A brand new Sarah Palin headache
Dont look now, but her candidate might be on the verge of a huge upset in Nebraska today
By Steve Kornacki
Sarah Palin(Credit: AP)Lets be clear: No matter what, Republicans in the state of Nebraska will be nominating a very conservative candidate for the U.S. Senate today. But the sudden prospect of a surprise victory by an underfunded state legislator best known for the endorsement she received from Sarah Palin lends potential national significance to tonights outcome.
To set the stage, the front-runner in the race is (and has been the entire way) Jon Bruning, Nebraskas third-term attorney general. The 43-year-old Bruning has made some gestures to his partys restive base, suing the Obama administration over its healthcare reform law and contraception mandate and likening welfare recipients to raccoons. But his polished demeanor and political resume elected to the state Senate at age 27, a seamless rise to the AGs office six years later, and now a Senate bid make him seem more like an establishment man on the rise.
Which can be a problem in the Tea Party era. Conservative leaders and voters today arent as easily satisfied as they once were by candidates who are with them on paper. They want proof of absolute commitment to the cause reason to believe that a would-be senator wont ever compromise away a single conservative principle, no matter how much pressure is coming from party leaders, polling, and the press. And Bruning, who has had to contend with revelations about his personal investments in state-regulated businesses and his purchase of a summer home with two executives from a company that the AGs office had previously sought to help, doesnt really have the image of a true believer.
Until very recently, Brunings main challenger for the GOP nomination was supposed to be Don Stenberg, the current state treasurer and a former attorney general. Backed by some serious money from the Club for Growth, Sen. Jim DeMints Senate Conservatives Fund and FreedomWorks, Stenberg has been portraying himself as the candidate of purity and pounding away at Bruning. But Stenberg, a veteran of three failed Senate bids and two other statewide offices, is something of a perennial candidate, and he lacks the freshness and outsider credentials that Tea Party conservatives tend to respond to. Thus did Bruning still seem poised to win the primary until last week.
Thats when Palin came through with a surprise endorsement of the third candidate in the race, Deb Fischer, whose personal story is the most naturally appealing to the Tea Party crowd. The 61-year-old didnt enter politics until 2004, when she won a seat in the state Senate, and on the campaign trail plays up her work as a rancher. She doesnt ooze the same ambition as her opponents, and of the three candidates shes the most likely to be immune to Potomac Fever.
The Palin announcement offered a huge jolt of momentum to Fischers effort, and was followed a day later by an endorsement from 1st District Rep. Jeff Fortenberry. Then, over the weekend, came one more surprise: a last-minute $200,000 ad buy from a super PAC that has decided to promote Fischer, and savage Bruning. (The super PAC is run by Ameritrade founder Pete Rickets, whose son, Pete, defeated Stenberg in the 2006 GOP Senate primary.)
Where exactly the race stands in hard to say. Fischers campaign has been promoting internal polls that show her leapfrogging Stenberg and threatening Bruning for the lead. There hasnt been a reputable public poll since earlier in the race, when Bruning was still the runaway favorite.
The national implications are two-fold. If Fischer does manage to win, Nebraska could actually emerge as a Senate battleground this fall. With Democrat Ben Nelson declining to seek reelection, the seat has long been assumed to be an automatic Republican pick-up, even after Bob Kerrey, a one-time governor and senator, decided to return to the state and launch a comeback bid. Polls have shown Kerrey getting trounced by Bruning and with Barack Obama on course to lose the state by at least 20 points, its not like Kerrey is going to get any help from the top of the ticket.
Fischer, though, would be a wild card. Shes largely untested, and theres a lot that isnt known about her background and her skills as a candidate. If she wins the nomination, she might do fine in the general election, but theres also the chance shed prove to be another Sharron Angle. And, of course, it could be that she does turn out to be the next Angle, and that it still doesnt matter, given Nebraskas partisan bent. (Its doubtful that a Stenberg win would do much to help Kerrey, since hes a more established figure and has been able to win before.)
The bigger consequence of a Fischer win, though, would be to reinforce the message that was sent to Republican senators by last weeks Indiana Senate primary, when Dick Lugar was trounced by his Tea Party-aligned challenger. As I wrote yesterday, the Tea Party movement really isnt about making the GOP a more conservative party; its about making what is already a conservative party more obstinate, unyielding, and hostile to Democrats. A surprise victory by Sarah Palins candidate today would help that cause.
