Terry McMahon's Awesome Blog: November 2005 Archives

You know, sometimes it's easy to forget that I live in, more or less, the center of the universe. Check out this blurb on the from CNN:

Warner Bros. also had terrific results for its limited-release debut of "Syriana," whose ensemble cast includes George Clooney and Matt Damon in a thriller centered on the oil industry.

The film took in a whopping $372,147 in five theaters over the weekend and $553,372 since Wednesday. "Syriana" goes into nationwide release December 9.

Five theaters?

How many times do you hear that about a movie you've already seen?
(For the record, I did see it, I enjoyed it, and the theater was so packed I thought I would pass out before it was over. Fascinating movie though.

)
I spent the 2002 campaign up in New Hampshire, helping out on that year's governor's race. After the September primary, I had the opportunity to move from the state party to the campaign of our nominee, Mark Fernald, as deputy press secretary. I jumped at the chance for two reasons.

First, I knew the value of a good title, but second, I'd get to work with the press secretary, Steve Marchand. I'd already gotten to know Steve on the summer political event circuit, and I could tell early that he was both an all-around great guy and one of the sharpest political minds I've met, before or since. Sure enough, as under-funded campaigns go, working with Steve was a real lot of fun.

We showed up an hour early every morning, ostensibly to review our coverage in the local papers but really to talk about the latest in New Hampshire political news: who the Democratic establishment was throwing under the bus, what strategies were working, what campaigns had a shot, and so on. It was absolutely my pleasure to work for him. Besides being a great boss, Steve's ideas for the campaign were creative and terrific.

He wound up getting vetoed from from the top more often than not, but I think, had his advice been followed, the election result would have been a lot different.
Why do I bring this all up? Well, a lot of campaign operatives like to say they'd do a better job than the candidate, and Steve actually went out and did it.

He ran for Portsmouth City Council in 2003, and came in fifth on a ballot that elects nine councilors and makes the top finisher the mayor. I checked the vote totals, and he actually finished closer than being mayor than he did to finishing out of the running in tenth place. For a first-time candidate, that ain't bad.

He ran for reelection in 2005, with a different subtext. This time, the incumbent mayor was retiring, and Steve thought he had a serious shot at finishing #1. The Portsmout Herald "this may seem like an upset victory" for him, but for those of us who knew him, it wasn't much of a shock.

Another (with a good Election Night photo) quotes him as saying "I knew one thing, no matter what the outcome was going to be tonight - nobody was going to outwork me," which, let's be honest, is the remark of a winner. The way you win local elections, of course, is by introducing yourself to voters one by one, and sure enough, Steve went to 2500 houses in his hometown. That's how you get 67% of the vote, and in the city.

You could say the Portsmouth Herald editorial board supports him too, since they "genuinely excited about Marchand as mayor" since "the guy has guts, energy and ambition." All told, not a bad Election Day result.
What's funny is the fallout.

See, a couple wacky things happened in New Hampshire that day. First, Mayor Bob Baines lost in Manchester, the state's biggest city. Every two years the GOP puts someone up against Baines, and every time it's going to be the year they finally beat him, and every time they don't even come close.

This year, I don't even remember the Republicans going through the this-is-the-year motions for their guy Frank Guinta, except on Election Day when Guinta actually won. No one saw this coming.
Now, Guinta ran a solid anti-tax campaign, and Steve has some creative ideas to hold the line on spending.

So this compels the "N.H. on verge of a taxpayer revolt.

" So, along with the Manchester mayoral race and some City Council races in some second-tier towns, we have new Portsmouth Mayor Steve Marchand and his push "for a 4 percent budget cap," which is almost close to the truth. According to the , Steve moved first that city departments had to submit budgets with increases of 4% or less, and if they wanted more, they had to go to the City Council and explain it. I have no idea why anyone would oppose this move.

This is a democracy: if you can't explain to the City Council why you need the extra money, they shouldn't have to give it to you. Right?
In , GOP activist Charlie Arlinghaus, who once sent a to try to charm me into revealing what organization had sent me to an event, phrases it even better:

In Portsmouth, conservative Democrat Steve Marchand may have single-handedly resurrected the old Preston-Stephen conservative wing of the Democratic Party.

Last year, Marchand pushed unsuccessfully for a 4 percent budget cap. This year, he’ll be called “Mayor Marchand” after topping the citywide ticket by a large margin.

Nice.

