Showdown Alarms
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“REPUBLICAN” SCOZZAFAVA
The NY-23 special election on Tuesday has the attention of
the White House at the highest levels, with White House sources
saying that the endorsement of Democrat Bill
Owens by “Republican” Dede
Scozzafava came only after a call from White House
chief of staff Rahm Emanuel asking
that she throw her support behind the Democrat.
On Monday Vice President Joe Biden will
visit the district, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign
Committee on Sunday was coordinating with its colleagues in the
SEIU as well as the Working Families Party (ACORN) and may spend
as much as $150,000 over the next 48 hours to defeat
conservative Doug Hoffman. Had
polling for Owens appeared stronger on Saturday, the White House
was prepared to send former president Bill
Clinton into the district as well.
Meanwhile, on the GOP side, as late as Thursday evening,
the National Republican Congressional Committee was working on
endorsements to shore up Scozzafava, who suspended her
campaign on Saturday morning after another round of polling in
the upstate New York district confirmed she was running well back
of two other candidates in the run-off election.
But hours after Rudy Giuliani
spurned the pleas of NRCC chairman Rep. Pete
Sessions to endorse Scozzafava, according to NRCC
sources, Sessions told staff to suspend anti-Hoffman media
efforts online and in the district. “We thought Rudy endorsing
would have been the game changer,” says an NRCC source. “But even
he wasn’t going to eat the dog food we were trying to
sell. We had a lousy candidate and the other
guys had a better campaign strategy and more
energy.”
Regardless of what happens on Tuesday in the special
election between Conservative Party candidate Hoffman and
the Democrat Owens, House Republican leaders and
staff say there will be repercussions inside the NRCC, which
failed to do the most basic vetting of a candidate before backing
Scozzafava, who, according to media reports late Saturday, had
spent the day calling supporters to encourage them to vote for
the Democrat in the race.
“We didn’t,” says the NRCC source about checking Scozzafava’s
voting record and her previous campaign history for the New York
state legislature. “The local party endorsed her; they didn’t
endorse Hoffman or anyone else. She was their pick. That’s what
we went on.” But the aide added that even
then, that should not have precluded the NRCC from withholding
endorsements and funds to the candidate who clearly was not a
Republican in the traditional sense of the term.
“We assumed she was a lot like other northeastern Republicans,
similar to the [Susan]
Collinses of the world,” says the aide.
“We had no idea she was that far to the left until we started
reading about her on the blogs. By then, given the way politics
and this place [Capitol Hill] works, it was too late to turn
back.”
RADICAL NEUTRALITY
White House senior adviser Susan Crawford
resigned last week to little fanfare, but some White House
insiders say her leaving may reveal growing tensions inside the
Obama Administration about just how radical the administration
has become in developing policies.
Crawford, who was one of the leading voices during the Obama
transition period, and then stayed on as Obama’s key adviser on
technology and communications policy, was credited with putting
in place the general policy overlays in those subject areas that
guided many of the Administration’s hiring and appointments to
the Federal Communications Commission and the Commerce
Department. She was a strong proponent of Net
Neutrality regulations, which would allow the government to
regulate the Internet, and in her role sitting on the president’s
councils on economic policy, she supported strong government
interventions and controls of private business.
But White House sources say that she ran afoul of senior White
House economics adviser Larry Summers, who
claimed he and other senior Obama officials were unaware of how
radical the draft Net Neutrality regulations were when they were
initially internally circulated to Obama administration officials
several weeks ago. “All of sudden Larry is
getting calls from CEOs, Wall Street folks he talks to,
Republicans and Democrats, asking him what the Administration is
doing with the policies, and he isn’t sure what they’re talking
about,” says one White House aide. “He felt blind-sided, and
Susan was one of those people who heard about
it.” In the end, the proposed regulations were
slightly moderated from the original language FCC chairman
Julius Genachowski, a Crawford ally,
circulated.
Crawford resigned, citing the need to return to her tenured
position at the University of Michigan law school, but White
House sources say that when Crawford signed on to the
administration, she told them the university had given her a
two-year waiver before requiring a return. “There may have been
miscommunication there, but we thought it was two years,” says
the White House source. Similar waivers — usually two or three
years — were given to a number of academics who joined the Bush
Administration in various positions back in 2001.
Crawford’s exit comes at a time when some Obama Administration
aides, after seeing the fallout from the resignation of
Van Jones and the spotlight placed on
leftists inside the administration, like Anita
Dunn, wonder if it is too late to pull back many
of the more radical aides now placed in a number of different
cabinet level departments, including the Department of Justice,
and the Energy and Education departments, and federal agencies.
“They haven’t done us any good on any level,” says the White
House aide. “And now they are just a bunch of targets on our back
that we can’t shake.”