How the Tea Party is destroying the Senate GOP leaders clout and why its bad for America
By Steve Kornacki
Mitch McConnell (Credit: AP)The possibility that Mitch McConnell might be ousted when Senate Republicans pick their leader after the November elections was raised by a Sunday New York Times story, which found several Tea Party-aligned GOP candidates refusing to commit to backing him. McConnell, though, still has plenty of allies and remains the prohibitive favorite to retain his post.
But theres a more interesting question at work here than whether he can hang on: Why would he even want to?
The impetus for the Times piece was the landslide victory of Richard Mourdock over Richard Lugar in an Indiana Republican primary last week, which refocused attention on the rising influence of Tea Party-style conservatism in the upper chamber. Mourdock, if hes elected, will join a bloc of Republican senators whose governing approach mirrors that of South Carolinas Jim DeMint, the Tea Partys de facto leader on Capitol Hill.
To promote unity within his ranks and to secure his grip on power, its important for McConnell to respond to his partys evolution toward the DeMint/Tea Party style, something hes been doing lately. The problem, though, is that this style severely constrains his ability to exercise the traditional prerogatives of a Senate leader and threatens to render him the upper chambers equivalent of John Boehner, who lives with the knowledge that any deal-making with the other side could spur an intraparty coup.
This reflects an important point about Tea Party Republicanism: It isnt really about ideology; its about governing tactics.
After all, the battle for the Republican Partys ideological soul was fought and settled decades ago. In the late 1970s, a movement somewhat similar to the Tea Party gave rise to a number of primary challenges to sitting GOP senators. The targeted incumbents, though, were genuine liberals New Jerseys Clifford Case, Ed Brooke of Massachusetts, and New Yorks Jacob Javits. The Republican Party of that era was in the midst of a sweeping geographic and demographic evolution, one that established it as the home for white Southerners and newly mobilized evangelical Christians and left the old Rockefeller wing extinct. When Ronald Reagan triumphed in 1980, it certified the GOP as the conservative party it remains today.
The primary challenges of the current Tea Party era are not defined by similarly vast ideological gulfs. Lugar, for instance, was generally a party man in his Senate votes, racking up a fairly conservative record and voting against President Obamas major d! omestic initiatives. But he did leave some room for independence and compromise, particularly in his specialty area of foreign policy. His opponent, Mourdock, was to Lugars right on some issues, but what really distinguished him is his belief that the Senate is a venue for partisan warfare.
Bipartisanship, Mourdock declared last week, ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view.
This is as concise a distillation of the Tea Partys governing vision as youll find. Its not really about moving the GOP to the right; the party is already there, and has been for a while. Its about reflexively opposing the other party on every issue, resisting compromise at all costs, and exploiting every available legislative tool to stymie the other side. This mind-set is already pervasive in the House, and as the Times story shows, its now making its way into the Senate.
The lesson that Lugars defeat sends to individual Republican senators is that they risk the same fate if they dont get with the Tea Party program. Traditionally, theres been room for them to carve out a specialty area like Lugar with foreign policy and to reach across the aisle to advance legislation that affects it. But that model is fast giving way to the Tea Partys expectation of relentless, 24/7/365 partisan warfare.
A case study in how this works can be found in Orrin Hatch, who was spooked when his Utah colleague Bob Bennett was denied renomination in 2010. Hatchs voting record is reliably conservative, but he has (or had) a reputation as a deal-maker. When Bennett went down, though, Hatch swore off compromise and recast himself as a Tea Party-friendly partisan warrior. It will probably be enough to save his job, which only reinforces the message of Lugars defeat.
All of this affects what McConnell is, and isnt, able to do as the GOPs leader. In the past two years, hes played a crucial role in resolving stand! offs wit h the White House that House Republicans instigated over the debt ceiling last summer and expiring payroll taxes before Christmas. But his ability to keep doing this depends on having space to negotiate and cut deals with Democrats, and with every Tea Party primary triumph, that space erodes a little more.
The Senate is not the House yet, but the Tea Party is pushing it in that direction. As Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann explain in their new book, the principles of a parliamentary system absolute party loyalty and reflexive, unyielding opposition from the out-of-power party are coming to define Capitol Hill. For McConnell, this will force a personal reckoning over whether hes comfortable functioning as the kind of leader such a system demands. For the rest of the country, it will force a different kind of reckoning, as the total incompatibility of the parliamentary style with the American system becomes apparent.