Sure, he gets Steve's policy wrong, again, but this is one hell of a quote for down the road. Working with Steve, I found him to be a consensus-building moderate more interested in making definite progress than finding nobility in defeat. (That's how I roll too.

) He was even by the Howard Dean alumni group in New Hampshire. But if Steve ever runs for higher office someday, they're going to try to tar him, as they always do, as an out-of-touch liberal. And when that happens, it'll be nice to have an on-record quote, from a noted Republican activist who could very well be working against Steve's campaign, calling him a conservative.

That's protection.
Now, speaking of Steve and his political ideas, it's one thing when a friend of yours wins political office. It's something else when you think his philosophy could actually be a new vision for the party and for the country.

Here's a quote from the :

I believe government can be a real force for good in improving people's lives," says Steve, "but only if we earn the trust of citizens through being accountable, transparent, fair, and inclusive."

You know what, that really ain't that bad. I have long believed that government can do good for people's lives if we make sure it does a good job of it, and I think the American people agree: the federal government, even in non-defense spending, is getting bigger at a faster rate in the Bush administration than in the Clinton administration.

In other words, the no-government ideology is losing steam in American public life, and whichever party can manage government effectively will have a built-in advantage for the next generation.
As the old tax-and-spend party, Democratic leaders have to hold themselves to a higher standard before the American public will trust that they'll manage their money well. In a way, I think that's good: Democrats have to work at it, and Republicans don't.

And Democrats who want to become better stewards would do well to listen to Steve and his advice to stick to "being accountable, transparent, fair, and inclusive." Do all that, and you're in pretty good shape.
So congratulations to Steve on an awesome electoral victory, and hopefully the first of many.

I'm not sure are accurate, but Steve Marchand is on the way up. It's nice to know that someone with this much success in his future is a good Democrat - and a really good guy, too.
No, I haven't made any blog posts since the Theo Epstein Era.

I do have a rock-solid excuse, though, which is that my baby is in the shop (arrived yesterday!) and should return the day after I'm required to use it for finals. OK, I'm pessimistic.

My recap of the NYC mayor's race will be pretty short, because I think all that surprised anyone is that Fernando Ferrer wound up finishing less than 20 points behind Mike Bloomberg, when everyone was expecting a margin of around 33. I will say, though, that I agree with Dick Morris's opinion of the mistake in Ferrer's strategy. Morris is kind of crazy these days, but his book Behind the Oval Office on the 1996 Clinton campaign really shows the genius he used to be; that book is still a valid campaign strategy instruction manual.

Another book of his, Power Plays, is almost as good and much more recent. There he goes through six or seven political strategies, with two or three chapters in each on how famous political leaders succeeded or failed to pull that strategy off.
I say all that, because, best I can tell, Dick Morris at this point is generally insane.

Almost all of his columns in 2003 were about Hillary's guaranteed run for President in 2004, and he wrote entire books refuting both Hillary's book and Bill's book. Now he's moved back from Hillary-refuting to Hillary-campaign-predicting, with his latest book Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race.

That said, he was weaned on NYC politics, and I think his anecdote on the Ferrer-Bloomberg race is instructive. Ferrer was considered pretty divisive when he ran in 2001 on the "Two New Yorks" theme, and while he mostly abandoned the attack on wealthy New Yorkers time around, he did stick early to the minority label, to try to emphasize the poor-boy-made-good motif. By the time even the primary campaign heated up, it was too late to redefine him.

Morris argues that Ferrer should have skipped the minority label and defined himself as a Catholic instead. I think that would have been a good idea. First, I'm not sure what exactly being a minority or a Hispanic says about your character.

I do know Catholics are supposed to be highly moral and committed to justice, life, and helping the poor. I assume Ferrer's pro-choice, but he could have spent the campaign focusing on how his Catholic faith has prompted him to spend his life helping people and how he wants to be mayor to help all the people who aren't getting bought off under Bloomberg. This isn't that far from what he wound up saying, but Morris argues, and he's right, that how you frame a candidate and a position can make all the difference.

People who'll take a racial-minority focus to be a liberal guilt trip will embrace the idea of standing up for what's right.
The weird part is that I don't understand why Ferrer didn't go with it. He started off, about a year ago, trying to frame his campaign as a way for Democrats pissed off after 2004 to stick it to George Bush and the Republicans.

