Showing posts with label Howey Politics Indiana. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Howey Politics Indiana. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Richard Mourdock: Precursor or anomaly? Greg Garrison and Charlie Cook adroitly pinpoint where Sen. Richard Lugar eventually lost his way, started losing the trust of Hoosier voters, then lost in a landslide due to the dis-connect. Points largely lost on a predictably apoplectic Beltway MSM


Richard Mourdock for U.S. Senate campaign video: It's time.... for Richard Mourdock. March 3, 2011, http://youtu.be/0EE8jJ2Jhu8


Richard Mourdock: Precursor or anomaly? Greg Garrison and Charlie Cook -separately- adroitly pinpoint where Sen. Richard Lugar eventually lost his way, started losing the trust of Hoosier voters, then lost in a landslide due to the dis-connect. Points largely lost on a predictably apoplectic Beltway MSM

The best reasoned analysis I've read thus far of why Sen. Lugar lost in the GOP primary last week -and lost badly- is by the one-and-only Charlie Cook last week and Breitbart.com's  Greg Garrison today.

THE COOK REPORT
Lugar’s Downfall
Don’t just chalk up the Indiana Republican’s primary defeat to the tea party. It’s more complicated than that.
By Charlie Cook
Updated: May 11, 2012 | 1:39 p.m. 
May 10, 2012 | 4:00 p.m.
One way to explain Sen. Richard Lugar’s loss to state Treasurer Richard Mourdock in this week’s Indiana Republican primary is to attribute it to a tea party takeover of the GOP. A second explanation is that a venerable public servant overstayed his welcome and ran for reelection one time too many. A third is that Lugar was too focused on international relations and grew too distant from his state—that he didn’t keep his political fences mended back home.
Read the rest of the column at 

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Breitbart.com 
LUGAR: 36 YEARS OF PUBLIC SERVICE
by Greg Garrison
May 16, 2012
He was 16 when I was born, Mayor of Indianapolis (my home town) when I was a student at IU, and off to the US Senate when I was a ripe old 28; been there ever since.  And a few hours after having seen him take a beating most uncommon in American politics—he lost to Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock by 21 points in yesterday’s primary—the confetti has just stopped floating to the floor and empty beer cans have barely stopped rolling around as we look with mixed feelings at the phenomenon just experienced.  
Read the rest of the post at:
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Both before and after I first moved to the Washington, D.C. area in 1988, where I lived and worked for 15 years, other than maybe Sam Nunn in Georgia, Daniel Inouye in Hawaii or Teddy Kennedy in Massachusetts, I don't think there was another senator more firmly linked in the minds of both voters and the local and national news media with their own home state than Dick Lugar was with Indiana, who was already a U.S. Senator when I first moved to Bloomington from North Miami Beach in August of 1979 for my freshman year at IU.

Then, and for 25 years afterwards, it was simply inconceivable for anyone who knew anything about Indiana politics and the people of the state to imagine any logical scenario where he would ever lose an election, even if he should've retired after his last term ended in 2006. 
Thirty years was long enough, though, and lots of voters who had voted for Lugar their entire life had become disenchanted with both him, his policies and his increasingly-curious priority choices.

As I've mentioned here previously, too, I was actually at the televised Birch Bayh-Dan Quayle Senate debate at IU in 1980, sitting in the second row of sweltering Whittenberger Auditorium at the IMU, where I usually sat to watch films on weekend nights, glad to be somewhere where people cared about ideas and public policy, even if they weren't always the ones that I agreed with or thought were most logical or reasonable.

After growing-up in the completely unrepresentative South Florida of the 1970's, with no Black or Hispanic congressmen and everyone on the Dade County Commission voted in at-large, the best-case scenario for lobbyists, I was happy to be somewhere where every vote counted for something.

A place where actual political debates took place, even if they didn't exactly match the lofty rhetoric of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858; the election Lincoln lost in case you forgot, before he was elected president two years later.

On Election Night 1980, I spent a lot of time going from one place to another for various election return parties, on and off-campus, in retrospect, the news about Bayh losing to Quayle was merely the precursor.

I eventually made my way tothe dorm room of a friend there at Briscoe Quad where I lived that year, a friend who just happened to be the IU Student Association president.
As first, George McGovern, John Culver and other well-known Dems bit the dust, and then Reagan was acclaimed the winner over President Carter, the large crowd became the very personification of an election wake, filled with gallows humor -and clever remarks about someone making a race competitive by only losing by ten percentage points!

