Posts Tagged ‘ Jim Cooper ’

The Tennessee Primary Waltz

Friday, August 6th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

It’s been a very busy week on the primary front, with a block of midwestern states — Kansas, Michigan and Missouri — on Tuesday and Tennessee on Thursday.  In all four states, a heavy menu of Republican primaries dominated the landscape, with a few notable Democratic tilts.

I did a reasonably thorough summary of the Midwestern primary results for P-Fix on Wednesday, so I’ll focus today on Tennessee.

With Mike McWherter — son of popular former Gov. Ned McWherter — being unopposed for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, the GOP contest drew the most attention.  As expected, Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam, scion of the Pilot Oil fortune, used a big financial advantage and a low-key “competence” message to soundly defeat two opponents, Chattanooga Rep. Zach Wamp and Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, who both tried to outflank Haslam on the Right.  Haslam drew 48 percent of the vote (Tennessee does not have runoffs), with Christian Right favorite Wamp finishing second with 29 percent and Ramsey third with 20 percent.  Haslam carried most of the state outside Wamp’s district and a few northeast counties in Ramsey’s base.

The real fireworks in Tennessee involved four highly competitive Republican U.S. House primaries.  In Wamp’s 3rd district, which is heavily Republican, self-funded radio talk show host Chuck Fleischmann (backed by Mike Huckabee, whose 2008 campaign manager, Chip Saltsman, ran Fleischmann’s campaign) edged Robin Smith — a former state party chair — who was backed by a host of DC-based conservative groups, most notably the Club for Growth (which was embarrassed when a “for more information” phone number in an anti-Fleischmann mailer turned out to connect callers to a phone sex service).

Two other competitive GOP races were in potential pick-up districts where Blue Dog Democrats are retiring.  In Bart Gordon’s 6th district, State Senator Diane Black won a very nasty three-way contest against fellow state senator Jim Tracy and conservative activist Lou Ann Zelenik.  Zelenik heated up this race with repeated ethics allegations against front-runner Black, but made national news by opposing construction of an Islamic mosque in the college town of Murfreesboro (she claimed it would be a base for the imposition of Sharia law in Tennessee, believe it or not).  In the end, it came down to geography, with Black heavily winning her state senate district while Tracy and Zelenik split the vote in their base county of Rutherford.   There was also a competitive Democratic primary in the 6th, won by decorated war veteran Brett Carter, who edged the underfunded but evocatively named Henry Clay Barry.

In John Tanner’s West Tennessee 8th district, where veteran state legislator Roy Herron easily won the Democratic nomination, Republican put on what is reported to be the most expensive House primary in the country.  Nationally-recruited farmer and gospel singer Stephen Fincher battled two massively self-funded opponents, broadcast entrepreneur George Flinn and physician Ron Kirkland in a race where total expenditures ranged up towards $8 million, with $3 million spent by Flinn alone.  Despite concerted attacks on Fincher for receiving millions in farm subsidies, he won easily with half the vote, dominated his opponents in the areas of the district most remote from Memphis.

And in the Nashville-based 5th district, eleven Republicans competed for the right to wage an uphill battle against Rep. Jim Cooper in a district comfortably won by Barack Obama in 2008.  The best-financed candidate, David Hall, defeated Huckabee-backed home-school activist Jeff Hartline and Sarah Palin’s latest “Mama Grizzly,” entertainment attorney CeCe Heil.

Finally, it wasn’t really a competitive primary, but it got attention: 9th district Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen drew a second consecutive opponent who claimed the district required African-American representation.  But former Memphis Mayor Will Herenton was widely regarded as an embarrassment, and after Cohen was endorsed by President Obama, former 9th district congressman Harold Ford, Sr., and the Congressional Black Caucus, Cohen breezed to a 79-21 win.

