Quote of the Day: N.H. GOP Has Jumped the Shark
Oh my. 200 NH Republicans show up to cheer skyping Jas OKeefe for evading grand jury summons. NH GOP has jumped the shark. #NHPolitics
— Raymond Buckley (@ChairmanBuckley) May 6, 2012
Jack Kimball Returns to Lead Tea Party Remnants
Former state Republican party chair and Tea Party leader Jack Kimball announces his return to the political scene with typical bombast:
“We are watching the systematic dismantling of our great Republic right before our eyes. Barak [sic] Obama is continuing with his mission to ‘fundamentally change’ America into a European Socialist style country. … He is aware that in order to succeed with his plan he must bring the USA to its knees.”
Kimball, who was the featured speaker at yesterday’s “Jack is Back!” Save-Our-Republic Tea Party rally, has taken back the reins of the Granite State Patriots Liberty PAC and vows to lead the Tea Party in a fight to “send Obama packing!”
“We are the Patriots of our time and we will not be the generation to lose what those who came before us have fought to preserve. No sir, we intend to FIGHT! I am asking you to join me in that fight. … Are you with me?”
Amid the sound and fury, however, polls document New Hampshire Republicans have fled the Tea Party in droves, and outgoing national Republican committeewoman Phyllis Woods reminds us Kimball’s last leadership role didn’t turn out so well.
“He was over his head, inexperienced and not qualified for the leadership role in an organization in which he never had participated. It broke my heart. … [I]t was just too steep a learning curve for him too soon.”
Laying Odds on Sen. Kelly Ayotte
New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte today opened at 25:1 odds to be the Republican vice presidential nominee on betting markets operated by Paddy Power, Ireland’s largest bookmaker.
But if you think Ayotte is going to be the V.P. pick, you should head over to Intrade for better odds. The bettors there are less upbeat about Ayotte’s chances, giving her just a 0.5% chance of being the GOP vice presidential nominee. Ayotte shares are trading at $0.05 today, down from $2.50 in mid-February.
Hall of Shame: 85 Vote to Legalize Discrimination
Last week, 85 New Hampshire lawmakers voted to exempt business owners and their employees from the state’s civil rights laws if they deny wedding services based on their “conscience or religious faith.”
House Bill 1264 was clearly aimed at same-sex marriages, but the bill would have hypothetically protected the right to discriminate against any union, including interracial and interdenominational marriages.
For that reason, Rep. Barry Palmer said, the bill would have violated state and federal laws including the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other nondiscrimination statutes.
“This is not a religious exemption, this is a red herring,” he complained. “This sounds more like 1950s Mississippi than 21st century New Hampshire.”
The bill was defeated, but 85 GOP House members voted to turn back the clock and legalize discrimination. The full list follows below the fold.
h/t: Shir Haberman
GOP Obsession With Social Issues: “It’s All About Sex”
Writing in the Concord Monitor, Katy Burns dissects the GOP obsession with so-called social issues. “It’s all about sex,” she writes. “First, alarms were raised about gay marriage…. Then the focus moved to Planned Parenthood…. Now the focus has moved — incredibly — to contraception….”
As legislators across the nation — many of them old and male — suddenly became obsessed with slaying that wicked contraception dragon, they pontificated that “it’s about religious freedom.” Bosh. It’s not about religious freedom, not for most of ‘em. It’s about sex. It’s about the fear that entirely too many people — coincidentally not old and often not male — are having entirely too much sex. And enjoying it!
Oral contraceptives, Burns reminds us, have had a profound impact on society. They allowed women to control their reproductive freedom for the first time in history. “And with that, their futures.”
Unshackled from their plumbing limitations, women flocked into the workplace, into higher education, into once normally “male” professions. And they started having sex without dread or shame…. The Pill and its variations have become as much a part of American women’s lives as tooth brushing.
“Cynical and increasingly desperate politicians,” who are frightened by these profound changes, are now fighting to reverse them. But the attempt to turn back history and keep women barefoot and pregnant has awakened even the apolitical. Witness “the small army of angry women who showed up at the State House to protest.”