The next time I was in a place that Blue and sad following election returns was at The Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill for the mid-term 1994 elections, when I thought the GOP would take the House, but my friends on The Hill told me that my famous intuition was wrong, something it rarely was.

By the end of the night, many of my friends were actually crying real tears as they saw their always-interesting Capitol Hill jobs get eliminated before their eyes, when their bosses lost in the Gingrich Revolution, while people who for years had been on the Majority Staff of House committees realized that the new math would get them gone, in part, because of how they'd run things and treated the Republican staffers.
Karma, it's not just a chameleon.
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Howey Politics Indiana: http://howeypolitics.com/

NPR Audio: The Bigger Picture Of Indiana's Senate Race: 
NPR's Scott Simon talks with Hoosier political analyst Brian Howey of the Howey Indiana Politics newletter about Richard Mourdock's landslide defeat of Sen. Richard Lugar last Tuesday in the GOP Senate primary

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

50 weeks 'till Election Day 2012: On the current political dynamic in Hallandale Beach and a rationale for running for office...

50 weeks 'till Election Day 2012: On the current political dynamic in Hallandale Beach and a rationale for running for office: more middle-class jobs, the injection of common sense, foresight and enthusiasm at City Hall, and the elimination of its apathy & myopia


Below is a revised excerpt of an email I sent out around Noon today to a couple of dozen interested parties and 'all the ships at sea.'

November 22, 2011

Within the past two weeks, I received a very curious email from a well-known South Florida political consultant about their curiosity about what was going on here and who was running for office in Hallandale Beach next year.

That email to me, as well as the column below from the Howey Politics Indiana newsletter, caused me to wonder if I should finally state publicly what has been building up inside me for months as I observed what has -and hasn't- been going on around me here in this corner of Broward County -frustration.

They have, and combined, they've caused me to write this email, which will be the only large group email I send out this week before next Sunday night, unless something crazy happens around here.

Check that, unless something REALLY, REALLY CRAZY happens here, which is always possible. (Sometimes even I forget where we live.)

I'll still be posting material to the blog, though.

After reading it, I hope that email will prompt some of you to strongly do some soul-searching and speak to your family and friends in the next week or so and consider the possibility that YOU might very well need to actually do MORE for the community than you already are, whatever that is, to rid us once and for all of Cooper and her Rubberstamp Crew in all its pernicious manifestations -attitude, policy, stealthiness...- that is making a mockery of our city's Quality-of-Life improving markedly anytime soon with them in charge.

My thought: some of you may, in fact, need to actually run for office yourself.

Or, failing that, at least consistently start bringing friends and neighbors of yours to various civic-minded meetings around town that will be taking place here until the election -50 weeks from TODAY.

Apathy being what it is in this community, longstanding and entrenched, the only way that the long overdue institutional reform and public policy changes towards greater accountability and transparency can take firm hold here -including a real work ethic by city employees and commitment to giving friendly and professional service to taxpayers and business owners that will have real world consequences for those who fail to do so- is to enlarge the universe of people actually committed to voting for positive change next November.

To me, having seen what passes for public policy and campaigns here, our simply relying on persuasion next September and October is a recipe for failure and naive, and only shows a failure to fully appreciate human nature here and the high level of public skepticism.

In my opinion, this community can NOT stand more of the sort of disconnectedness to the larger community that we have already had to endure the past five years from Mayor Cooper and City Managers Good and Antonio, who have actively discouraged civic involvement and participation -unless you're a crony of City Hall.

The way to change that negative dynamic here is to work hard now to increase the number of people who become engaged and become actively committed to changing the status quo, so that by next November, that wave of change can't be stopped.
Result: a majority on the HB City Commission for common sense that can improve the Quality-of-Life here and make it better for residents and business owners alike.

Despite it being a city of under 40,000, the City of Hallandale Beach isn't currently in the rut it's in because there aren't enough people from a myriad of backgrounds, interests, and talents with good ideas to share and contribute, it's the way it is because under the current administration, good ideas aren't actively solicited and allowed to rise to the top on their own merits, because so many existing bad ideas and myopic thinking aren't seriously held up to scrutiny or penalized.

