ny-9

Steve Kornacki: Maybe you remember the much-discussed map that the New York Times ran in November 2008, just after Barack Obama racked up a bigger share of the national popular vote than any Democrat had in 44 years. It really was the perfect election for Democrats, with just about everything breaking their way, and yet the Times showed that in a few pockets of America, Obama had somehow fared worse than his party’s previous (losing) nominee.

This phenomenon was mostly centered in Appalachia, but there were exceptions – like the Brooklyn/Queens-based 9th District of New York, where Obama performed one point worse than John Kerry had in 2004 and 12 points worse than Al Gore had in 2000.

This may be the most important piece of information to keep in mind now that the voters of that same 9th District have just handed national Republicans a dream talking point… there really isn’t much that’s remarkable about the victory that Republican Bob Turner achieved on Tuesday night.

Mainly, it tells us what a simple look at President Obama’s job approval numbers (or the economic indicators that are largely responsible for them) would tell us: Voters are frustrated and eager to register their displeasure with him and his party. This is true everywhere, but particularly in areas like the 9th District, where voters already had clear reservations about Obama even before he did anything as president – back when his approval ratings were still stratospheric.

…. None of this is to say that Turner’s win is a non-story … President Obama is in serious political trouble and is faced with an electorate that could easily deny him a second term next year. But then, that would have been true even if the Democrats had pulled an upset or two on Tuesday night.

Full article here

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Nate Silver: …. New York’s Ninth Congressional District has highly unusual demographics, with a set of local issues that are unlikely to extrapolate well to the rest of the country.

… First, there are the local issues – Barack Obama’s positioning toward Israel, Mr. Weprin’s endorsement of a plan to build a mosque and Muslim cultural center in Lower Manhattan, and possibly gay marriage – that will resonate more in Queens than they will in the rest of the country.

Roughly 40 percent of voters in the Ninth District are Jewish, 20 times the rate in the country as a whole. Moreover, and perhaps more important, many of those voters are Orthodox Jews, who often have starkly different political viewpoints than Reform or secular Jews, and who are extremely rare in the United States outside a few spots in the New York region.

There’s also the fact that the district was already behaving unusually in 2008. Despite having a 37-point edge in party registration, Mr. Obama won the election by only 11 points there – barely better than the seven-point edge he had nationwide.

I doubt that there was any district in the country (in 2008), perhaps outside a few remnants of the “Solid South,” where so many enrolled Democrats voted against Mr. Obama.

Full post here

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Read Steve Benen’s take on the result here

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And don’t forget how Weiner won that seat in the first place – here

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Wow, look at that Brooklyn result. 🙄

‘a bellwether of nuthin’

Greg Sargent

gma

The President’s interview with Robin Roberts is on “Good Morning America” Friday at 7 a.m. ET.

pelosi talks jobs, not weiner, so networks cut away…..

new yorker

“If he’d cheated on his wife like everybody else he’d have been forgiven.”

😆

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I don’t think Steve Kornacki (Salon) likes Weiner very much:

1991: … One of the new districts is in an overwhelmingly white, heavily Jewish swath of southern Brooklyn … Weiner jumps in the race … He also launches an ugly, anonymous attack at the last minute – a race-baiting mailer that links Cohen to the “Dinkins/Jackson agenda,” just days after the Crown Heights riot. Weiner ekes out a narrow victory and only then admits that he was behind the flier. He’s excoriated in a New York Times editorial….

2009: …. Weiner begins showing a sudden interest in congressional and national politics – and, more specifically, in talking about congressional and national politics on cable news programs. For producers, he’s a perfect guest – smart, glib, cocky and provocative. With the healthcare reform debate heating up, Weiner begins championing a single-payer system. It’s an issue he’s previously shown no interest in and that has zero chance of winning enactment …. In the summer of 2009, he becomes a genuine cable news all-star, attracting a new national fan base of liberal viewers. But there’s a clear New York angle: By championing their causes in the national media, Weiner makes a new, much more favorable impression on liberal voters in Manhattan and Brownstone Brooklyn – voters who, combined with his outer-borough base, could make Weiner unstoppable in a 2013 mayoral primary.