Next Tuesday primaries are being held in Colorado, Connecticut and Minnesota, along with a runoff in Georgia.  Colorado features very competitive Senate primaries in both parties (Bennet v. Romanoff among Democrats, Buck v. Norton among Republicans), and a strange GOP gubernatorial primary overshadowed by the meltdown of front-runner Scott McInnis and the third-party candidacy of Tom Tancredo.  Connecticut has a close Democratic gubernatorial contest between 2006 Senate nominee Ned Lamont and Stamford mayor Dan Malloy, along with a multi-candidate challenge to Republican Senate front-runner and former wrestling executive Linda McMahon.  Minnesota has a very competitive Democratic gubernatorial primary, in which the best-known candidate is former U.S. Senator Mark Dayton.  And Georgia’s Republican gubernatorial runoff has become a vicious cage match, with first-place primary finisher, Karen Handel, backed by Sarah Palin, battling former congressman Nathan Deal, backed by Newt Gingrich and a big majority of Georgia Republican congressmen and state legislators.

I’ll have previews of all these events next Tuesday.

Photo Credit: J. Stephen Conn’s Photostream

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Blue Dogs Only Chasing Their Tail

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
Will Marshall


Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Will Marshall

It often seems that Blue Dog Democrats, along with a handful of Senate moderates, are the only people in Washington who are serious about fiscal responsibility. Chasing the will-o-the-wisp of a balanced budget amendment, however, seems more likely to distract from than advance that essential cause.

The idea is seductively simple: The only way to restrain deficit spending in Washington is to make it unconstitutional. That’s how the states keep their books balanced, and there’s no reason the federal government shouldn’t do the same.

In fact, there are several. Consider that today’s federal deficit is about 12 percent of GDP. It’s going to go down as the economy recovers, but the spending and tax adjustments that would have to be made to get it all the way down to zero would be unduly draconian and disruptive. Also, unlike state mandates, a federal balanced budget amendment for accounting reasons would not distinguish between capital investment and consumption. But government borrowing to invest in public infrastructure or higher education, for example, makes economic sense, because it will generate more economic activity and amortize itself over time.

What’s more, the federal government acts as the nation’s fiscal safety valve, or strategic reserve. During severe economic downturns, the only way many states can provide services while preserving their fiscal virtue is to get counter-cyclical assistance (or revenue sharing) from Washington. A constitutional ban on deficits could prevent Washington from responding to emergencies of all kinds.

In truth, we don’t need a balanced federal budget — we need a disciplined federal budget. Congress would be better off adopting Sen. Mike Bennett’s (D-CO) sensible suggestion that federal deficits be held first to four percent, then to three percent of GDP each year. At that level, they’d be gradually whittled down by economic growth, and the government could borrow without swelling the national debt.

A balanced budget amendment, moreover, is a blunter instrument than we need to deal with overspending and undertaxing in Washington. It doesn’t hone in on the real problem, which is the automatic and unsustainable growth in entitlement spending. A better idea, from the Brookings-Heritage Fiscal Seminar, is to bring Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security on budget, which would require Congress to periodically reconcile income and spending to keep the programs solvent.

Finally, a balanced budget amendment is just too damn difficult to enact. Congress has to approve Constitutional amendments by a two-thirds vote, well nigh inconceivable given how hard it is to muster the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster. Then three-fourths of the states would have to approve an amendment.

Demanding a balanced budget amendment thus is more of a symbolic gesture than a real solution to America’s fiscal crisis. Recall that it was a key plank in the GOP’s 1994 Contract with America, but Republicans quickly lost interest once they won control of Congress. Nonetheless, Newt Gingrich has endorsed the amendment in a bid to recapture the old magic for this year’s midterm elections.

Unlike the Republicans, of course, the Blue Dogs have real street cred when it comes to fiscal rectitude. They fought successfully to resurrect “pay go” rules that require Congress to offset new spending with tax hikes or budget cuts. And key Blue Dog leaders like Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) have led the charge for a bipartisan commission to get entitlement spending under control.

It’s vital, though, that progressive deficit hawks not let the holy grail of a constitutional amendment deflect them from the gritty, day-to-day battles in Congress to get America’s exploding deficits and debts under control.

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Posted in Daily Fix, Fiscal Responsibility | 1 Comment »