Political Diary

Why the Parties Are Wargaming Over Staten Island

Political analysts in both Washington and New York's Staten Island now expect GOP Rep. Vito Fossella not to seek re-election. His media adviser says only he plans to continue working on behalf of his constituents "in the weeks" and months to come. But Mr. Fossella's political future probably became untenable after he revealed he fathered a secret daughter three years ago with Laura Fay, a retired Air Force officer.

It was Ms. Fay who picked him up from jail in Alexandria, Virginia when Mr. Fossella was arrested for drunk driving on May 1, after which the story came out.

Mr. Fossella has been urged to resign by the largest paper in his district, the Staten Island Advance, as well as by the New York Post, the tabloid that is a staple of the island's conservative and largely Catholic voters. The district, which includes a portion of Brooklyn, gave President Bush 58% of its vote in 2004.

But don't look for Mr. Fossella to resign immediately. If he left office before July 1, New York's Democratic Gov. David Paterson would call a special election, which would probably force cash-strapped Republicans to spend $2 million in a potentially losing battle. Even should the GOP win the election, it would likely have to spend a like amount to hold the seat again in November.

Candidates are already lining up for the expected vacancy. On the Republican side. State Senator Andrew Lanza would be a strong candidate but his departure from the State Senate could imperil the slim GOP majority in that body. A more likely candidate is Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donavan, who has close ties to both New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. He won re-election last year with 68% of the vote.

Democrats have several potential candidates, including State Sen. Diane Savino and Assemblyman Michael Cusick, a former aide to Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer. But Ms. Savino would also be under pressure from party officials not to run because her departure from the Senate could allow Republicans to capture her seat.

-- John Fund

The Manchin Candidate

Inside the confines of a voting booth today, popular West Virginia Democratic Gov. Joe Manchin will cast a ballot for either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Manchin finds himself in the midst of his party's most contentious nomination fight in 40 years, and the first nomination fight to reach his state since JFK campaigned there in 1960. But Mr. Manchin has steadfastly refused publicly to endorse either candidate. He's offered to appear at campaign rallies for both. His wife delivered opening remarks at one event that featured a keynote address from Mrs. Clinton. But Mr. Manchin has mainly used the election coverage to boost his state in national media outlets.

More than a few analysts wonder where Mr. Manchin comes down. West Virginia has a hefty proportion of unionized blue-collar workers. It has more senior citizens per capita than nearly any other state. These demographics give Hillary Clinton a near a lock on winning the state's primary. Yet Mr. Manchin is also uniquely suited to be a strong vice presidential candidate under Barack Obama. Mr. Obama would need to move quickly to the political center. He also needs to find a way to win voters he hasn't won in the primaries -- rural, poor and middle class whites. Mr. Manchin's political base of support are West Virginians who own guns, head to church on Sundays and carry union cards in their wallets.

Yet he's also shown himself to be an effective, practical, moderate reformer. Over his four years in office, he's cut taxes, reformed the state's worker's compensation program and pushed fiscally responsible policies that have left the state in surplus. He brags about the Japanese companies he's attracted to the state. And he has publicly criticized his own party for being in love with "renewable" energy at the expense of coal -- something that could make him appealing to voters given the backlash against ethanol and high food and gas prices.

Going by voter registration alone, West Virginia is a heavily Democratic State. Democrats outnumber Republicans by two-to-one and control the governor's mansion, the state legislature and both U.S. Senate seats. But George W. Bush carried the Mountain State twice in presidential years and Democrats certainly noticed that had Al Gore won there in 2000, he would have won the presidency regardless of the outcome of Florida. Maybe that explains Mr. Manchin's caginess. Helping to carry West Virginia might earn him a close look as veep by either nominee -- after all, the last Democrat to win the White House without carrying West Virginia was Woodrow Wilson in 1916.