Quote of the Day: Smells Like Desperation
Running to social issues doesn’t work in New Hampshire (the nation’s second least religious state). Plus, it smells like desperation. (But there are a lot of months to go until November.) Rush Limbaugh may help in certain places and among certain demographics, but New Hampshire independents are not one them.
— James Pindell, WMUR.com Political Director
Rep. Lee Quandt: “Why Did You Stab Us in the Back?”
GOP state Rep. Lee Quandt says thousands of New Hampshire Republicans have been driven from the party by the “arrogance and self serving decisions” from Speaker Bill O’Brien and the House leadership team.
There are thousands of union Republicans that have been driven away from the party. The current make up of the Republican Party has no use for senior citizens, veterans, gays, or the working middle class. They have proven this by, not only the right to work issue; but, the myriad of other anti working class bills that they have put in.
The bad House leadership has brought down the Republican Party in NH. The arrogance and self serving decisions that are coming out of our leadership team is being hard to believe according to many active republicans that are watching what is going on. They don’t listen and have put themselves in an un-winnable situation.
While the thousands of public middle class republicans can ask, “why did you stab us in the back, what did we do to deserve this”?
Quote of the Day: Barefoot and Pregnant
I think they just want us barefoot and pregnant, and I’m disgusted. The atmosphere of the whole Republican Party has been going backwards, and the moderates are lost. The religious argument is bogus, because I think they’re just using that as a political tool.
— GOP state Rep. Priscilla Lockwood, on Republican efforts to allow employers and insurers to place limits on insurance coverage for birth control.
Our Problematic Legislature: Number Two, With a Bullet!
When asked to name the most important problem facing the state, 39 percent of New Hampshire adults expressed concerns about jobs and the economy. And the second most identified problem? The Republican state legislature!
That’s right, in the latest WMUR Granite State Poll, ten percent of New Hampshire adults identified GOP lawmakers as their biggest concern, more than those who named the state budget, health care, taxes or education quality. And the number is growing. In October, six percent of the respondents identified Republicans in the legislature as the state’s most important problem.
In other news, the survey confirmed that Gov. John Lynch is very popular (with a 68 percent approval rating and a +52 percent net favorability rating) and that most of us don’t know enough about the potential gubernatorial candidates to have an opinion about any of them.
The WMUR Granite State Poll was conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, which interviewed 527 New Hampshire adults between January 25 and February 2, 2012. The margin of error is +/- 4.3 percent.
Dante Scala: The Yankee Republican Has Disappeared
UNH political scientist Dante Scala analyzes Granite State voting data in presidential elections from 1960 to 2008 and concludes that the “Yankee Republican, that rural stalwart of New England conservative values, has slowly but surely disappeared from the scene.”
The must-read study from the Carsey Institute documents the state’s “slow motion realignment” from reliably Republican to “Democratic-tilting bellwether.” Scala charts the decline of GOP voters in the “Yankee” rural counties in the north and along the Vermont border; and the corresponding growth in the Massachusetts border counties, Hillsborough and Rockingham, which contributed 55% of the votes cast in the 2008 GOP presidential primary.
Scala counters those who argue that New Hampshire is undeserving of its “first in the nation” role in the presidential campaign because it is unrepresentative of the national electorate.
The fate of Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and the other competitors will largely be decided by voters who live within the environs of the Greater Boston metropolitan area. As such, they might be a harbinger of how Republicans in other suburbs around the country may choose when it is their turn to cast votes.
WMUR Poll: GOP in Legislature “Important Problem”
6% of New Hampshire adults say the most important problem facing the state of New Hampshire today is “Republicans in the state legislature.” This was the third most frequently cited problem, following jobs and the economy (48%) and the state budget (7%). Republicans in the legislature are seen as a bigger problem than taxes (5%), health care (4%) and education funding (4%).
The WMUR Granite State Poll, conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, surveyed 558 New Hampshire adults by phone from October 7 to 16, 2011 and has a margin of error of +/-4.1%.