Unfortunately, the current City Manager and his staff are among the very worst offenders of all, as they continually refuse to admit their mistakes on a whole host of issues, and persist in driving the wrong way despite all the passing signs that they don't enjoy the support of the community: continued taxpayer-funding and subsidy of South Florida Sun-Times; the North Beach facility on State Road A1A & Hallandale Beach Blvd. taking over three times as long to be fixed as it took to be built and yet is STILL closed to the public it belongs to; the unpopular Golden Isles Overlay proposal that has zero support...

The result is that bright, thoughtful and enthusiastic people with something tangible to contribute feel like ostracized outsiders at HB City Hall, and after awhile, after enough encounters with the octopus bureaucracy of being shown their input is unwanted, people with something to contribute get frustrated and give-up.

The very people whom we need to engage and hear from!

Name another city in Broward or South Florida where there isn't a single attorney on the city's council or commission?
Or an owner of a successful ongoing business, who knows first-hand what dealing with that city's bureaucracy and Code Compliance is really like?
Yet in Hallandale Beach, we have neither!

After reading this column below, ask yourself a simple question: When was the last time you heard the mayor or commissioners sound the least bit convincing when talking about bringing middle-class jobs to Hallandale Beach, not part-time hospitality jobs?
Especially Commissioners Ross, Sanders & Lewy?

I mean if you walked up to one or more of these three completely out-of-the-blue and said, "Hard at work or hardly working?" we all know what the honest answer would be, don't we?

They and the mayor seem to think that job creation is the sole province of real estate developers and their land-use attorneys -when trying to convince the P&Z or City Commission to give them approval for variances or side deals- not elected officials like them or the HB Chamber of Commerce, the way those sorts of thing are done normally and successfully in other parts of the country, and we have results that match their apathy and lack of effort, don't we?.

Some of the following article may be lost on you because you don't know the locales and don't recognize the names being mentioned here like I do, from my time living in Indiana while at school and still trying my best to follow things from a distance, and so may miss the clever nuanced approach to connecting-the-dots, but this new column from the popular and much-read Howey Politics Indiana newsletter has a lot of things worth thinking about in Hallandale Beach.

Especially for those of you receiving this who are seriously interested in being part of the tangible positive change we need in this community, and replacing the myopic,
ethically-challenged, common sense-challenged status quo we are stuck with on the dais at City Hall now -the Rubber Stamp Crew.

I hope some of you will take the hint, and NOT just run for office exactly like candidates have done in the past. That model simply doesn't work anymore.

There are literally armies of VERY FRUSTRATED taxpayers out there who are looking for someone who'll seriously engage them in ideas, listen and show some intelligent moxie. The good news for you all is that there are also more ways of effectively reaching them thru technology than ever before.

But you have to start making the effort to be part of that wave of positive change NOW, NOT next Spring.

For myself, I wouldn't consider voting for someone who isn't already hard at work campaigning around town by the end of January, since genuine hard work and action, not mere words,
are what it's going to take to get things changed around here, starting with the paralyzing bad attitudes at City Hall and the scared-straight citizenry.

FYI: John Mellencamp, who is mentioned below, grew-up and lives about 20 minutes from Bloomington and IU in Seymour, which while I was going to school was home to one of THE worst sites of the EPA Superfund -and a one-time girlfriend.

(Two of my female housemates back then, owing to their ridiculously cute, Midwestern girl-next-door looks and appeal, were among the girls in one of his first videos for Columbia Records.)

Mellencamp has given millions to IU and is responsible for the "Bubble" that the IU varsity teams use to train under during inclement weather -that is, our normal weather for December thru March! It's named after him, of course, which is entirely appropriate.
http://iuhoosiers.cstv.com/facilities/ind-facilities-mellencamp.html

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Howey Politics Indiana

Brian Howey, Publisher

Gregg launches from his Sandborn roots

11/18/2011 9:28:00 AM

SANDBORN, Ind. - To be a governor requires a candidate to reveal his roots.

While recent Hoosier governors have come from the big cities of Indianapolis (Daniels), South Bend (Kernan), Lafayette (Branigin) and Evansville (Orr), there is that Mellencamp charm of coming from a small town – a Bremen (Bowen), a Vincennes (Welsh), a Seymour (Whitcomb), a Shirkieville (Bayh), and, of course, Corydon, where Frank O’Bannon worked a sentimental connection from the first state Capital to the current one.

Read the rest of the column at: http://howeypolitics.com/main.asp?SectionID=10&SubSectionID=21&ArticleID=7250