “She has spent years reporting on the failures of out-of-control government, and she is committed to advancing solutions that increase freedom and opportunity for all Americans.”

“I’ve long admired Senator DeMint for the battles he’s waged to limit the size of government and decrease spending,” said Carpenter. “He is a relentless advocate for conservative principles. I’m thrilled to join his team and help promote those ideas.”

Previously, Ms. Carpenter has worked for Townhall.com, Townhall Magazine and Human Events newspaper. She was also a weekly conservative writer for Glamour Magazine’s 2008 election blog. She graduated from Ball State University (Indiana) in 2005.

Organizer Jebb Young addresses conservative activists at the FreedomWorks office (Photo by David Weigel)

Before Ryan Hecker presented the Contract from America to his Sunday night audience — 63 activists huddled inside of a meeting room in the Washington, D.C. office of FreedomWorks — the free-market think tank’s spokesman promised great things.

“You watch,” Adam Brandon told TWI. “This is the idea that’s going to change the election.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

In this room, Hecker, a lawyer and Tea Party activist, had an easy sell. His idea, fleshed out over four months, was to produce an election manifesto along the lines of the Contract with America launched by Republicans shortly before the 1994 elections, or the 1961 Sharon statement drafted by Young Americans for Freedom. First, Tea Party activists — and anyone else who was interested — would submit ideas at the ContractFromAmerica or Spiritof94 websites. Then they’d be whittled down to 50 ideas with an online vote. When he brought the draft contract to this meeting, it was down to 20 user-selected ideas. “I had four ideas,” Hecker chuckled. “None of them made it in here.”

The draft contract was a hit — at first. When FreedomWorks vice president of policy Max Pappas asked what people thought of the name, the dissent started to rumble.

“I just think if there’s anybody who has negative thoughts toward Gingrich or that group,” said Charlotte Fitzgerald, a Maryland activist, “this has associations with that. If you start with a clean slate, you can be more credible to independents.”

Hecker stepped up to explain himself. “My reason for ‘contract’ — maybe it’s just the attorney in me — is that I like the idea that it’s binding. With the Contract with America, a lot of it ended up not being enacted.”

Adam Brandon offered that the “Contract” name would make more sense to Washington politicians. “When I say ‘Contract from America,’ they know exactly what I’m talking about. When I say ‘American Manifesto,’ they say, What’s that?”

“‘American Manifesto’ sounds socialist,” sniffed Lynn Collins, a Delaware activist.

It was a friendly argument that didn’t go off the rails — within a few minutes, activists were voting on which in-progress Contract items they supported. That was business as usual at the Liberty Leadership Summit, an inaugural effort by FreedomWorks to bring together Tea Party activists from state to state to meet, share ideas, and craft an agenda. From Saturday through Monday, 63 activists gathered in the free-market group’s offices to strategize for the 2010 elections, participate in workshops like titles like “What You Can and Can’t Say: How to Stay Out of Jail This Year,” and break occasionally for pizza or Chinese food.

Despite the high level of the discussion — the Contract draft was marked “confidential,” and activists openly debated which incumbents they were ready to challenge in 2010 — FreedomWorks invited reporters inside to see how their movement worked. On Monday morning, the activists would sit down with reporters from The New York Times, CNN and other media outlets to explain who they were and what they were doing. After a year of liberal pundits bashing FreedomWorks as an “astroturf” group and attacking the credibility of Tea Party activists for working with it, the group’s leaders have stopped caring about MSNBC or liberal bloggers attacking them as a force behind a popular anti-government movement.

“We’re the shadowy roots!” laughed Brandon. “What I always tell people is that we’re a service center. There’s only 18 of us. Our model is that we’re going to help you and your network.”

