Opening the Day: Karl Rove Throws in the Towel

by: Matt Stoller

Mon Oct 27, 2008 at 08:00

• Eight points in Virginia?  And half of all voters in the state contacted by the campaign?  Wow.

• Democrats are warning people not to become complacent about Obama's win, but it doesn't help that Karl Rove is publicly throwing in the towel.  Speaking of complacency, who's going to replace Obama in the Senate?  Larry Handlin makes some guesses.

• Third Way communications director Matt Bennett and Brookings Institution fellow Bill Galston doubt that Obama can follow through on his transparency pledge.

  Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, a progressive policy think tank that leans Democratic, said he sees parallels between Obama's plan and Clinton's pledge in 1992 to cut the White House staff by 25 percent - the symbol of his overall platform to reduce and reorganize government in a year when, like 2008, "change" was a more popular mantra than "experience."

  "His staff will struggle to comply with what will eventually feel to them as arbitrary rules," said Bennett, a former Clinton administration aide. "I go back to the Clinton vow to cut the White House staff by 25 percent. It was arbitrary and capricious. It was very hard to do and caused significant trouble, and he got zero political benefit out of it."

  Norm Ornstein also gets in a few digs.  You know, can't they wait until Obama wins to start telling him why he shouldn't run an open administration?

• Lots of different companies are now competing for the bailout money.  

  Insurers, automakers and American subsidiaries of foreign banks all want the Treasury Department to cut them a piece of the largest government rescue in U.S. history.

  It's a grab bag!  Can I have some?

• Democrat Paul Kanjorski in Pennsylvania is just not doing well.  This ad isn't helping, making him look old and out of it.

• Lobbyist revenue is taking a dip.

• Do we really need 60 Senators to pass legislation?  Sheldon Whitehouse doesn't think so.

  "If the White House political team can't figure out a way to get two Republican senators to vote with us between Air Force One, tea at the White House, U.S. attorneys and judges and dams and roads and ambassadors and all that other stuff, somebody should take them out to the woodshed. Sixty is less a magic number than a zone."

• New York's going to lose 40,000 Wall Street jobs.  I don't know how the city's going to deal with that.

• The GOP in the House is preparing to tear itself apart.

What are you reading?