Good idea, no? But the real lesson from 2004, besides that we need a fucking plan on terrorism, is that Democrats should be unafraid to embrace morality. We absolutely have the moral high ground on most issues, and when we talk of the Republicans and say, "That's immoral, and it should be illegal," we'll relate to the voting public.

Unfortunately, it seems that the only lesson Ferrer took from the 2004 elections is that the Democrats lost.
The other part of the New York mayor's race worth noting is that Ferrer didn't have an average opponent. We should note not only that Bloomberg spent some ridiculous figure (like $75 million) on his actual campaign, but also that during his term he spent about $300 million on conveniently placed NYC charitable donations.

Talk about patronage! If the mayor helps you out, you help him out. That's basic human nature.

If Fernando Ferrer, on the other hand, had an opponent who couldn't buy off the city, would this election be different? Honestly, I think so. So while Ferrer probably dug his own hole too deep for anyone to get him out, I think this may be one case where the problem wasn't the candidate.

The problem was a billionaire for an opponent.
As promised, we continue with our look back at Election Day 2005. Next up, New Jersey!

I still don't get how this race worked out. On the one hand, Doug Forrester, politically, is not much more than a failed Senate candidate with deep pockets. In a race for governor against a sitting U.

S. Senator, why would anyone expect him to lose? New Jersey is a fairly closely divided state, given that it has voted Democrat four presidential elections in a row, but this was clearly Jon Corzine's race to lose all along.

And in fact, he almost did: those polls in October were pretty close, and given New Jersey's Bob Torricelli/Jim McGreevey tradition of Democratic corruption, this race could have very easily turned into a referendum on incumbent-party corruption. So did Forrester blow the Republicans' best possible chance at winning the governor's mansion, or did he have no shot all along? I really have no idea.

Oddly enough, I heard tell that the only reason Corzine ran for governor is so he can run for president. Frankly, I suspect that's a bit of only-game-in-town overanalysis of an off-off-year election. But I think Mark Warner could have pulled off the rapid switch from Senate campaign to presidential campaign better than Corzine could now pivot to a presidential run.

First off, abandoning your job in the Senate is a lot easier than abandoning your job as governor. All you really need to do in the Senate is vote, and you usually don't even have to do that. Governors, on the other hand, need not only to make decisions but to be the heavy in state government who can lean on legislators to push things through.

Governors can certainly run for president, but for Jon Corzine the burden is tougher: if he runs for president in 2008, he'll have done so as a governor and former senator who hasn't completed a term in anything. Mark Warner in the Senate, on the other hand, could miss a bunch of non-essential votes, leave constituent service up to his staff and more or less be okay. I think Jon Corzine would find a rockier road.

That said, I don't think Corzine necessarily really wants to do it. Chuck Schumer in New York and Chris Dodd in Connecticut both considered leaving the Senate to run for governor. Maybe it's just the tri-state area (and Frank Murkowski in Alaska, and Dirk Kempthorne in Idaho) but a fair amount of senators seem to be more interested in going back home to be governor.

All the appeal of being a powerful statewide elected official, none of the trouble of living in Washington with a bunch of dickheads. I think Corzine, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, is more interested in being an executive.
Fortunately, Corzine has quite the compelling executive decision coming up: his appointment for his successor in the U.

S. Senate. Corzine's imminently open Senate seat is up for election in 2006, and presumably whoever he appoints is going to be, at the very least, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for the full term next November.

The trick, though, is that the Republicans are running state Sen. Tom Kean, whose dad is a popular ex-governor (and, you'll remember, co-chair of the 9/11 Commission). So no matter who Corzine appoints, that person will have a tough race ahead of them in 2006.

Now, at first I was thrilled to hear rumors that Corzine was leading towards picking Acting Gov. Dick Codey for the Senate seat. It's only fair: Codey took over as governor when Jim McGreevey resigned, and he planned on running for a full term of his own until Corzine came in and said he wasn't leaving.

Corzine has murdered primary opponents before by dropping tons of money on them, so there's no reason he couldn't have just outspent Codey into oblivion. Codey wound up taking one for the team and declined to run. So it'd only be fair to think that Corzine would pay him back by appointing him to his old Senate seat.

But then I discovered that national Democrats really want Corzine to pick Codey ahead of several of New Jersey's Democratic congressmen who have been waiting for years. The idea, basically, is that internal Democratic polling shows that Codey's the only candidate who can beat Kean in the general election next November. Fair point, until I realized why: name recognition!

