(Chuck Muth) – According to The Hill, “Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.) said this weekend he’s refused to approach any fellow Democrats about a bid to become majority leader come next year. Durbin, the second-ranking Senate Democrat who serves as majority whip, said he had pledged to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to not rally support to succeed Reid if the current leader is defeated in his bid for reelection.”
Isn’t telling people you’re not going to jockey around to succeed the boss in case he’s defeated just another way of jockeying around to succeed the boss in case he’s defeated? And doesn’t such jockeying around mean Democrats in Washington think Harry’s going down in November?
Meanwhile, Sue Lowden, the GOP front-runner in the race to replace Reid in Nevada, is finally responding to the withering attacks against her “bartering” comments by Reid, fellow Republican candidate Danny Tarkanian and rest of the left-leaning/Democrat world with a new TV commercial debuting on the Sunday talk shows today.
It’s a darned good commercial. How good? Well, the Reid camp is having a conniption over it, that’s how good. In the commercial, Lowden says her bartering/chickens comments were taken out of context. The Reidites call that a “bald-faced lie.”
“It’s pretty interesting, and by that I mean pathetic, that a month after the fact, they would resort to lying about what they said after her campaign has spiraled out of control,” said Kelly Steele, Reid’s pathetic-obsessed campaign communications czar who, methinks, doth protest too much.
While Lowden certainly did raise the issue of bartering and brought chickens into the discussion by noting they were used for bartering purposes “in the olden days,” she also certainly was not suggesting paying for doctor visits today with poultry or other farm animals as an alternative to ObamaCare.
The point Lowden certainly was making was that people today can negotiate lower health care costs by paying cash rather than going through an insurance claim, which certainly is true. To suggest that she actually was suggesting “chickens for checkups” as a policy proposal is absurd.
So while opponents are correct that Lowden first brought up the words “barter” and “chickens” in the debate, Lowden is also correct in noting that opponents have taken her use of those words out of context by ascribing to them a purpose which was never intended. So I call this one a wash.
In any event, while the Lowden campaign has been stumbling and recovering, fellow GOP U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle has been rising, thanks in large part to her endorsement by the Tea Party Express a couple weeks ago. But with increased viability has come increased scrutiny. It was reported on Friday that her campaign is being investigated by the FEC for reporting irregularities. Not good.
Speaking of Republican U.S. Senate candidates, does anyone doubt that if Assemblyman Chad Christensen had been as aggressive and creative in promoting the conservative cause during all his years in the Nevada state Assembly, he’d have been the Assembly Minority Leader and Republicans wouldn’t have been so “irrelevant”? Ah, what might have been.
In other U.S. Senate news, Sarah Palin has been endorsing candidates all over the country and the latest hot rumor is that she might announce an endorsement in the Nevada GOP primary this week.
Many think she’ll back the same candidate as her dad: Danny Tarkanian. Others think the darling of the tea party movement will go with Tea Party Express candidate, Sharron Angle.
However, Palin’s endorsements have been somewhat unpredictable thanks to her backing of moderates such as John McCain in Arizona and Carly Fiorina in California. Those endorsements were clearly more pragmatic than philosophical. So with Sue Lowden being both the front-runner and far more conservative than either McCain of Fiorina, getting Palin’s seal of approval isn’t completely out of the question.
It’s pins-and-needles time for all three candidates.
Speaking of endorsements, they’ve actually provided more confusion in this U.S. Senate race than clarity. For example, one prominent national pro-life group has backed Sue Lowden while another prominent national pro-life group has backed Sharron Angle.
Meanwhile, the national Tea Party Express has endorsed Angle, yet none of the recognized Nevada tea party organizations have similarly done so.
And then there’s the anti-illegal immigration Minutemen group. The organization was originally founded by two men. One of them has endorsed Angle; the other Tarkanian.
Joe the Plumber and Pat Boone have endorsed Angle; Kim Rhode has endorsed Tarkanian; and Sen. Jon Kyl has endorsed Lowden.
What this says is that all three of the leading GOP candidates are conservative enough to garner conservative support in the general election if they win the June primary. And I think all of us will be glad when that’s done.