Well now this is bizarre.

Former Rep. Rob Simmons (R-CT) dropped of the race for Chris Dodd’s Senate in Connecticut when the state GOP convention endorsed his primary opponent, fake wrestling star Linda McMahon. But now you see me, now you don’t, and Simmons appears to be getting back into the race – in a very half-hearted way. He's not campaigning or fundraising; he’s just airing one state-wide ad after nearly two months of inactivity.

Rob Simmons, a former congressman who suspended his campaign for the United States Senate in Connecticut only a few weeks ago, is jumping back into the race for the Republican Party nomination with a statewide advertising campaign touting his candidacy. …

In an interview, Eric Janney, the campaign chairman for Mr. Simmons, that the former congressman was not reactivating his campaign. Instead, he said, Mr. Simmons simply wanted to remind Republican voters that they could vote for him if they so desired.

“As he has been going around the state the last couple of months, folks ask him about staying involved in the race,” Mr. Janney said. “Many people did not realize that Rob remained on the ballot. So he decided to do a television ad that reminds people that they have a choice and that Rob is on the ballot.”

I’m very confused as to Simmons’ motives. There’s no way he’s going to win the GOP nomination this way – McMahon is campaigning, fundraising, airing multiple ads, and has the state party’s endorsement. You don’t beat that with just one ad that doesn’t even say “You should vote for me,” just “You can vote for me.” Is this Simmons’ way of trying to punish the tea party for purging moderates like him out of the party? All he can hope to do this way is create intraparty division and weaken McMahon before the general. And while that seems highly unlikely, it wouldn’t surprise me – McMahon may well be the single most unqualified candidate for Senate this entire cycle, more so even than South Carolina’s Alvin Greene. Simmons must know it, and can’t be happy about the direction his party is moving. The National Journal gave him a conservative score of 46.8 out of 100 in 2006, behind 9 Democrats and hardly acceptable material for the 2010 Repub Party, New England or not. It's either about that or he's just got a political itch he can't scratch and little perspective on reality.

Speaking of McMahon’s general election campaign, a new Rasmussen poll out yesterday shows her trailing Democratic Attorney General Richard Blumenthal 52-40, and a recent Quinnipiac poll has her down even more, 54-37.

Finally, from the CTDems, here’s a video showcasing what kind of a Senator McMahon would be:

A new Quinnipiac University poll shows some real trouble for Chris Dodd in Connecticut in the wake of the AIG bonus fiasco. Not only is Dodd trailing every potential Republican challenger:

Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd trails former U.S. Rep. Rob Simmons, a possible Republican challenger, 50 - 34 percent in the 2010 Senate race, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today...

Matched against two other possible Republican challengers, Sen. Dodd trails both State Sen. Sam Caligiuri 41 - 37 percent and former ambassador Tom Foley 43 - 35 percent, the independent Quinnipiac University poll finds.

...but Dodd's favorability and approval ratings have just plummeted:

...voters disapprove 58 - 33 percent of the job the Democratic incumbent is doing, his lowest approval rating ever. [...]

The incumbent's approval is down from 49 - 44 percent March 10.

Dodd gets a negative 30 - 58 percent favorability rating, compared to 39 - 12 percent favorable for Simmons with 47 percent who don't know enough to form an opinion.

In Quinnipiac's poll from a month ago, Dodd was down just 1 point. This suggests that the DK/R2000 poll from last week, which showed Dodd slightly ahead of Simmons, may have been overly sanguine or didn't fully register the impact of the attacks on Dodd over the AIG bonuses. You'll recall that Dodd had originally added an amendment to the stimulus package that was extremely tough on compensation restrictions but ended up stripping its retro-activity at the urging of Treasury and was dishonestly implicated in essentially allowing the AIG bonuses to be paid out. Dodd's real error was his reaction to these accusations where he appeared to deny then admit involvement, predictably reported as a flip flop in local media. That was at its peak during the week of March 16th (Rob Simmons laid AIG at Dodd's feet on March 19th); this poll was in the field from March 26-31. The success of the anti-Dodd campaign by the rightwing can be seen most clearly in this result from the Quinnipiac poll:

Asked which public official is most to blame for the AIG bonuses:

• 28 percent blame former President George W. Bush;
  
• 27 percent blame Dodd;
  
• 20 percent blame Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner;
  
• 7 percent blame President Barack Obama.

Dodd has to be seen as our most vulnerable incumbent at this point and as Chris Bowers notes, it's hard to see him recovering from this:

...if the Q-poll is correct, than this is better than the advantage Bob Casey started out with against Rick Santorum in 2005, and akin to the advantage Tom Udall started with in New Mexico in 2007. Both of those campaigns ended up in 17.36% and 22.66% blowouts respectively, as the incumbent and incumbent party never recovered. I'd be hard pressed to find any incumbent Senator that has ever recovered from a 16% deficit.