-- Brendan Miniter

Quote of the Day I

"In last Tuesday's North Carolina primary, [Hillary] Clinton got only 7% of the black vote -- a lower percentage than Nixon or Reagan had won in general elections.... No constituency has swung as much over the past few months. The Clintons are used to loving and supporting minorities -- as long as the minorities know their place and see the Clintons as the instrument of their salvation. Obama broke that dependency and that relationship. And that was why the Clintons had to do all they could to destroy and belittle and besmirch him. But in that venture the Clintons are destroying themselves and their legacy and their capacity to bridge the very gaps they now must widen to stay in the race. It is a Clinton tragedy -- and one that most Americans seem slowly, cautiously but palpably determined not to make their own" -- columnist Andrew Sullivan writing in the London Times.

Quote of the Day II

"The Clintons find themselves victimized and under siege. The presidency is being stolen from them. The press is out to get them. They deride elites and champion the masses. They live in a constant state of emergency. But they will endure any humiliation, ride out any crisis, fight on even when fighting seems hopeless. That might sound like a fair summary of how Bill and Hillary Clinton have viewed the past five months. But it also happens to describe what, until now, was the greatest ordeal of the Clintons' almost comically turbulent political careers: impeachment. That baroque saga hardened the Clintonian worldview about politics and helps to explain their approach to this brutal campaign season. The Clintons have been here before, you see. They're being impeached all over again" -- columnist Michael Crowley, writing in the New Republic.

Re-Airing Ronald Reagan

It's been two decades since Ronald Reagan left office and so many young people under 30 have little or no understanding of him or what he represented.

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation hopes to remedy that by producing a series of two-minute radio retrospectives featuring excerpts from the over 1,000 commentaries Reagan did in the 1970s between his years as governor and president. Those radio commentaries, published in annotated form recently, have played no small role in forcing even liberals to have a second look and give the Gipper his due as a thinker and writer. Additional broadcasts will use portions of Reagan's Saturday radio addresses as president.

Harry O'Connor, the original producer of what was called "Reagan Radio," is working with the Foundation to produce the commentaries. Peter Hannaford, who wrote some of the commentaries that Reagan himself did not pen, will provide an introduction to each segment. Each one, while non-partisan in nature, will address an issue such as taxes, terrorism, abortion and the economy and in Mr. O'Connor's words "establish the connection between the classic radio addresses and contemporary issues."

McCain's Climate 'Market'

The latest stop on John McCain's policy tour came at an Oregon wind-turbine manufacturer, where the topic was – what else? – the Senator's plan to address climate change. This is one of those issues where Mr. McCain indulges his "maverick" tendencies, which usually means taking the liberal line. That was the case yesterday, no matter how frequently he claimed his approach was "market based."

In fact, if "the market" is your favored mechanism, Mr. McCain's endorsement of a "cap and trade" system is the worst choice for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. The Bush Administration has pursued one option, which combines voluntary measures with subsidies for "clean" alternatives. Since 2001 under this approach, U.S. net carbon emissions have fallen by 3% – that is, by more than all but four countries in cap-and-trade-bound Europe.

At the other end of the market spectrum is a straight carbon tax, which would at least distribute costs more efficiently. It would also force politicians to be honest about – and take responsibility for – the true price of their global-warming posturing.

Then there's cap and trade, which Mr. McCain has backed for years and would, as he put it with some understatement, "change the dynamic of our energy economy." He noted that Americans have a genius for problem-solving but continued, "The federal government can't just summon these talents by command – only the free market can draw them out." To translate: His plan is "market based" insofar as it requires an expensive, invasive government bureaucracy to interfere with the market.

Mr. McCain's proposed targets and policy instruments more or less mesh with the global-warming bill sponsored by Senators Joe Lieberman and John Warner that may come up for debate next month. The McCain plan would aim to return emissions to 2005 levels by 2012, and to 1990 levels by 2020. Barack Obama supports similar reductions.

In theory, this would be achieved by imposing emission ceilings on electric power, transportation fuels, commercial business and industries. If a company produced less carbon than it was allowed under the cap, it could sell -- i.e., trade – its extra allowances to other businesses. Under the McCain plan, permits would be given away to industries, at least initially. Mr. Obama prefers to "auction" the permits, meaning businesses would be taxed at the outset. So Mr. McCain's plan would help mitigate the transition costs of putting "the age of fossil fuels behind us."