A particularly tedious bit of GOP obstructionism prompts the Senate majority leader to suggest the unthinkable
By Steve Kornacki
For those who are anxious to see the filibuster die, this week has produced some very hopeful developments.
The biggest news came late yesterday afternoon, when what Harry Reid thought was going to be a routine exercise approving a bill already passed by the Republican-controlled House to reauthorize the Export-Import bank was ruined by surprise Republican objections, forcing the majority leader to file a cloture motion and delaying action on the bill at least until next Monday.
This is the 84th time in the current Congress that Reid has formally sought to bypass a Republican filibuster or filibuster threat, a continuation of a trend toward Senate obstructionism that has been building for decades but that really took off when Republicans returned to minority status in 2007. In the Congress that began that year, Reid filed 139 cloture motions, and in the next one there were 137, numbers that dwarf anything seen since the procedure for cloture was developed in 1917.
And if anything, this understates the degree to which filibustering has become an everyday tool; how often have Reid and Democrats not even bothered to file cloture on bills, knowing they lacked the necessary 60 votes and not wanting to waste precious days of precious Senate time?
Faced with yesterdays Republican maneuver, an exasperated Reid took to the Senate floor and said, If there were anything that ever needed changing in this body, its the filibuster rules, because its been abused, abused, abused.
He also invoked the names of two of his Democratic colleagues, Tom Udall and Jeff Merkley, who attempted before the current Congress convened in January 2011 to sell their party ! on what they called the Constitution option under which Democrats would exploit a technicality to change Senate rules on the first day of the new session with a simple majority vote, not the two-thirds supermajority normally required. Merkley and Udall werent actually proposing to get rid of the filibuster; the new rules they envisioned would just have stopped the mere threat of a filibuster from killing a bill and forced senators to engage in real filibustering. But the ultimate ability of the minority party to kill legislation it doesnt like by forcing proponents to secure 60 votes would have stood.
As benign as their plan was, it still prompted an outcry from the right and was regarded as too extreme even by some Democratic senators. In the end, Reid struck an agreement with Mitch McConnell, his Republican counterpart, that made some very modest and superficial reforms an agreement that, as Reids frustration yesterday demonstrated, didnt change much.
If there were ever a time when Tom Udall and Jeff Merkley were prophetic, its tonight, Reid said in his floor speech yesterday. These two young, fine senators said it was time to change the rules of the Senate, and we didnt. They were right. The rest of us were wrong or most of us, anyway. What a shame.
The question is whether Reids outburst signals a real shift in his thinking, or if he was simply blowing off steam (or trying to gain some leverage with Republicans by flirting with rules reform). In the near-term, it doesnt really matter. if filibuster rules are going to be changed, it will almost certainly be at the start of a Senate session, not in the middle of one, so the earliest Demo! crats wo uld move on anything is next January. And with all of the vulnerable Democratic seats up this fall, theres a real chance they wont be running the Senate next January, anyway.
That said, theres another big development this week that increased the Democrats chances of holding on to the Senate and their incentive for changing the rules if they do: Richard Lugars primary loss in Indiana.
With Indiana Republicans now saddled with a far-right candidate, Richard Mourdock, Democrats have a real opportunity to pick up Lugars seat. If they succeed, it will radically diminish the GOPs odds of reclaiming the chamber.
But even if Mourdock goes on to lose in the fall, his primary triumph ensures that Senate Republicans will be even more ideologically inflexible, compromise-resistant and filibuster-dependent going forward. The threat that theyll suffer the same fate as Lugar (and the other Republican congressional incumbents and establishment favorites who went down in the 2010 primary season) will hover over every vote that every GOP senator takes.
So if Reid really has had it with the filibuster, next January may be a good time to do something about it, because the problem isnt going to get any better. Of course, if divided government is still the rule next year a Democratic White House and Senate and a Republican House, say then any filibuster reforms wouldnt have much practical effect on the enactment of laws. But the Merkley-Udall proposal could be a good starting point, a means of reestablishing the precedent for filibuster reform and laying the groundwork for a more sweeping overhaul at a later date.
Joe Biden sped up history this week -- and made some new friends who could help him fulfill his most elusive dream
By Steve Kornacki
FILE - In this March 15, 2012, file photo, Vice President Joe Biden in Toledo, Ohio. (AP Photo/Madalyn Ruggiero, File) (Credit: AP)One of the striking aspects of this weeks gay marriage drama is how neither Barack Obama nor Joe Biden played to type.
