Please save us from the living hell of Time-Warner Cable of Manhattan.
For some background as to why Arlen Specter — who in the past has had a pretty good record of supporting unions — came out yesterday against EFCA, look no further than this new poll number. Specter is currently running with 27% support against winger Pat Toomey in next year’s Republican primary. Remember, he only barely beat Toomey back in 2004.
Specter could probably win in the general, without too much difficulty. But the big problem is whether he can get the GOP nomination.
But by turning so dramatically on labor, which is a particularly big deal in Pennsylvania, I’m curious whether he can really make it through in the general, given the wild level of kow-towing to the right he’ll need to do to secure the nomination.
Jindal: I may want Obama to fail. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
From TPM Reader AR …
There’s just no chance he wins the general now. On top of unions, which are really the only way to win in Philly (although even here they’re losing their cachet a little bit), the reality is the people in PA broadly speaking like Obama a lot. And as someone who would have actually probably would have voted for Specter–it would have been with my eyes closed, but I still give him credit for at least nominally standing up to Bush when it came to judicial appointments–I now see him as someone who made the stimulus package worse, won’t let EFCA come to a vote, and generally is the worst kind of moderate (that is, not someone who is liberal on some issues and conservative on others, but someone who pretends to be a moderate on every single issue). I think it’s obvious that he can’t win the primary (not only is he too liberal, but people who are still registered as republicans in PA are a special kind of hard core), and even if he did, I just don’t know anybody around here that would prefer the 60th vote in the senate to be an unpredictable attention whore. I guess I’ve just had it with Specter.
I’m still feeling kind of cheated about there being no Bobby Jindal official GOP response yesterday. But we’ve still put together a special honorary, Gov. Bobby Jindal slideshow with images of the new eruption of Alaska’s Mount Redoubt.
I see I was not to be totally disappointed in wanting my fix of Bobby Jindal. He appeared at a fundraiser last night during President Obama’s press conference. And his choice of topic seemed well-suited to the GOP’s new Rush Limbaugh era. The self-consciously intellectual Jindal set for himself the task of providing the intellectual justification for wanting the president to fail.
Jindal described the premise of the question — “Do you want the president to fail?” — as the “latest gotcha game” being perpetrated by Democrats against Republicans.
“Make no mistake: Anything other than an immediate and compliant, ‘Why no sir, I don’t want the president to fail,’ is treated as some sort of act of treason, civil disobedience or political obstructionism,” Jindal said at a political fundraiser attended by 1,200 people. “This is political correctness run amok.”
…
“My answer to the question is very simple: ‘Do you want the president to fail?’ It depends on what he is trying to do.”
Timesmen get a little snippy about not getting called on at Obama’s presser.
Kent Conrad and senate moderates are cutting money from Obama’s proposed budget. But as Brian Beutler points out, a decent amount of their cuts aren’t really cuts but efforts to switch back to Bush era efforts to obscure future spending.