Anderson@Large

Emanuel Going to Chicago

Rahm Emanuel reportedly has given notice that he’s going to Chicago to run for mayor. Emanuel is expected to announce his move on Friday.

The Atlantic’s Mark Ambinder reports:

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel will have a campaign team ready when, as expected, he announces Friday he's leaving Washington to run for mayor of Chicago. Unless Emanuel changes his mind at the last minute, which associates say is highly unlikely, he will return to Chicago as early as Sunday to begin to collect signatures necessary to put his name on the ballot next Monday.

Like Larry Summers, Emanuel will not be missed.

Is Second Time the Charm for Obama Voters?

Election Day is 35 days away.

The unemployment rate is high, foreclosures are on the rise and mama needs new shoes, but President Barack Obama says the second time is the charm.

The New York Times reports:

On Tuesday, the president is scheduled to hold an old-fashioned campaign rally on the campus of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Party officials said they expected thousands to cram onto Library Mall, an outside setting, to see Mr. Obama.

A senior Democratic Party strategist said the event would be the biggest political rally since the end of the campaign and is meant to recapture “some of the old excitement and energy from the 2008 campaign that was so essential to Obama’s and Democrats’ success.”

[…]

The Madison rally will, in part, be a test of whether Mr. Obama can still provide that kind of political punch. In February 2008, Mr. Obama, then a candidate, filled the 17,000-seat Kohl Center in Madison and left thousands more outside, waiting to get in.

Time is running out. The latest Gallup poll shows Republicans hold a 20-point enthusiasm advantage over Democrats.

One Nation March on Washington

Progressives will be on the march in Washington on Saturday. By one estimate, over 400,000 people are expected for the One Nation march for “jobs, justice and education for all.”

The crowd estimate comes from a union organizer who informed me that I could not get on her bus because I did not reside in her district (New Jersey). When I mentioned few bus rides are listed on website, she said that was because organizers were concerned tea partiers would reserve all the seats.

The march’s endorsing organizations are a who’s who of the “progressive left,” including the AFL-CIO, NAACP, Service Employees International Union, National Council of La Raza and National Action Network.

During an appearance on TV One’s “Washington Watch,” NAACP President Ben Jealous said:

We and the Tea Party are responding to the same moment. They see this moment of increasing diversity, decreasing prosperity, and they say, “Let’s attack diversity. Let’s push down on diversity.” We say, “Let’s push up on prosperity.” They want to turn this into a battleground. We want to find common ground.

For more info, visit One Nation Working Together.

Great Expectations

A new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll found President Barack Obama’s job approval is at an all-time low. Only 42 percent of Americans approve of Obama’s job performance; 56 percent “think the president has fallen short of their expectations.”

Expectations are a terrible thing to waste.

At today’s Christian Science Monitor breakfast, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said Obama played the expectations game and lost.

In the push for his economic plan, Obama administration officials said that if Congress passed the stimulus package, unemployment would stay below eight percent.

The unemployment rate has hovered around 10 percent since February 2009.

While noting the economy “hasn’t done well enough,” Frank observed:

The public doesn’t grade on a curve. The public grades on reality, particularly when expectations have been raised.

Contract with America 2.0

It seems like a lifetime ago that flag-waving Republicans stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and pledged a “Contract with America.”

Fast forward 16 years and Republicans are back partying like it’s, well, 1994.

This morning, House Minority Leader John Boehner will unveil a shiny new “Pledge to America,” a 21-page governing agenda to take the country back to the future:

In a self‐governing society, the only bulwark against the power of the state is the consent of the governed, and regarding the policies of the current government, the governed do not consent.

[…]

With this document, we pledge to dedicate ourselves to the task of reconnecting our highest aspirations to the permanent truths of our founding by keeping faith with the values our nation was founded on, the principles we stand for, and the priorities of our people. This is our Pledge to America.

We pledge to honor the Constitution as constructed by its framers and honor the original intent of those precepts that have been consistently ignored – particularly the Tenth Amendment, which grants that all powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

It’s a broad draft document but that hasn’t stopped the pre-buttals. Nadeam Elshami, spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said in a statement:

Congressional Republicans are pledging to ship jobs overseas; blow a $700 billion hole in the deficit to give tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires; turn Social Security from a guaranteed benefit into a guaranteed gamble; once again, subject American families to the recklessness of Wall Street; and take away patients’ rights. Republicans want to return to the same failed economic policies that hurt millions of American and threatened our economy.

With this document the “party of no” becomes the “party of oh, hell no.”

UPDATE: House Minority Leader John Boehner released “A Pledge to America” at a family-owned business in Virginia.

During the press event, Boehner said:

“A Pledge to America” offers a new way forward that hasn’t been tried in Washington: an approach focused on cutting spending instead of accelerating spending, and eliminating uncertainty for the private-sector innovators and entrepreneurs who create jobs. These are the solutions the American people are demanding, and Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid should act on them before Congress adjourns for the fall.

“A Pledge to America” can be downloaded here.

Summers Heads Back to School

Larry Summers, the director of the National Economic Council, is heading back to Harvard after the midterm elections. Summers’ departure was announced by the White House in a statement.

President Barack Obama said:

I will always be grateful that at a time of great peril for our country, a man of Larry’s brilliance, experience and judgment was willing to answer the call and lead our economic team. Over the past two years, he has helped guide us from the depths of the worst recession since the 1930s to renewed growth. And while we have much work ahead to repair the damage done by the recession, we are on a better path thanks in no small measure to Larry’s wise counsel. We will miss him here at the White House, but I look forward to soliciting his continued advice and his counsel on an informal basis, and appreciate that he has agreed to serve as a member of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

Polls show Americans have lost confidence in Obama’s handling of the economy so Summers’ “brilliance, experience and judgment” are more suited for the faculty lounge than the real world.

In any case, Summers is probably exhausted.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said:

Look, I think in many ways they [Summers and members of the economic team] probably fit four or five years worth of work into two years.

Hey, Larry, don’t let the door hit ya on your way out.

Obama Voters are T-I-D-E

Election Day is 41 days away.

While tea partiers are partying like it’s 1994, Democrats are disappointed, dispirited and disillusioned.

President Barack Obama heard an earful during yesterday’s town hall meeting.

It could not have been music to Obama’s ears to hear Velma Hart, a veteran and chief financial officer at a nonprofit organization, say she’s “exhausted” defending him.

Hart is not alone. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes:

It’s no secret that the president is in trouble politically, and that Democrats in Congress are fighting desperately to hold on to their majorities. But much less attention has been given to the level of disenchantment among black voters, who have been hammered disproportionately by the recession and largely taken for granted by the Democratic Party. That disenchantment is likely to translate into lower turnout among blacks this fall.

Herbert continued:

Most blacks are reluctant to publicly express their concerns about the president because they are so outraged by the blatantly unfair and often racist attacks against him from the political right. But many blacks are unhappy that Mr. Obama hasn’t been more forceful in the fight to create jobs. And there is disappointment over the dearth of black faces in high-profile posts in the administration.

In plain English, Obama’s supporters are tide, T-I-D-E, of being taken for granted.