When they teamed up four years ago, Obama was the face of the new Democratic Party, one composed of college-educated professionals and young voters who held decidedly liberal cultural views. Bidens addition to the ticket was partly a nod to the partys blue-collar roots specifically, to the white, working-class voters who had continued to line up behind Hillary Clinton all the way to the end of the 2008 primaries, even when it became clear Obama would be the winner. In Biden, a Scranton-born Catholic who once took heat for calling Obama articulate and bright and clean, it was hoped, these voters would find reassurance that the Democratic Party was still for them, too.
If they were playing their assigned roles, it ! would ha ve been Obama leading the way on same-sex marriage this week, issuing an eloquent call for equality that would prompt Biden to come around too. Instead, it was the vice president who made the first move, making a surprise declaration on Sunday that hes absolutely comfortable with gay marriage and setting off a 72-hour media frenzy that culminated in Obama finally admitting in public that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.
Theres some obvious political logic to this role reversal, which has helped fuel speculation that the events of the past few days were all part of an orchestrated White House rollout: Biden launches a trial balloon on Sunday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan ups the ante on Monday, until finally its safe for Obama to make the leap that his base has been expecting him to make for years.
But as conspiracy theories go, this ones a bit hard to swallow. For one thing, Biden wouldnt have addressed gay marriage on Meet the Press unless David Gregory had brought it up, and little about Duncans statement on Morning Joe the next day suggests it was anything but a spontaneous response to an unexpected question (a question that was almost drowned out by one of the shows hosts). And the insider accounts of the White Houses deliberations that are now emerging all suggest that Bidens comments were unscripted and forced Obama to dramatically speed up his timetable for confronting the marriage question.
This puts Biden in an unlikely role: hero to the left the man who gave Obama no choice but to say what hes been scared to say since taking t! he natio nal stage. As Ana Marie Cox remarked on Twitter Wednesday afternoon, I applaud the leadership of President Biden.
What exactly prompted Biden to speak out the way he did on Sunday remains unclear. If you put aside the notion that the White House instructed him to do so, its possible Biden was simply speaking from the heart, motivated by his own interactions with gay couples and their children. Its also possible that his candor was accidental, a botched effort to mimic Obamas tortured rhetoric about evolving on gay marriage without actually endorsing it.
Whatever his motive, Biden has clearly sped up history. Its long been assumed that Obama considered the issue too risky to address before this years election, although some unnamed advisors are now telling the New York Times that he was going to get to it by the fall. Either way, theres every reason to believe that the only reason Obama took such a bold step on Wednesday is because of what Biden did on Sunday.
At the very least, this makes Biden a major figure in what will go down as one of the Obama administrations signature moments, guaranteeing that his vice presidency will be remembered in history something that cant be said for many of his predecessors. But this also has the potential to generate newfound respect and appreciation for Biden among the younger, more culturally liberal party base, voters who until now have been conditioned to regard Biden as an almost comic figure the tone-deaf, gaffe-prone great-uncle of American politics.
For a 69-year-old vice president who still has hopes of winning the top job for himself someday, this is surely a welcome development.
Everyone saw his defeat coming but no one expected the statement he released afterward
By Steve Kornacki
Sen. Richard Lugar meets with voters outside of a polling location Tuesday, May 8, 2012, in Greenwood, Ind. Lugar is being challenged by two-term state Treasurer Richard Mourdock. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings) (Credit: AP)The romantic interpretation of Dick Lugars epic flame-out is that the long-serving senator was simply too proud and too principled to do what was necessary to survive. Its also possible he was just too clueless.
Whatever the exact explanation, Lugars 36-year run in the upper chamber was ended on Tuesday night by his own partys voters, who handed conservative challenger Richard Mourdock a 20-point landslide in Indianas Republican Senate primary.
The immediate effect is to create a general election Senate battleground that was on no ones map until very recently. With Lugar as the nominee, Republicans would have been a lock to hold the seat in November. With Mourdock, the GOP remains favored to win, but because of his far-right views and the fact that he lacks Lugars cross-partisan personal popularity, theres now at least a chance of a Democratic pickup.