The Liberty Leadership Summit was a perfect demonstration of how FreedomWorks amplifies and aids the work that Tea Party activists already want to do. On their way into the offices for Sunday’s meeting, activists grabbed copies of the latest Cook Political Report rankings of House and Senate races, copies of G. Edward Griffin’s seminal anti-Federal Reserve tome “The Creature from Jekyl Island,” and copies of a memo from Pappas laying out the “fiscal policy outlook” of the coming year. That memo laid out the cases against the Democratic agenda on issues ranging from energy to financial regulation, warning activists against the majority party’s proposals to answer voters’ concerns.

“Bush’s ‘Wall Street Bailout’ was the spark that lit the Tea Party grassfire,” wrote Pappas in a section on financial regulation, “and the Obama administration has so far been successful in continuing to increase the ties between Wall Street and Washington while at the same time demonizing bankers for political gain. This presents a big opportunity for the right to throw off the image of being owned by business interests when what we really support are free markets.”

Some Tea Party activists at the meeting, like Fitzgerald, blanched at the thought of their agenda matching up with the Republican agenda. There was audible grumbling when Hecker announced that Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions was on board with the Contract from America as soon as it was ready to launch — Hecker mollified that by explaining that the group was not “tied” to Gingrich. When Florida activist Robin Stublen worried that Republicans might try and beat Tea Party activists to the punch with their own Contract, Brandon told him not to worry.

“They don’t have the credibility to do that,” Brandon said.

At the same time, in the wake of Scott Brown’s upset victory in the Massachusetts special election — a victory that came after Democrats tried and failed to negatively tie Brown to Tea Parties — activists were thrilled at the prospects of taking down long-serving incumbents. Sketching out the primary and general election calender for 2010, activists speculated that the Florida seat of retiring Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) could be up for grabs, along with the Senate seats held by Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and House seats held by Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.) and Rep. Michael Mahon (D-N.Y.). Every Democratic committee chairman, they argued, should be looked at for a challenge. According to Virginia activist Lisa Miller, former Rep. Virgil Goode (R-Va.) was talking to Tea Party activists about challenging Perriello, the man who beat him.

When all of this was boiled down, the activists came up with three goals. The first: “No tax & spend incumbent goes unchallenged.” The second: “Take over the Republican Party,” which meant scouting out “strategic opportunities to put fiscal conservatives in the House and Senate.” The third: “Fiscal conservatives will take back the House and Senate.”

If the short debate over the Contract from America did anything, it demonstrated that the Tea Party vision of “fiscal conservatism” is one that Republicans are primed to run on. Asked to vote whether the first batch of possible Contract items were in their “top ten” or “bottom ten,” the activists heavily favored items that promised more government transparency (putting every bill online for seven days before votes) and lower taxes (making the Bush tax cuts permanent and replacing the tax code with one “no longer than 4,543 words — the length of the original Constitution). The transparency item, in particular, sounded like a no-brainer.

“I thought we voted for Obama to do that!” said Everett Wilkinson, a Florida activist.

The less popular items were ones that smacked of federal government intervention in the economy. The group voted down a tight term limits rule, a “Committee on Constitutional Authority” that would rule on whether bills passed muster, and waivers from the EPA “in order to allow states flexibility in establishing environmental priorities.” That prompted activists to argue that they should simply support abolishing the EPA. After no one supported a “corporate welfare commission” to scour wasteful spending, Pennsylvania activist John Stahl suggested that the movement campaign against corporate welfare altogether. And Stahl worried that the Contract was missing a major action item.

“There are assaults underway by the Obama administration, and others, on our Constitutional right to vote,” said Stahl. He rattled off examples — the motor voter law, giving the vote to “anybody who’s on the dole,” amnesty to undocumented immigrants — and argued that it needed to become an issue or there would be “a lot of disappointed people out there.”

“That’s a good point,” said Hecker. “One of the ideas that’s not in this, that was on the site, is an ID for voting.”