The problem is that once government creates an artificial scarcity of carbon, how the credits are allocated creates a huge new venue for political rent-seeking and more subsidies for favored industries. Some businesses will benefit more than others, in proportion to their lobbying influence and how well they're able to game the Beltway. Congress itself will probably take the largest revenue grab, offering itself a few more bites out of the economy and soaking politically unpopular businesses.

Then there's the question of whether any of this will even reduce greenhouse gasses. The McCain plan would allow businesses unlimited use of domestic and international offsets to comply with the carbon cap. So a chemical manufacturer, say, would pay an industry not covered by the program – most notably, agriculture – to reduce its emissions. Or it could pay a coal plant in China for plucking low-hanging efficiency fruit, like installing smokestack scrubbers. In other words, U.S. consumers would be paying higher prices for energy in return for making Chinese industries more efficient and competitive. Europe is in the midst of that experience now under the Kyoto Protocol, and most of its reductions so far have been illusory.

The compliance bookkeeping for this new "market" is vastly complex, and a McCain Administration would create a public-private "Climate Change Credit Corporation" to oversee it all. This new regulatory body is likely to morph over time into an "Energy Fed," similar to the one Warner-Lieberman would create. Such an agency would set the price of energy indirectly by fiddling with carbon levies, which will undoubtedly lead to economy-wide distortions.

Given the distance between Mr. McCain's rhetoric and the policy reality, we wonder if he even knows what he's proposing. This is of a piece with his approach to many domestic issues, where the policy contradictions and cul-de-sacs overwhelm his professed political convictions. The McCain campaign believes his global-warming plan will appeal to independents and young people, as well as separate the Senator from President Bush.

But he will never be green enough for the climate-change fundamentalists. The Obama campaign and Democrats were already dinging Mr. McCain yesterday for half-measures. His concessions won't help him much in November, but they will make his governing decisions in 2009 that much more difficult if by some chance he does win.

Clinton Wins West Virginia Primary, Networks Project

May 13 (Bloomberg) -- Hillary Clinton won the West Virginia primary by a wide margin, television networks projected, a victory that still leaves her far short of catching Barack Obama in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Clinton expected to get an overwhelming majority of the 28 pledged delegates at stake in the contest to keep her campaign going through the five remaining primaries.

While Clinton yesterday called West Virginia ``a crucial turning point,'' Stephen Wayne, a professor of government at Georgetown University in Washington, said the outcome won't change the direction of the contest between the two senators.

``Superdelegates are continuing to announce for him,'' Wayne said before the vote. ``Calls for her withdrawal are getting more persistent. The die has been cast.''

Obama has picked up declarations of support from 27 of the party's superdelegates since last week's primaries in North Carolina and Indiana and 40 since the beginning of the month. That gives him a total of 285 endorsements from party officials and officeholders whose votes likely will decide the nomination.

By comparison, 10 superdelegates have endorsed Clinton since the start of May, bringing the New York senator's total to 274.5, according to lists and public announcements from both campaigns. About 200 superdelegates have yet to declare.

Next Contests

Obama also has a lead of 164 pledged delegates over Clinton, according to an unofficial Associated Press count. In the five remaining contests, Kentucky, Oregon, Puerto Rico, Montana and South Dakota, there are a total of 189 pledged delegates available, awarded proportionally based on the popular vote in congressional districts and statewide.

The Illinois senator is 146 delegates away from the 2,025 needed to clinch the nomination, according to his campaign.

``The math is impossible for her now,'' said Clyde Wilcox, also a government professor at Georgetown.

Obama limited his appearances in West Virginia as he turned attention to swing states that will be important in the November election against Arizona Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee. While Clinton made a last dash into West Virginia today, Obama headed to Missouri, a state that has been a bellwether in presidential contests and where he won the Feb. 5 primary.