Codey's been the governor for over a year now, and Kean is the son of a former governor. The other potential Democrats are all congressmen, representing a small part of the state each. In other words, suggesting that Codey is the only Democrat who can beat Kean is like suggesting that John McCain is the only candidate who can beat Hillary Clinton, and vice-versa.

Name recognition is valuable, but not for picking Senate winners a year out.
This doesn't reflect poorly on Codey, of course; I just can't stand inaccurate political statements. Interestingly enough though, there's a rumor that Corzine's actually , who would be the first female or African-American senator in New Jersey history.

Now that would be interesting: I have no idea her ambitions, or even if she'd run for the full term in 2006, but kudos to Corzine for thinking out of the box.
Based off the other day, you could say I went 7 for 7. I won't say that though, because it was a Team Democrat kind of night, and I'm not going to bet against my own team and still expect to get into the Hall of Fame for it.

But pretty much all the races wound up going leaning five points further towards the Democrats than I expected, which is fine by me.
Of course I won't let an Election Day go by without any of my trenchant commentary. For the sake of not having an unbelievably long post, I'm going to break things up by state.

First up, the first runner-up for my undergraduate and law school selections: Virginia!
Congrats to everyone who got Tim Kaine the win in the governor's race here. I was never totally convinced that Tim Kaine was that great a candidate, a sentiment that may be implicitly supported in all the morning-after coverage about how Virginia's now a purple state.

(Kerry contested it briefly in 2004, and the fast-growing DC suburbs and exurbs are either heavily Democratic or moving in that direction.) This is true especially because outgoing Gov. Mark Warner received a lot of credit, and rightly so, for winning his campaign in 2001 by sponsoring NASCAR cars, playing a bluegrass-flavored theme song for his radio ads, forming a big Sportsmen for Warner group: in other words, doing a better job of appealing to rural voters than pretty much any statewide Democrat in ages.

Especially since Mark Warner is a Connecticut-born, DC-suburbs kind of Virginian, it seemed like he had finally found a way for a Democrat to carry the state.
Tim Kaine, on the other hand, ran a much more straightforward progressive campaign. He did talk a lot about his Catholic faith and how it drove him to public office, which I think is smart for all Democrats of faith, but he didn't do as much rural campaigning as Warner (which the results in rural Virginia showed).

The crazy thing, though, is that Kaine still won by a bigger margin than Warner did, which I think reflects two facts of Virginia politics. The first is the trend towards Team Democrat that I think will definitely make Virginia competitive in 2008.
The second thing I found interesting is the ridiculous popularity of Mark Warner, whose approval rating is something like 80 percent in a state that hasn't voted Democrat since 1964.

I don't have any material with which to back this up, but I suspect Warner's the second example I've noticed of an odd political phenomenon: self-fulfilling popularity. You may recall in the California recall of 2003, political observers first raised the question of whether California's most popular politician, Senator Dianne Feinstein, would run for governor. When she declined to run, her name still came up, because every Democrat considered as a candidate had to be viewed through the lens of not being as popular as California's most popular politician, Dianne Feinstein.

By the end of three months of that kind of press coverage, Feinstein, despite having done very little on the public radar in the meantime, had her already high approval ratings go through the roof. I guess if you're wicked popular, it's good to have people compared to you.
I think the same thing happened to Mark Warner here, because I'm pretty sure his approval rating wasn't at 80 percent when this whole campaign started.

But one of the overarching themes of this campaign, politically at least, was whether Tim Kaine can take advantage of the fact that Mark Warner is outrageously popular. And, as with the California recall, if so much of the Virginia gubernatorial coverage depends on Mark Warner being considered that popular, people take it for granted that Warner's doing a great job (which he did) and his approval rating only goes up. It's a neat trick, especially it only helps Warner with his "future plans," whatever they "may be.

"
That said, I still think Mark Warner is a little overrated. He's clearly running for president in 2008 (the invitations to his first New Hampshire event arrived in the mail, of all days, on Tuesdsay), and if he's the Democratic nominee, I will absolutely be thrilled to support him. But let's not call Warner an electoral marvel yet, not least because he's only won one campaign in his life.

The difference between Mark Warner and John Edwards on electoral success, though, is in why they didn't run for Senate. John Edwards decided in September 2003 that he had to decide between the presidential campaign and the Senate campaign, and he decided to roll the dice. Mark Warner could have challenged George Allen for Senate in 2006 and still run for president in 2008, but he didn't: if he lost, his presidential hopes would be gone.

