John Cornyn Forced To Defend Ted Cruz's Lunacy… Fails Miserably. Will Republican Senate Candidates Be Crushed In 2014?

John Cornyn must have felt ambushed when mild-mannered centrist, Bob Schieffer threw him onto the grill when he appeared on Face the Nation Sunday. Schieffer just pounded him on the Republicans' whole blackmail and terrorism approach to governance.

Schieffer:The law has been passed. Why not keep the government running and then everybody can sit down and decide what they want to do about it.

Cornyn: Well there should be a negotiation, and this government would still be up and running in full if President… if Harry Reid had allowed Democrats to vote to eliminate the Congressional carve-out which treats them favorably under Obamacare and to treat average Americans the same way the President has decided to treat business with regard to Obamacare penalties.

Schieffer: Senator, isn’t there something wrong when you say I won’t fund the government unless i can attach my personal wish list to the legislation every time we vote? I’d love to see the government find a cause, uh, cure for cancer, but I don’t think you can say I’m not going to pass and pass any funds for the rest of the government until [the National Institutes of Health] finds a cure for cancer. I mean, isn’t that just kind of the same thing here?

Big John was squirming-- and Schieffer didn't even remind him his party is costing the taxpayers $300 million a day in pure waste. Keep in mind that last January, Cornyn reassured the Houston Chronicle editorial board that Republicans would never force the U.S. into a default. This was before he understood he had become Ted Cruz's bitch. "We will raise the debt ceiling. We're not going to default on our debt. I will tell you unequivocally, we're not going to default." No doubt Cornyn wishes Cruz would disappear off the face of the earth, but he's stuck with him so long as the right-wing media has the GOP grassroots brainwashed that Cruz's vision is the way to go-- even if that vision leads directly to a kind of political and economic (and social) armageddon, something right-wing crackpots have been taught to pray for.

At least Cornyn doesn't have to be worried about losing his seat as long as he keeps himself firmed joined at the hip to Cruz. Other GOP Members of Congress worry that their seats are in jeopardy, either because they're supporting him or because they could be primaried by Koch-financed teabaggers if they don't support him.

Republican primaries in states like Georgia, Alaska and North Carolina are turning into the kind of tea party-driven fights that put winnable races for the GOP in Democrats’ column the past two elections.

And as the shutdown drags on and Republicans dig in on the debt ceiling, Republicans are only digging the hole deeper, endangering what should be their year to take back the Senate, with early warning shots that they could nominate candidates who will have a tough time winning a statewide election.

The battle is far from over, but already Republicans and Democrats alike are pointing the finger squarely at Cruz, who both sides credit with fueling the strategy of linking Obamacare to the government funding fight-- without an obvious exit strategy.

“Sen. Cruz thinks his boisterous efforts on defunding the healthcare law will help defeat the likes of Hagan, Pryor and other Democrats in swing states, but this is to his own detriment,” complained one Senate GOP aide to MSNBC.com. “Instead he has become the Senate’s new Jim DeMint, raising money off being loud, bringing division within his party, and causing influential leaders to be at great risks to under qualified candidates in their primaries.”

Democrats are gladly fanning the flames, too. Obama’s former campaign arm, Organizing for America, is up with a new ad this morning blaming “Tea Party Republicans [for] threatening an economic shutdown.”



…In Georgia, the site of maybe the most volatile GOP primary next year, it wasn’t just Rep. Paul Broun and Phil Gingrey-- seen as the most conservative and most worrisome to Republican strategists if they win-- who said they would side with Cruz. The entire field said they would have backed his controversial tactics, including Rep. Jack Kingston, former Secretary of State Karen Handel and businessman David Perdue, the cousin of the state’s former governor. That’s counter to how both the state’s GOP senators-- Saxby Chambliss, the man they’re vying to replace, and Johnny Isakson-- both voted.

Not helping matters, Republicans say-- one of the leading voices on the movement in the House, Rep. Tom Graves, hasn’t just kept a hardline on the defunding strategy may have passed on the Senate race, but GOP observers in the state say he’s also helping push the field further to the right.

The volatility of the GOP primary race there is one reason Democrats made getting a top recruit in place, and they turned to Michelle Nunn, the daughter of former Sen. Sam Nunn and former CEO of the volunteer organization Points of Light, where she worked closely with former President George H.W. Bush.

“Ted Cruz and Tom Graves have boxed the GOP in in D.C. and they’ve done the same thing here in Georgia with our Senate candidates. They’ve all been forced to support what’s going on and move toward the right,” said Georgia GOP strategist Joel McElhannon. “Right now it’s not helping our Senate candidates position well against [Nunn] who can adopt the national Democratic narrative that Republicans are shutting everything down.”

In North Carolina, where Republicans hope to knock off first term Democrat Kay Hagan, the whole primary field has also said they would back Cruz’s defunding strategy-- also squarely at odds with the state’s GOP Sen. Richard Burr, who called it “the dumbest idea I’d ever heard of.”