2010: Weiner’s hero status to liberal activists is affirmed by a House floor rant against Republican obstructionism on a healthcare bill for 9/11 workers …. several New York members had labored to craft the 9/11 bill and to win over Republican support, but Weiner had played no meaningful role before the floor debate. “He almost blew up the [expletive] bill,” one disgruntled New York member later tells the Washington Post … to his own colleagues, he’s a camera-seeking nuisance who’s interested in gaining publicity for himself – not in doing any substantive work.

Full post here

it’s over

New York Times

the today interview (part 2 added)

Original video and transcript here

curry focuses on important issues of the day. sigh.

MSNBC: In an interview with TODAY’s Ann Curry that will air on Tuesday’s show, President Barack Obama said that if he were Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner right now, he would resign…

“I can tell you that if it was me, I would resign,” he said.

“When you get to the point where, because of various personal distractions, you can’t serve as effectively as you need to, at the time when people are worrying about jobs, and their mortgages, and paying the bills — then you should probably step back,’’ Obama said.

Obama added that what Weiner did was “highly inappropriate’’ and that he has “embarrassed himself” and his wife and family, but said it will ultimately come down to a decision by Weiner and his constituents as to whether he will continue in office.

tears of a clown

GOPolitico: John Boehner has shown his weepy side once again … he welled up a few times during his commencement address at Ohio State University on Sunday.

What set off the waterworks this time? Boehner got emotional twice when he mentioned his parents and again when stressing the importance of gratitude.

….In a lighter moment, Boehner talked about his early days as an unknown politician with a troublesome last name.

“When you begin to go out there and ask people to vote for you, they’re probably not gonna vote for you if they can’t say your name,” he said. “You know, my name looks like Beener, Bonner, Boner.”

Then, to the delight of the crowd, he added: “Thank God it’s not Weiner.”

Boehner also cried when delivering Catholic University’s commencement address last month.

curious

The professional left, as you know, aren’t happy: their beloved Anthony Weiner is in a spot of bother. And if I had a dollar for every time I read them cite Martin Luther King’s, eh, active social life when posting their support for Weiner on various websites, I’d have the price of an iPad 2.

Eg:

(You have to love the last comment – “King gets a pass because his assassination was literal”. I don’t even know where to start with that one, so I won’t. But the person who posted it is a self-described ‘progressive’).

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Now, if you were trying to compare Weiner’s woes to other high profile Democrats/liberals/activists who had trouble controlling their weiners, would a man who died over 40 years ago really be the first who’d spring to mind?

Not Bill Clinton? Or John Edwards? Or Eliot Spitzer? Or …. well, there have been quite a few in recent times.

Why Martin Luther King? If you were going that far back, why not JFK? Or RFK? And why choose someone who wasn’t even an elected politician – which is kind of the issue here with Weiner, isn’t it?

Curious.

By the way, the professional left now have something in common with the turd that is Lee Siegel. The photo above comes from his article on the Daily Beast … “With all the commotion over Anthony Weiner’s gross and undignified online behavior, we have been too distracted to see that we have an even worse miscreant in our midst …. Martin Luther King Jr.”

Note the present tense: “…we have an even worse miscreant in our midst.” Has Siegel not heard MLK was assassinated in 1968?

So, Siegel has to travel back over four decades to find a perfect comparison with Weiner – because MLK was a “compulsive seducer of women, he lied to his closest aides and friends, and to his wife and children”. Well, that’s true, no Democrat/liberal/activist has behaved in that fashion since then. None at all.

Oh, forgot to mention: the professional left and Siegel have something else in common: they both loathe the President. You know, the guy who makes them think of MLK.

The best part of all this is that the professional left constantly bleat about the race card being used against them when they attack the President …. and then they bring MLK in to the debate about Weiner’s ‘problems’. You couldn’t make it up.

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PS I was Googling stuff earlier on and up came a bunch of right-wing hate blogs making the same Weiner/MLK comparison. Sometimes it’s so hard to distinguish between the bigots on the right and the bigots on the left.