By the end of the meeting, Tea Party activists had a handle on the issues they’d demand answers on when politicians got fully into gear. And they’d started to determine how the Tea Parties of 2010 would not merely repeat the ones that broke out in 2009. Arkansas activists, said organizer Jebb Young, would hold a rally on the one-year anniversary of the day Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) called protesters “un-American.” They’d meet and greet legislators when they showed up to the next session. After he described ways for Tea Party activists to show their political heft, New York activist Tom Borrelli argued that the movement needed to pick one major corporation and start a boycott of its products. The dozens of Tea Party activists scribbled down notes.

“I think the people that you see here are going to change the direction of the country this year,” said Brendan Steinhauser, FreedomWorks’ director of federal and state campaigns.

The North Decoder blog unearths some fascinating writing from current Gov. John Hoeven (R-N.D.), then the president of the state-owned Bank of North Dakota and a proud member of the … Democratic Party. From a letter he wrote to newspapers in 1996:

I have always been moderate in my political views, but now that I am considering elective office, I realize I must join a political party and stick to it. I have decided to join the Democratic-NPL Party because I believe that is the best fit for my views. […]

What people don’t want is partisan politics as usual.  The effort by overly partisan members of the Republican Party to cast me as one of their own is just that, partisan politics as usual.

Four years later, Hoeven was elected governor as a Republican; now, he’s the party’s candidate for an open Senate seat.

Hoeven wasn’t the only promising Midwestern politician to switch to a GOP that was, at the time, growing wildly in his state. The year that Hoeven wrote this letter, St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman switched from the Democratic Party to the GOP.

A big statement from the senior senator from Arizona, who famously floundered at the start of the financial crisis in September 2008 by — among other things — demanding the resignation of then-SEC Chairman Chris Cox.

Our country is still facing an economic crisis and while I appreciate the service that Chairman Bernanke has performed as Federal Reserve Chairman, I believe that he must be held accountable for many of the decisions that contributed to our financial meltdown.

Therefore, I plan to oppose Chairman Ben Bernanke’s confirmation for a new term as Federal Reserve Chairman.

What’s unclear: Whether McCain knows whether Bernanke’s confirmation is already a go. His colleague Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), who is not up for re-election this year, is backing Bernanke.

In a dark month for progressives, the nascent and inexplicable New York Senate bid of former Rep. Harold Ford (D-Tenn.) has provided a little levity. Here, for example, is one of the stranger exchanges in a radio interview he did with Fred Dicker.

The two bantered about the difference between New York and Tennessee, with Dicker poking fun at Ford for pronouncing “smear” (as in: “I’ve been the victim of a smear campaign on my position on choice”) as “schmear”, prompting this exchange:

Dicker: “I think schmear is something you put on a bagel.”

Ford: “I’m a little country. I apologize…It’s “smear”, s-m-e-a-r. Y’all talk funny.”

When the health care reform bill passed the House in November, I reported that anti-abortion rights groups thought they’d pulled a number on Democrats by backing Rep. Bart Stupak’s (D-Mich.) anti-abortion funding amendment instead of demanding that conservative members kill the bill outright. In a Friday interview with CNSNews, Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) looked back and agreed with the pro-life activists.

I want to give great credit to the pro-life Republicans and Democrats who took a stand in the House of Representatives on the traditional language that was encompassed first in the Hyde Amendment and then in the Stupak-Pitts Amendment – so, I think it played a critical role.

There was some anger from libertarian-minded activists that Republicans didn’t kill the bill back in November — pro-life groups argued that Democrats would have found the votes anyway, and that Supak-Pitts would cause trouble for the majority down the line. It looks like a smart strategy.

The upshot of the news that Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden–son of the vice president–won’t run for the state’s open Senate seat is that Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) is now prohibitively likely to take the seat over for Republicans. Delaware Democrats, who have dominated the state for the better part of a decade, have a bench of second-tier candidates to draw on. But Castle, who’s held statewide office in Delaware since the 1980s, is the most popular politician in the state. And Biden’s pass on the race will be national news, an indication that Democrats are panicking about bad polls and bad economic numbers and don’t want to stake their careers on the whims of 2010 midterm voters.