The one way to ensure that we keep the seat would be for Dodd to step aside and let CT Attorney General Richard Blumenthal jump in. Dodd has insisted that he has no intention of stepping aside but that was before a poll showed him with a double digit deficit. If subsequent polls confirm Quinnipiac's findings, I think Dodd's really got to revisit that decision.

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This week, the rightwing media slime machine has been on overdrive tarring Chris Dodd with the AIG bonus fiasco. Their goals are (at least) twofold: to tie Dodd and Democrats at large to Wall St. and to ultimately defeat Chris Dodd in his bid for re-election next year. So it is hardly surprising to finally see Dodd's Republican opponent, former Congressman Rob Simmons, pounce on not entirely honest coverage of Dodd's role in watering down his own amendment to the stimulus package.

Simmons, who is running against Dodd, is now speaking out.

Daniela Altimari of The Hartford Courant is reporting the following:

"He says one thing one day, one thing another day,'' Simmons said.

"Where's the transparency in all of this? People have lost their savings, they've lost their jobs. There's no leadership...I can't believe the chairman of a committee can take a bill to the floor and speak in favor of it and vote on it without knowing what's in it. The issue of executive compensation is obviously an important issue...you would think someone's reading the language of the bill.''

Simmons said he was particularly troubled by Dodd's assertion that much of the detailed work on the bill was done on the staff level. Simmons served as a Senate staffer for six year, working for former Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Arizona, and former Sen. John H. Chafee, R-Rhode Island and "never once were they so disengaged with important issues that they let the staff do it all.''

"The chairman has responsibility for the bill. You can't slough it off to the staff,'' Simmons said.

Simmons is all over the place message-wise here and I think at some point Republicans are going to learn that campaigning against the stimulus package will not work but Simmons is on firmer political ground -- although on weak factual ground -- by focusing on the claim that Dodd is a flip flopper. That's the story local media is telling. This plus his Countrywide problem spells a really tough fight ahead for Dodd, although the good news is there's plenty of time for this to turn around.

Still, it's not insignificant that in a Quinnipiac poll released last week this race was already tied up.

Simmons 43
Dodd 42

Keep in mind Simmons was a congressman, not even known statewide; add to this that Dodd is under 50% for both his job approval rating (49-44) and favorability (46-45;) plus the fact that this poll was released before the whole AIG thing blew up and you have a textbook example of a vulnerable incumbent. Dodd's gonna need us to have his back.

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It was a very good year for Democrats in both the House and the Senate.  Democrats in the House gained 30 seats using a combination of candidate funds and independent expenditures.  The largest sources for the independent expenditures were the national committees: the NRCC, RSCC, RNC, DCCC, and DSCC.  In at least one race, CA-11, the efforts and money of environmental groups paid off in ousting Richard Pombo.

Although, Federal Election Commission reporting (www. fec.gov) is not quite complete, a highly accurate picture of both national trends and individual races is clearly available.  Among the results so far, 55 Democratic challengers raised at least $1 million but slightly over 100 failed to raise $100,000.  About half of those who raised $1 million won but three candidates with smaller bank rolls managed to upset incumbent Republicans: Carol Shea-Porter ($287,197 with no help from the DCCC or any outside expenditures), David Loesback ($443,273 through October 18) and Nancy Boyda ($702,260 but significant late help from the DCCC of over $360,000).

Many individual Democrats were substantially outspent by incumbent Republicans and still managed to win.  These would include Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Carol Shea-Porter, and Joe Courtney.  I haven't done full work ups outside of New England but this is an important fact.  In 2004, virtually no incumbents lost and virtually no one with a money deficit managed to win.

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Your guilty conscience may force you to vote Democratic, but deep down inside you secretly long for a cold-hearted Republican to lower taxes, brutalize criminals, and rule you like a king. That's why I did this: to protect you from yourselves. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a city to run. - Sideshow Bob, as Mayor of Springfield in the Simpsons

Political systems are built through symbols, and no symbol has been more pernicious than the idea of a moderate Republican.  Since 1964, the Republican Party has gradually turned itself into a neo-Confederate group of extremists attached to a political network of partisan pagan church groups.  This transformation has happened explicitly, with a bevy of tax breaks directed at white churches, or implicitly, such as when Reagan opened his 1980 campaign at the site where three civil rights workers were murdered.  Moderate Republicans - like Lowell Weicker, who did stand up to Nixon - gradually died out, replaced by leashed poodles who substituted affability and pork for moderation.  Chris Shays, Nancy Johnson, and Rob Simmons are such figures.  

Moderate Republicans are a dangerous symbol because they are a mirage that tricks liberal and moderate voters into thinking that the natural governing center is an affable extremist.  Put a 'moderate' face on extremist policies or a party, and all of a sudden you have a country built on, say, corporate trade agreements that are reviled by the public at large.  Or you have the war on drugs, which is nonsensical but considered part of the natural governing tapestry, or 2 million prisoners costing America hundreds of billions of dollars a year, or any number of crazy policies that are considered moderate but are in fact simply elitist in orientation.