Right on cue when Mourdocks win was announced, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee released a statement calling him this years Ken Buck a reference to one of the Tea Party-aligned Republican Senate candidates in 2010 whose fringe image cost the party a winnable race. This may be wishful thinking, though. Mourdock has a limited profile in Indiana, but he has solid credentials and has won statewide office before (hes current the states treasurer); its just as likely hell prove to be this years Pat Toomey, a similarly credentialed Tea Party candidate who managed to win Pennsylvanias 2010 Senate race.
In the days ahead, there will be countless tributes to Lugar from his colleagues and from commentators, who will salute his seriousness, civility and willingness to work across party lines. Actually, its already begun, with John Kerry releasing a statement as the votes came in calling Lugars defeat a tragedy.
Theres something to this, especially when it comes to foreign policy and arms control, subjects that Lugar devoted himself to in the Senate, but its also easy to get carried away. Lugars independence had its limits, and his voting record has been reliably conservative and Republican over the years. Hes no Jim DeMint, but hes also not an Arlen Specter.
This gets to the real significance of the Indiana result. Lugars loss is a blow to the Senate not so much because hell be absent from it starting next January but because of the lesson that the Republicans who remain will take from it. The rules and traditions of the Senate, after all, have long encouraged senators to conduct themselves as Lugar has, remaining generally loyal to their party but also exercising individual prerogatives as they see fit. But the GOPs conservative base has in the Obama era risen up against this approach and launched a relentless campaign to turn the partys Senate ! and Hous e ranks into a uniform bloc of ideologically pure partisan warriors.
That campaign was wildly successful in 2010, when conservative challengers many of whom would previously have been written off as crackpots and condemned to also-ran status scored a series of high-profile primary season victories over Republican incumbents and Republicans with strong establishment credentials and ties. Like Lugar, most of the Republicans who went down were hardly moderates or liberals; they were standard-issue conservatives whose sins consisted of one or two wrong votes on major bills, or too much friendliness toward Obama and Democrats, or too much of an association with the party establishment. Think of Utah Sen. Bob Bennett, who was trounced at the states GOP convention, or South Carolina Rep. Bob Inglis, who was crushed in a primary.
Its impossible to overstate the traumatic effect that 2010 had on the way Republican members of Congress approached their work. Many of the newly elected senators and House members were true believers, as were a fair number of Republicans already in the House and Senate. But there remained many legislators like Lugar, who had in the past been willing to occasionally break with their party and work with the other side. 2010 was a clear message to these senators and House members that they risked suffering the Bennett/Inglis fate if they didnt change their ways.
Most got the message. A prime example is Orrin Hatch, Bennetts Utah colleague and a man whose Senate service began the same year as Lugars, 1977. For the past two years, Hatch has embraced or re-embraced unrelenting and vitriolic partisan warfare, hurling insults at the White House and Democrats and catering to the conservative bases siege mentality. Hatch is up this year too and was in grave danger of losing his partys support, but his transformation appears to have saved him; he won the Utah GOP convention by 18 p! oints a few weeks ago.
2010 clearly had some impact on Lugar. His voting in the Senate became more conservative and his posture toward Obama whom hed gone out of his way to praise on foreign policy in the 2008 campaign became more hostile. But he would only go so far, and resisted the complete makeover that Hatch put himself through. Whether this was a principled stand or simply a miscalculation is a matter of opinion, but it didnt take long for Lugar to release a statement on Tuesday night bluntly spelling out his objections to the approach to legislating that Mourdock and his wing of the party represent:
He and I share many positions, but his embrace of an unrelenting partisan mindset is irreconcilable with my philosophy of governance and my experience of what brings results for Hoosiers in the Senate. In effect, what he has promised in this campaign is reflexive votes for a rejectionist orthodoxy and rigid opposition to the actions and proposals of the other party. His answer to the inevitable roadblocks he will encounter in Congress is merely to campaign for more Republicans who embrace the same partisan outlook. He has pledged his support to groups whose prime mission is to cleanse the Republican party of those who stray from orthodoxy as they see it.
In Utah, Hatch has gone out of his way to convince Republicans that he embodies this philosophy. He still has to get through a primary next month, but assuming he does, Hatchs survival and Lugars defeat will probably have the same effect on Republicans in the next Congress that the 2010 primaries had on Republicans in this one.
Has the partys desire for unity given a flawed candidate a free pass in the race to take on Scott Walker?
