Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., and her campaign team should be very proud of their first place Ames Straw Poll finish Saturday. Few predicted she would finish strong, let alone win the event, months ago. But her Ames victory may also be the high point of her campaign. The opportunities for her to pick up extra support are severely limited now that Texas Gov. Rick Perry has entered the race.
Without Perry, there was a chance she could have established herself as the conservative alternative to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. But Perry now amply fills that role. Just look at Saturday’s straw poll results. Rep. Ron Paul’s, R-Texas, voters are never going to vote for Bachmann. And given their bitter exchange Thursday, it is unlikely many Pawlenty supporters will become Bachmann converts either.
Sarah Palin’s dismissive reaction to Bachmann’s victory was also telling. They are not as close friends as Bachmann has lead many to believe. Other reports out of Iowa indicate that tension between the Bachmann and Palin camps is just now beginning to simmer over. And already the early reports out of Iowa show that Perry is able to out-campaign Bachmann on a retail level in a way that Pawlenty never could.
The Ames win was big. But Team Bachmann is going to have to step up their game to compete at the next level.
Around the Bigs
The Los Angeles Times, Democrats urge Obama to be more aggressive on jobs: Democrats worry that the jobs agenda Obama is pushing on a three-day tour of the Midwest, is not enough to boost job growth. Obama’s policies “are just not big enough to make much of a difference,” Robert Reich told The Times.
The Wall Street Journal, Plan for Highway Bank Faces Uphill Battle: President Obama id hoping to tack his $30 billion infrastructure bank onto the highway reauthorization bill that expires September 30th. Congress must pass a highway funding bill by the end of September, or the federal government will lose authority to collect the federal gas tax. The Obama infrastructure bank would be a separate appropriation on top of gas-tax paid spending.
The Washington Post, A Businessman in Congress Helps His District and Himself: The Washington Post editors dialed up a hit piece on House Government Reform and Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and the results are spectacularly weak. All the Post’s hatchet man could find is that Issa requested some infrastructure projects for his district adjacent to property that he owns.
The Washington Post, Obama administration encounters opposition to international climate agenda: Obama is on track to fall more than $200 million short of his $1 billion Copenhagen Climate Conference pledge to help prevent the cutting and burning of tropical rain forests. And Obama is set to fall far short of many of the climate promises he made in 2009. “In terms of explicit climate policy, the administration will not be able to deliver, at least between now and 2013,” Robert N. Stavins, director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, told The Post.
The Los Angeles Times, Obama job rating sinks below 40% for first time: Gallup’s three-day rolling average tracking poll had Obama below 40 percent for the first time ever Sunday. The data posted Sunday shows 39% of Americans approve of Obama’s job performance, while 54% disapprove. Both are the worst numbers of his presidency.
Campaign 2012
Pawlenty: Minutes before appearing on ABC News, and hours after finishing third in the Ames Straw Poll, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty told supporters on a conference call that he was ending his presidential campaign. “There are a lot of other choices in the race,” Pawlenty told ABC’s Jake Tapper. “The audience, so to speak, was looking for something different.”
Perry: The Wall Street Journal‘s Charles Dameron takes a critical eye at the Texas Emerging Technology Fund under the header, “Rick Perry’s Crony Capitalism Problem.”“All told, the Dallas Morning News has found that some $16 million from the tech fund has gone to firms in which major Perry contributors were either investors or officers, and $27 million from the fund has gone to companies founded or advised by six advisory board members. The tangle of interests surrounding the fund has raised eyebrows throughout the state, especially among conservatives who think the fund is a misplaced use of taxpayer dollars to start with,” Dameron reports.
Iowa: Texas Gov. Rick Perry out shined Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., at the Black Hawk County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day dinner, Sunday night. Perry arrived early, worked the crowd, and was accessible to everyone in the room. Bachmann “campaigned like a celebrity,” according to Politico, staying in her bus until she had already been introduced twice on stage. “She kept us waiting, she was not here mixing – then she was talking about what great evening it was. How do you know? You just got here,” Karen Vanderkrol, of Hudson, Iowa, told Politico, “She can say she’s real and part of the people, but that’s not what we do.”
Palin: Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and her aides are upset with how Bachmann’s campaign is taking their support for granted. “It is so pervasive and so continuous that it can’t be rogue people doing it without the understanding and encouragement from the candidate herself,” a Palin supporter in Iowa told Real Clear Politics. “The entire Bachmann team has gone around the state saying Palin is a lightweight and a quitter and saying that Sarah’s about to endorse Michele. Bachmann’s campaign is radioactively dirty. They are shameless.”
Righty Playbook
At The Corner, Ramesh Ponnuru offers a brief Pawlenty postmortem: “There was room for an establishment candidate and a populist conservative candidate, but perhaps not enough for someone in between.”
RedState‘s Erick Erickson says Perry’s “singular overlooked advanage” is his close nit of top supporters: “While Governor Perry really did legitimately stand down after the November 2010 election and, until a few months ago, had no intention of running for President, his team never really did stand down. … The Perry team has been with him so long, there is no kicking the tires or vetting the candidate or getting to relative comfort levels.”
Pundit & Pundette note that Obama is considering creating a Department of Jobs: “Brilliant. How about the Department of I-Got-Nuthin? The man is floundering. Doesn’t he have a bus to catch or something?”
Lefty Playbook
Paul Krugman attacks Perry;s jobs record in Texas: “What Texas shows is that a state offering cheap labor and, less important, weak regulation can attract jobs from other states. … The point is that arguing from this experience that depressing wages and dismantling regulation in America as a whole would create more jobs — which is, whatever Mr. Perry may say, what Perrynomics amounts to in practice — involves a fallacy of composition: every state can’t lure jobs away from every other state.”
Talking Points Memo introduces their liberal reader to Perry’s Gardisal problem: “An effort to introduce the drug into Texas schools turned into one of Perry’s greatest defeats, an exceptional episode in that it pitted the governor, renowned for his ability to closely read his base, strongly against the religious right.”
In The New York Times, Warren Buffet says we should Stop Coddling the Super Rich: “For those making more than $1 million — there were 236,883 such households in 2009 — I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. And for those who make $10 million or more — there were 8,274 in 2009 — I would suggest an additional increase in rate.”