Even in Alaska, it’s making for some strange bedfellows. Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell may be the favorite of DC Republicans but he faces a primary challenge from former 2010 Senate nominee Joe Miller, who beat Lisa Murkowski in a primary but went on to lose to her as a write-in candidate, and now has a three-way primary with the entrance of former natural resources commissioner Dan Sullivan. Miller has firmly backed Cruz, but Treadwell also, to the surprise of some, pledged he would “stand and work with Cruz and Lee.”

Republicans argue it’s a gamble, though, that 13 months out from the election voters will remember the political posturing that took place during this fight, especially as both sides are uncertain how the stalemate ends. Instead, they argue it’s the president’s health care law, which remains heavily unpopular in many of the targeted states, that will be their catalyst to victory.

But the problem for Republicans-- it’s the right who’s the most energized in the primaries and could end up not just picking but also forcing candidates to take more conservative positions in these primaries.

“The enthusiasm in the party is coming from the right, and that exhibits itself in a primary,” said Harvard Institute of Politics Director Trey Grayson. A former Kentucky secretary of state, Grayson experienced that first hand in 2010-- the early favorite in the primary, he eventually lost to now-Sen. Rand Paul.

That seat stayed in Republican hands, and Grayson noted other failed GOP Senate nominees didn’t have the political skills and savvy Paul has. Even though he comes from the same ideological wing as Cruz, Paul hasn’t taken up the defunding yoke with quite as much fervor as Cruz has, taking a more pragmatic approach. And he has stuck with backing McConnell in his own primary challenge that’s drawn ire from other conservative groups.

But Grayson says the internal discord is “frustrating to watch.”

“When you lose a couple of presidential elections in a row, these are the kind of things that happen,” said Grayson. “We’re doing some soul searching.”

Still, being on the precipice of victory is a scenario Republicans have found themselves in before. With favorable math and even a wind at their backs, they didn’t capture the Senate in either 2010 or 2012. In 2010 they picked up five seats in a huge wave year, but still lost winnable races in Nevada, Delaware, and even Colorado with problematic candidates. In 2012, Democrats were defending more than double the races that Republicans were, yet the GOP squandered away winnable races in Missouri and Indiana as Democrats actually picked up three seats.

Those five missed opportunities, when added together, wouldn’t have given the GOP the majority, but could have made it a lot easier to even sway conservative Democrats to their side in the shutdown fight, or make a more successful pitch to even delay the health care individual mandate.

To pick up the upper chamber next year, Republicans face a map that runs through many red states held by Democrats and should be squarely in their column. They have the upperhand in seats with Democratic retirements-- West Virginia, South Dakota and Montana-- but still need three more. They’d like to find those in Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana and North Carolina, all states where Democratic incumbents must defend territory where President Obama lost last year. But hoping messy primaries can give them an opening, Democrats have put GOP-held Georgia and Kentucky in play.

The seeds could also be there for at least some more primary discomfort in the Bluegrass State, making both Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell’s re-election challenge more difficult both in the primary and general.

McConnell didn’t vote with the Cruz/Lee bloc to oppose cloture on the House version of the CR, and his primary opponent, Matt Bevin, has attacked him for it, aided by the Senate Conservatives Fund, who’s named McConnell a top target.

But Republicans counter that these primaries are far from settled that the president’s refusal to negotiate and his hard-line against Republicans will backfire-- and that the shutdown battle could be a distant memory by next November, again giving voters a way to register their dissatisfaction with Obamacare.

“It’s too early to know what, if any, political impact the shutdown will have on 2014, but what we do know is that Democrats have controlled Washington for the last five years and during that time it has been a dysfunctional disaster,” said National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesman Brad Dayspring. “The dysfunction of a shutdown or a failure to even try to negotiate hurts institutional Washington, which hurts already weak incumbents facing a difficult political environment like Mary Landrieu, Mark Pryor, Kay Hagan, and Mark Begich. Democrats are the status quo in Washington, which gives us an opportunity since people do not like the results-- or lack thereof-- on their watch.”

But, it’s Democrats who see the early signs of deja vu again, and hope holding the Senate, yet again, is their hat trick.

“Republicans have not missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, putting Democrats in a strong position to keep the majority next November,” said DSCC spokesman Matt Canter. “Republican recklessness and bitter partisanship is exactly what voters think is wrong with Washington.  By embracing the Cruz strategy en masse, GOP senate candidates are showing voters an inability to govern.”

Wes Clark says what a lot of us have been waiting to hear said about McCranky's national-security cred, and Senator Obama turns his back on him

"It's crucially important that we have a political debate in this country that's at least sophisticated enough to be able to handle the following rather basic idea: Arguing that a person's record of military service is not a qualification for the presidency does not constitute 'attacking' their military credentials; nor can it be described as invoking their military service against them, or as denying their record of war heroism.

"That's not a very high bar for sophistication. But right now it's one the press isn't capable of clearing."

-- Zachary Roth, this afternoon on the Columbia Journalism Review
"Campaign Desk" webpage

On one level, I think we need to get used to the fact that between now and November every day's news cycle is likely to include a new barrage of sniping at Barack Obama. We have to face the reality that as far as our sclerotic Infotainment Media are concerned, Young Johnny McCranky -- sleazy, ignorant, and ideologically whacked-out opportunist that he is -- is like unto a god walking among us, while the other guy is just some garden-variety Islamofascist-Marxist-Leninist off the Arab street.