So Mark Warner took the easy way out and decided he wouldn't run for Senate in 2006. He can do whatever he wants, of course, but keep this in mind when his people go around telling everyone how Mark Warner is a campaign Midas.
Especially since, look, I know , but George Allen sucks.

Look at (it'll start right away) and tell me this guy deserves to be the overwhelming Beltway favorite to be the next Republican presidential nominee. Besides the fact that I've never heard a good idea out of him, and you will get sick of his football metaphors well in advance of 2008, there is nothing about him that makes him seem presidential. The trick is that the GOP insiders are looking for a guy who will appeal to both social conservatives and fiscal conservatives while having the charm to win over swing voters.

That was always Bush's greatest political appeal, and I think it's valuable (yet another reason why I support John Edwards, by the way), but I suspect it works less effectively as the electorate becomes smarter. Thanks to blogs and the internet, people have a better idea of who's playing both sides, and I have a suspicion that if George Allen gets the spotlight in 2008 he'll be seen as a hypocrite if he doesn't choose between conservatism and moderation. I have seen absolutely no indication that he can pull it off.

Sure, I could forsake looking like an idiot, but then where's the payoff once it turns out I'm right?
Anyway, here's my prediction from last year:

Percentage-wise I'll go Kerry by five, 52-47. I predict states that will switch will be New Hampshire, Ohio, Florida and the upset special Arkansas.

Bush will not pick up any new ones, giving Kerry a handy 317-221 victory. For Senate races, I predict Democrats will lose seats in Georgia and Louisiana and pick up seats in Illinois, Oklahoma, Alaska and Colorado, bringing the Senate situation to 50-49-1.

So, look, I've got a really fantastic track record.

(You will note, though, that we did indeed lose seats in Georgia and Louisiana.) So indulge me here as I once again prove the triumph of hope over experience:
New Jersey Governor: Jon Corzine comes through in the clutch, proving once again that Edwards Research alums, besides being honest and conscientious, also get shit done. Thanks to research director Brian Horan and, I guess, the candidate himself, Corzine wins by five.

Virginia Governor: Tim Kaine in a close one, percentage-wise 49-49, thanks to ), and the GOP doesn't give up for months.
New York Mayor: I say Bloomberg takes this one by a 25-percent margin, despite the heroic efforts of Ferrer campaign manager, NYU Law graduate and close personal friend Nick Baldick, and his dashing yet glamorous assistant Kinsey Casey.
California/Ohio redistricting initiative: These are both going to fail, but I include them because I have no idea why anyone would oppose them.

Basically they make a nonpartisan commission do all the redistricting for state legislative and congressional seats, so incumbents can't make agreements to just gerrymander themselves into reelection. Besides the fact that this could help Democrats a lot in both states, it's just the right thing to do. But it looks like they'll fail.

St. Paul Mayor:
And finally, my good friend becomes the next Mayor of Portsmouth, NH. Good luck Steve!

In which Terry turns evil south of Houston St.

Me at the Apple Store: SoHo represents, like, the total failure of everything Jesus fought for.
Guy I said that probably too close to: Truer words have never been spoken.

Galvin: ...

I was waiting for someone to say that.
Also, I said this one several times: "You know what I love about SoHo? It's the place where weak souls go to hate themselves for everything wrong with them.

" Also, people don't know how to walk. Quick quiz: if you're walking five abreast, how often should you stop in the middle of the sidewalk?
I love it here.

I was saying to and his brother that I keep forgetting where the movie theater is, despite the fact that a) it's a block and a half away from where I live, b) it's literally across the street from where I jog on the roof (I can see it on every lap), and c) I keep telling Galvin that we have to go to that movie theater right by me. So as we're walking, say, a block from the Angelika on Houston, this girl also walking down the street says, "You didn't know where the Angelika is? It's right there!

" Always the charmer, I reply, "yeah, actually, these guys were just getting on my case about that too, so, we're all set, but, thanks." See? I can be cutting too.

I had an hour between class yesterday, and so me and a friend wound up in a lounge on the second floor of Furman, sitting in couches across from each other, our laptops flipped open, reading the same on espn.com. We sit there, we snicker, he tries sending me his favorite clips, I keep telling him I read Simmons articles slowly to savor them, and.

..