Election Day! We’ll be here all day and into the night bringing you all the latest. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
Rush Limbaugh outdid himself yesterday with a really sleazy dig at GOP nominee Dede Scozzafava, saying she was “guilty of widespread bestiality. She has screwed every RINO in the country.” I know. I feel dirty even repeating it.
Doug Hoffman got asked whether he denounced it or had any comment. He declined, said no comment.
Contrary to reports out this morning, Reid communications director Jim Manley tells TPMDC: “We do not yet have an understanding with Senator Lieberman.”
Just as a bit of background, it’s worth knowing that these kinds of things are seldom black and white and confidential understandings often cannot survive contact with the light of day or on the record questioning.
I’ve been at this so long I remember going head to head with John Fund about his bogus charges of vote fraud against Indians during the South Dakota senate race (Thune v. Johnson) in 2002.
Good times.
If you’re going to be up on Capitol Hill on Thursday, watch out! That’s when Rep. Michele Bachmann is holding her Capitol Hill Tea Party. They’ll start on the Capitol steps and then fan out into the halls of the building until they see the “whites of their eyes” and convince them not to give way to socialism.
Sounds fun.
For the last few days, Republicans and their media enablers have been laying the groundwork to declare any close races today as stolen by Democratic election fraud.
A lot of folks fondly reminiscing today about where they were and what they were doing one year ago. One year seems a bit premature for nostalgia, and my reaction to it was dismissive initially. Some of the nostalgia seems like a salve for the disappointments of the last year or for the expected poor showing by Democrats tonight. (But I suppose it’s not unusual for our nostalgia to say more about us in the present than it does about the past.) Then I watched this outtake from the HBO documentary on Obama debuting tonight and suddenly a year felt like a very long time, and the ’08 campaign like a quaint and simple time. Which I guess means I succumbed to the nostalgia, too, albeit unwillingly.
In an interview with TPMDC, former DNC chairman Howard Dean draws a bright line between voting against a public option and filibustering it:
Even though I disagree with him, Joe Lieberman is well within his right to vote against a public option. [But] no one has the right to oppose the leader. That isn’t fair.
Read the rest of the Dean interview here.
The centrist is an elusive and unpredictable species. It is prone to darting out of press conferences before the Q&A starts. When backed into a corner by reporters, the centrist is known to give vague, uncomfortable answers, eye flitting about looking for escape routes. Our Brian Beutler encountered a female from the rare subspecies of Senate centrists today on Capitol Hill, and she exhibited many of the behavior patterns of her kind, especially when pressed on health care reform.