By Steve Kornacki
Supporters of Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker display placards during a visit by Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, not shown, during a campaign stop in Fitchburg, Wis., Saturday, March 31, 2012. The phone bank is used in support of Walker who is facing a recall election in June 2012. (AP Photo/Steven Senne) (Credit: AP)Tonight we will learn which Democrat will oppose Scott Walker in Wisconsins June 5 recall election. Theres some suspense, since theres never been an election like this in the state before, but it will nonetheless be a big upset if Tom Barrett isnt the partys choice.
The Milwaukee mayor, who fell five points short against Walker in the 2010 election, is supported by most of Wisconsins big-name Democrats and has led in every poll conducted since he entered the race. The most recent survey actually shows his advantage over his chief rival, former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk, expanding to 17 points.
For Democrats, the promise of Barretts candidacy is that his pleasant manner and lack of sharp ideological edges will make it difficult for Walker to turn the tables and transform the June 5 vote into a referendum on the Democratic Party and its nominee. That Barrett is generally seen as more moderate than Falk and that hes run without the support of Wisconsins most powerful labor unions could also make it tougher for Walker who is armed with record-shattering financial resources to attack him as an ideologue beholden to special interests.
He is, in other words, a logical vehicle for a party that wants the general election to be all about the incumbent, and nothing else, which pretty much explains why Barrett leads the endorsement game. This insider consensus may well be right, and Barrett if he does secure the nomination today might very go on to knock off Walker next month.
But Wisconsin Democrats could be taking more of a chance here than they appreciate. The basic problem: Barrett has some potentially significant general election liabilities, but because of the unique circumstances of this years race, they havent been explored and tested during the primary campaign.
This is a result of the immense pressure that Democratic leaders and activists placed on both candidates to shy away from aggressive attacks that might create lingering divisions within the party and to focus their fire on Walker and the GOP agenda. Functionally, this pressure has constrained Falk more than Barrett, since shes been running from behind; front-runners like Barrett generally have no problem with all-positive campaigns.
The main issue with Barretts candidacy is that he actually utilized the collective bargaining reforms that Walker and the GOP enacted reforms that were passed under ferocious Democratic objections and that triggered the recall effort to impose concessions on his citys employees last summer. This, obviously, will become a prime pro-Walker talking point if Barrett is the D! emocrati c nominee. In fact, it already is. As the conservative Weekly Standard wrote a few weeks ago:
[B]arretts actions speak louder than words. The fact that he proposedand usedlimits on collective bargaining in order to save the city money proves the point that public sector unions use collective bargaining to prevent changes to their costly benefits.
Barrett has a response ready. State aid to Milwaukee was radically slashed by Walker and his GOP allies, his camp is quick to note, and with no way to make up for it with property tax revenue he was forced to choose between mass layoffs and employing Walkers law. Its a choice that no municipal leader should have to make, the line goes, and Barrett has publicly committed himself to repealing the ban on collective bargaining.
Will this pass the sniff test with voters? Or will it bolster Walkers claim that his actions have been vital to the states fiscal health and arent part of a radical ideological agenda, as Democrats charge? The answer is far from clear, and the primary campaign is a big reason why.
Under ordinary circumstances, Falk and her allies would have loudly raised the issue, in campaign literature, television ads, speeches, debates, and interviews. But this is no ordinary campaign. Among Democratic leaders, there is hyperawareness of the challenges involved in beating Walker and absolutely no appetite for a civil war. Under these circumstances, Falk risked inciting a loud and damaging backlash from neutral Democrats if she launched a direct attack on Barrett.
Apparently, that risk was too much for her. A few weeks ago, she debuted an ad that drew a clear but still unspoken contrast with Barrett over collective bargaining. It was supposed to mark the start of a s! tepped-u p attack on the front-runner, one aimed at closing the gap and pushing Falk over the top in the races closing days. But Barretts backers warned her off by playing the party unity card, and nothing much came of it. Falks home stretch ads have been positive, as have the spots bankrolled by her labor allies. Nor did she go after Barrett in the final debate of the campaign, held last Friday night.
So its not surprising that Barrett has maintained his lead and seems poised to win today. Again, this may not end up mattering in June; Barrett may prove to be a perfectly fine candidate. But the knock on him, besides the collective bargaining issue, is that hes just too nice a guy and too laid back and that he might get pushed around too easily by Walker and his crew. That concern has not been allayed by his race against Falk.
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