When Democrat Parker Griffith ran for Congress last year, it was in a district that the GOP wanted badly to win. So the Natioanl Republican Congressional Committee really went to town on him, putting out an attack ad filled with dark images of terror attacks, including 9/11, that ended by quoting Griffith as saying, "We have nothing to fear from radical Islam."
Griffith won anyway. But on Tuesday, news broke that he plans to switch parties, and will officially announce his decision to become a Republican Tuesday afternoon. Problem was, that ad was apparently still on YouTube.
The NRCC seems to have moved quickly, though. Their official copy of the spot has been removed from the video-sharing site. One other user's copy still remained as of this post, however. You can view it below.
Rep. Parker Griffith, D-Ala., will announce Tuesday afternoon that he's switching parties and becoming a Republican, a GOP source familiar with the decision who didn't want to preempt the announcement tells Salon. A first-term congressman, Griffith represents a district that's trended more and more conservative in recent years but hasn't been represented by a Republican since shortly after the Civil War.
Griffith is a doctor, and he's expected to cite his differences with Democrats over healthcare reform as a major issue in his move. But politics likely played a major role as well.
The congressman won 52 percent of the vote in a 2008 race for the seat, which was open as a result of Democrat Bud Cramer's retirement. But the district went to John McCain in the presidential election; the Republican got 61 percent of the vote to Barack Obama's 38 percent. President Bush got 60 percent of the district's residents in 2004. With numbers like that working against him, Griffith was seen as one of the most vulnerable Democratic members of Congress next year, even though he'd been voting against his party on major issues since being sworn in.
Republicans remain 40 seats away from taking back the House.
Politico's Josh Kraushaar, who was the first to report Griffith's decision, noted that the congressman already has more than $600,000 in the bank for his race next year, and at least $14,000 of it came from House Democratic leaders.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani will reportedly announce Tuesday that he's decided not to run for the Senate seat currently held by Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand. He'd already opted not to run for governor against incumbent David Paterson.
Things can change down the line, of course, but for now this seems to be the end of Giuliani's career in politics, and the obituaries are being written.
He did seem to have a shot at becoming either senator or governor, but at the same time he also had quite a bit of baggage to deal with, including the recent guilty plea of his friend Bernie Kerik. And certainly any hope he has of being influential in the political world from the private sector would have faded if he suffered another embarrassing loss like the one he faced in the Republican presidential primary last year.
One of the perks of serving in Congress is that members generally get quite a bit of vacation time, and pretty good hours as well. Elected officials aren't normally wild about working into the wee hours, though they'll do it when they have to. And on Monday morning, they did have to -- a procedural vote on healthcare reform was held at about 1 a.m. EST.
If you listen to reform opponents, there was a reason for the hour at which the vote was held, and a reason that the up-or-down vote on the bill is slated to take place on Christmas Eve: The Democrats are trying to pass the legislation under the cover of darkness.
"This Congress, this leadership, is so tone deaf and so hell bent on propping up a policy that the American people doesn’t (sic) want, that they’re willing to basically flip the bird to the American people on this issue and slip it in in the dead of night," Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said after the vote, expressing a sentiment that's become common on the right. You can bet, too, that Steele and others will have similar things to say if that Christmas Eve vote happens as scheduled -- the farther reaches of the right might add some anti-Christian charges against Senate Democrats, to boot.
What Republicans aren't saying, though, is that they bear as much responsibility for the schedule as Senate Democrats do, maybe more. True, Majority Leader Harry Reid could just decide to blow his self-imposed deadline and not get the bill passed before Christmas. But if Republicans would drop delaying tactics they're currently using, or agree to give up some of the debate time they're allowed under Senate rules, the votes would be conducted at more normal hours and with enough time for everyone to get home for Christmas Eve. At this point, it's clear that the bill will pass -- at least this time around, we'll see what happens after the House and Senate confer -- and that the delaying tactics are only that.
There is a possibility that Senate Republicans will decide to allow the final vote before the evening of the 24th; there were reports that they were discussing that possibility Monday. But now that they've dug in, they'd face an angry base if they did back down.
Clearly, a lot of conservatives want Democrats' healthcare reform legislation to fail, and are dismayed that it looks like there will be a bill passed. But in a post he published Sunday night on his blog Confederate Yankee, Bob Owens took that desire to a whole new level, saying he hoped that Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., would die so that the bill would go down to defeat.
In the post, titled "All I Want Is A Byrd Dropping For Christmas," Owens wrote:
Robert Byrd has been around a very long time, and his many decades of service have made West Virginia a wonderful state in which to manufacture methamphetamine or frame the locals for murder. But it's time for Senator to do the right thing, and expire.
It isn't too much to ask for Byrd to step off for that great klavern in the sky before the Senate vote that may force this nation to accept government-rationed health care. Even a nice coma would do.
Without his frail, Gollum-like body being wheeled into the Senate's chambers to cast the deciding vote, the Senate cannot curse our children and grandchildren with crushing debt and rationed, substandard healthcare.
Noting that some people were bound to be (rightfully) appalled by what he'd written, Owens added that he'd tell those people "that the party wheeling in a near invalid to vote in favor of this unread monstrosity of a bill is the one that should feel shame."
(Hat-tip to Andrew Sullivan.)
A new CNN poll is getting some attention, because it shows a six percentage point bump in approval of the Senate's healthcare reform legislation. That result's probably getting overplayed a bit, though.
For one thing, the percentage of respondents who told CNN they favor the bill is still just 42 percent, compared to 56 percent who oppose it. For another, the poll's margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points, so the bump could really be non-existent -- we'll need to see more polling to know if the numbers really are moving.
There were some notable results in the poll, though. Support for the bill is up 10 percent among Democrats, despite the opposition to the deals the Senate struck that's come from the left recently. And President Obama's approval rating, too, was up among self-identified liberals. That number's now at 81 percent.
Update: Wanted to add a point I meant to include earlier -- it's also fair to expect that Obama's numbers generally will go up after the bill's done and signed. Given the trend among Democrats now, that's likely to be especially true for Democrats' ratings of him. There's been a fair amount of frustration at the administration on the left because of a perception that Obama really hasn't gotten much done, and a major accomplishment like the bill will probably alleviate that.
War Room is written and edited by Alex Koppelman, with contributions from Salon reporters around the country.
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