David Gergen is the epitome of the adult in charge, the governing force without which adults will not trust you.  Air America had 'moderate Republicans' running the show, and large Democratic donor networks have been stymied by donors who think that moderate Republicans exist and want to hire them to run a liberal movement (hint, it doesn't work).  People like Tom Kean Sr. are a good example of the problem - he's loved and revered by liberals in New Jersey, and was put on the 9/11 Commission as a respected character, and then he goes out an engages in a dishonest smear campaign to peg Bill Clinton as responsible for 9/11 through an ABC propaganda piece, all to help his son get elected in New Jersey.

Killing the idea of the moderate Republican is critical if we are to convince the country that progressives can govern.  As we've seen, right now journalists, opinion-leaders, donors, and politicians do not think that the hawkish pro-corporate bipartisan consensus will be disturbed if Democrats take over.  Already we have Thomas Riehle trying to say that it is the netroots that want a targeted strategy versus James Carville-types who want to widen the playing field.  We have stories in the New York Times about New Democrats ascendant and the progressives being beaten back in a more moderate party, and Harold Ford splashed on the cover of Newsweek as the face of a new and more conserative party.  The LieberDems are licking their chops at a perceived ability for Joe to rule the Senate if he is reelected (prepare for a bad Q-Poll tomorrow, kids, polling director Doug Schwartz ain't a fan of Lamont).  Certain House Democrats are panting at the ability to reach out to the Republicans as one of their first acts in office, to show a new spirit of openness to their GOP Beltway boyfriends who have been abusing them.

Fortunately, even as power players preen about how close they are to moderate Republicans in their style and attitude, the electoral fortunes of the 'adults' is waning.  The most potent symbol of the moderate Republican up for office is Tom Kean Jr.  He's the poster boy for faux moderate, extremely affable and likeable, and culturally liberal in that he likes Starbucks coffee and doesn't belong to a mega-church.  He's facing Bob Menendez, a candidate who has always had overblown rumors of corruption surrounding him, which is actually standard for New Jersey politicians.  If any matchup were to deliver a Senate seat to a moderate Republican, it would be this one.

And yet, New Jersey is a Democratic state, with leaners likely to go for the Democrat, especially in a year like this one, and a traditional pollster undersampling of Democrats.  Remember in 2004, when Bush was totally almost going to capture New Jersey, until he got blown out?  I would peg Tennessee as the opposite, with all the optimism for Harold Ford somewhat misplaced (I'd love to be proved wrong, of course).  And with Menendez surging in the polls after having run a standard campaign, it's looking like it's becoming increasingly impossible for any Republicans to get the critical cross-over votes they need to stay competitive in blue states.  

That Kean is losing is a big deal, because it shows voters have moved away from at least one of their illusions.  Tom Kean Sr is a beloved figure in New Jersey politics, a statesman who parlayed a genteel affability into a Governorship in the 1980s and a storied place on the 9/11 Commission.  He was considered for a time Presidential timber, and he's now the model of bipartisan honor and integrity, one of the last good Republicans.  He's a dream, an "independent, honorable public servant, the kind that citizens admire and long for", as New Jersey's master of the obvious pundit David Rebovich puts it.

Of course, there's another thread to Kean Sr.  He won his governor's race in 1981 by an extremely narrow margin using hired racists thugs to suppress minority turnout, his fiscal policies destroyed New Jersey's budget picture, his family shakes down corporate contributors, and he dishonestly pushed the film 'The Path to 9/11', a historical travesty.  His legendary sheen has both threads running in parallel, the race-tinged corruption playing footsie with the bipartisan ethical righteousness.  In 1971, Kean made his first important political move, becoming speaker of the Assembly even though he was a Republican in the minority party.  The myth is that Kean was so respected on both sides of the aisle that he was a consensus pick; the reality is that he cut a deal with a white corrupt Hudson County politician, David Friedland, who couldn't ascend to the speakership because of a loan-sharking scandal and then threw his support to Kean to keep the a black Democrat from becoming the Speaker.

And it was off to the races for Kean Sr, moving quickly to the Governor's mansion and then to a storied place as an elder wiseman for the nation.  His son, who is mostly a lightweight in the State Senate and similarly affable, simply can't get above the mid-forties in the polls.  His avoidance of Iraq and his refusal to disavow Bush has hurt him badly among cross-over voters.  The nasty core of faux moderate Republicans - affability over substance - is dying out.  Iraq is too bloody and obviously wrong for Democrats to be fooled anymore.

So the 'moderate Republican' adult aesthetic - greatly weakened - may still be in charge of DC on November 8th in the form of Beltway journalists, politicians, and lobbyists, but the people are gradually voting it out of power.

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