A secondary effect of Biden’s decision may come when Tea Party activists–they’ve got a strong presence in Delaware–take a second look at Castle and decide whether it’s worth backing a primary challenger to protest his vote for cap-and-trade legislation. GOP activist Christine O’Donnell had been considering a race; with the stakes considerably lowered, expect to hear more about a possible challenge there.

A new Rasmussen poll has Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) trailing Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.)–rumored to be interested in a challenge, in the wake of the Massachusetts upset–by only three points.

Bayh, who was on nobody’s list of endangered Democrats last month, is the sort of senator who found himself endangered in last two elections of the Bush presidency. He regularly visits TV studios to state his concerns with the administration’s policies. But he never really votes against them. Complaints about, for example, how much Congress is spending, are matched with votes for more spending. It’s a tactic that’s sapped Bayh’s credibility with conservatives and angered liberals.

This is the most interesting State of the Union run-up event I’ve seen so far, although I’m still waiting on details from Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.).

U.S. Rep. Jeff Miller (R-FL-01) today announced that he will be hosting “Tea Parties” in his Washington D.C. and Pensacola offices on Wednesday, January 27^th prior to President Obama’s State of the Union Address.

Miller said the events will take place in both his Washington and Pensacola Offices at 5:30 p.m. local time. Constituents and friends are invited to come by for a cup of tea and to bring your questions and comments.

Mike Lillis speculated earlier on whether the far-reaching implications of Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission could open the door for foreign companies to intervene in American elections. Former FEC Chairman Bradley Smith tells me that, indeed, the decision seems to let foreign corporations spend whatever they like, as long as they find a loophole that protect them from the ban on election spending by foreign citizens.

“To the extent that there may be some foreign corporations that don’t fall under the category of foreign nationals, that might be something Congress can deal with,” said Smith. “I think the court would probably uphold the constitutionality of that. I can’t say for certain that they would.”

The strange spectacle of a Massachusetts congressional candidate trying to grab onto Scott Brown’s coattails is over: Bill Hudak, who got in hot water for signs and remarks about President Obama’s citizenship, has retracted his claim of an “endorsement” from Brown. From his press release:

“Our campaign misinterpreted his verbal agreement of support from Senator-elect Brown as an approval to proceed with the endorsement announcement.  And, we did not follow proper procedure for getting the press release approved by the Senator-elect’s team,” said Hudak.

“I look forward to taking Scott up on his pledge to help me, but will let him dictate when that support should be communicated,” continued Hudak.

“What is most distressing is the extent to which left-wing bloggers continue to use smear tactics, including trying to portray me as a ‘birther’ and falsely denigrate and accuse Senator-elect Brown of being of that belief”, Hudak said.  “Let me make clear that while I don’t agree with everything he does, President Obama is our President and I believe he was born in the United States, and accusations that he was not are unsupported nonsense and non-issues to the business of our country,” Hudak remarked.

That’s not quite what Hudak used to say.

The members of Congress addressing the annual March for Life are hitting a common theme — that the election in Massachusetts represented a watershed moment in anti-abortion politics, and that the health care bill is dead as a result.

“We have won a battle by defeating Obamacare with the help of the voters of Massachusetts last Tuesday,” said Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), drawing a huge cheer from the crowd. “They’re going to hope you aren’t as involved in three or six months, and then they’ll come up with something just as bad as the bill that was defeated in the Massachusetts election.”

“The socialized medicine bill was a serious threat to life,” said Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.), “and deliverance came from a strange quarter indeed–Massachusetts.”

“Are we empowered by Massachusetts?” asked Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.).”Yes, yes, yes! Okay!”

“You made the difference in ensuring an ill-fated and pro-abortion health care bill will not become the law of this land,” said Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.)

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) was possibly the most enthusiastic about the speciale election. “Thank you Massachusetts!” he said. “Thank you for helping us kill that anti-life bill! You delivered a teachable moment on Tuesday.”