Today's ruckus arises from comments made yesterday on Face the Nation by Gen. Wes Clark, who in response to questions said that while he certainly honors Young Johnny McCranky's service as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, that's not a qualification for the presidency. Nor does the "naval command" on his resume: "That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded—that wasn’t a wartime squadron. He hasn’t been there and ordered the bombs to fall." Finally, in response to moderator Bob Schieffer's observation that “Barack Obama has not had any of those experiences, either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down”, he said, “Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.”

At this point, let's turn to Zachary Roth's online account for CJR:

The McCain camp, sensing an opportunity, complained that Clark had "attacked John McCain’s military service record." Of course, Clark had done nothing of the kind. He had questioned the relevance of McCain's combat experience as a qualification to be president of the United States. This is a distinction that you'd expect any reasonably intelligent nine-year old to be able to grasp.

But many in the press have been unable to. ABC News political director Rick Klein led the outrage, writing in a blog post on ABCNews.com:

Find me a single Democrat who thinks it's good politics to call into question the military credentials of a man who spent five-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war.

This is the perfect embodiment of the press's unbelievably destructive habit of assessing every piece of campaign rhetoric for its political acuity, rather than for its validity and accuracy. Clark’s comments may (or may not) have been impolitic. But that has no bearing on their validity or lack thereof—which is how the news media should be evaluating them.

Roth asks utterly reasonably, "Why should it be out of bounds for Democrats to argue that McCain's particular military experience has done little to prepare him for the decisions he'll have to make as president?" But the Infotainmenteers will have none of it, and he goes on to sample their veritable feeding frenzy.

By the time we sink to the level of Wall Street Journal analysis, we get Gerald Seib and Sara Murray writing: "The one certainty of the 2008 campaign, it might have seemed, was that Sen. John McCain would be acknowledged all around as a war hero for his service in Vietnam—but apparently not."

At which Roth wonders: "Did Seib and Murray even read what Clark said? Where did Clark say anything about McCain not being a war hero?"

And then today, on Day Two, Senator Obama turned his back on General Clark, with some obnoxious bloviating about patriotism:

Beyond a loyalty to America's ideals, beyond a willingness to dissent on behalf of those ideals, I also believe that patriotism must, if it is to mean anything, involve the willingness to sacrifice -- to give up something we value on behalf of a larger cause. For those who have fought under the flag of this nation -- for the young veterans I meet when I visit Walter Reed; for those like John McCain who have endured physical torment in service to our country -- no further proof of such sacrifice is necessary. And let me also add that no one should ever devalue that service, especially for the sake of a political campaign, and that goes for supporters on both sides. We must always express our profound gratitude for the service of our men and women in uniform. Period. Full stop.

Which makes you wonder, did Senator Obama even read what Clark said?

As a really smart colleague put it online earlier today, all Senator Obama had to do was issue this simple statement:

"That's not what General Clark said. He said he respects McCain's service -- as do we -- but that McCain has done nothing that shows he has the leadership ability to serve as commander in chief."

And then, of course, stick to it, however long it takes for this embarrassingly simple idea to penetrate the blockheads of the Infotainment Media. But this resoluteness is in fact something that the senator has shown himself to be quite good at.

I can only guess that Senator Obama and his people have made an all but exception-proof decision that they will fight no battle that they don't absolutely have to, apparently including even slightly risky battles that if won might pay off in significantly raising the candidate's stature, electability, presidential mandate, and consequently ability to govern.

Oh, they'll fight the battles they have to, as when the senator was inspired by necessity to make his outstanding speech on racism. They have no intention, in other words, of being swiftboated. But it appears that they won't venture onto less solid ground.

In fact, General Clark basically said the same thing that a lot of people, including a lot of military people, have been thinking and saying for a decade or more: that being a prisoner of war isn't any sort of credential to be commander-in-chief. In fact, a lot of them go further. I'm hearing a lot of military types who really do question the McCranky military record. But the general pointedly didn't do that. He talked only about qualifications for the presidency. And found himself out there on that limb all by himself.

I'm thinking now that a forceful, articulate national-security specialist like General Clark or Virginia Senator Jim Webb isn't going to find a place on the 2008 Democratic ticket. I'm thining that all the talk we're hearing about that dismal reactionary Sam Nunn maybe isn't just talk.

If I'm close to right about the Obama camp's take-no-risk strategy, it will quite likely get him into the White House. But I wonder what kind of leadership he'll be able to exert when he gets there. If he's thinking that he can be truly himself once he's in the Oval Office, history shows few instances of that happening. By and large, once you're "in command," you're far less likely to drive events than to be driven by them, especially in modern times.

I suppose you could argue that Chimpy the Prez is an exception. When the Supreme Court installed him in the Oval Office, he went on being what he always was: less than nothing. If this is supposed to be a reassuring example, however, it doesn't reassure me the least bit.

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