.jpg)
(See 1 and 1a below.)
===
Sequester is working according to Stephen Moore but entitlement spending still is free to grow.
Government by handcuffs was surely not what our Founding Fathers intended. One has to assume they intended responsible citizens to come forth and serve for limited periods , act in ways that were judicious and conservative, keep the interests of the nation upper most in their mind and not engage in self-dealing.
Alas, somewhere along the way we passed an amendment which allowed government to tax the sweat of citizens and everything began to unravel. Sequester is a very crude, one size fits all meat ax approach towards solvency. It is the equivalent of butchering rather than surgerying. The fact that it is working is better than nothing but the consequences have yet to be seen as America's role in world affairs will shrink. That may not be all bad because it might result in less military venturousness but eventually it will have commercial implications as we lose out to other emerging giants.
More preferable would be the election of persons of integrity but that is not in the cards as long as politicians distance themselves from the governed, pass laws they do not read and do not subject themselves to the pain they reserve exclusively for others. (See 2 below.)
==
Why aren't these kids getting food stamps? Their parents should be jailed for letting them stay up so late. Somehow or other government must crush their talent because they are showing up all of their contemporaries with low esteem. This cannot be allowed!
===The 3 Mizzone BrothersJohnny (born 2003, banjo), Robbie ( born 2000, fiddle) and Tommy (born 1998, guitar).Bluegrass music
They are opening one in Savannah next year! Now this is my idea of a real classical education! "Wife School: http://www.clipjunkie.com/
===
Republicans have proven time and again they are more than capable of shooting themselves in the foot. It is one thing to be in favor of the right to possess guns. It is another knowing how to aim it.
Kingston is the more rational Republican to succeed Chambliss but Broun and Gingrey are more than capable of driving Kingston too far right during the nomination battle and should either Gingrey or Broun come out on top they will have positioned themselves beyond hope against Sam Nunn's daughter who may be a bright and accomplished young lady but her background reminds me of another community organizer we mistakenly elected.
That said, I would rather vote for Michelle Nunn than Broun or Gingrey, heretical as that may sound. (See 3 below.)
===
Dick
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1)Russia Makes a Fool Out of Obama, Over and Over
By Kim Zigfeld
The worst has finally happened. It took much longer than expected -- nearly two thousand days -- but Barack Obama's foreign policy has finally collapsed, leaving Americans to gape slack-jawed at the smoking ruins. Obama has undermined American influence and honor in ways that will be very difficult to repair.
Writing in the Moscow Times, Russian attorney Vladimir Berezansky plays the funeral dirge. He calls Russia's granting of asylum to Edward Snowden a "Suez moment." By this he means that China and Russia have effectively burst the bubble of American power in the same way that the U.S. burst the bubble of French and British power during the Suez crisis. The latter two nations were never the same afterwards, and, Berezansky argues, neither will the USA be after Snowden. Watching Obama's helplessness as these two malignant dictatorships thumb their noses at America reminds one of nothing so much as the Iran hostage crisis and the Afghanistan invasion, where Jimmy Carter's presidency ran aground.
Russia went out of its way to snub and provoke the United States and to humiliate Obama. It took the minimum amount of time and gave Snowden the maximum number of benefits available. Russia sent a clear message that it cares nothing for its relationship with the United States, has no fear of Obama's retaliatory moves, and believes that there will be none anyway. Obama replied by making it clear that he would not impose any tangible sanctions, such as an Olympic boycott, once again handing another easy victory to Putin.
Leon Aron, the dean of American Russia watchers, believes that Obama's feeble response to Russia on Snowden, canceling a scheduled personal meeting with Putin, was a fatal display of weakness and a national disgrace. Aron points out that Obama could have refused to attend the upcoming G-20 summit in Russia, where the meeting was scheduled, or he could have attended and strongly confronted Putin over what amounts to an act of war against the United States. Predictably, Obama chose to do neither. He'll attend the summit, sparing Russian face, but won't meet with Putin in protest, sparing Putin the post-meeting press conference where Obama calls him to account. Instead of punishing Putin, Obama is basically doing him a favor.
Putin did the worst he could to the U.S. on Snowden, and the U.S. responded with maximum softness. Obama's message to Putin is clear: grab for more. Russian political pundits were openly laughing at Obama's feebleness.
Political Information Agency General Director Alexei Mukhin told Interfax:
The Soviet Union hosted the Olympic Games without the Americans in 1980. Nevertheless, everything was just excellent. Even if Washington makes a similar step during the Sochi Olympics, this won't mean anything unpleasant for Russia. In 1980, the Americans were supported by a number of countries, but now this can't be replayed, because of the EU's position, among other things. It looks like, in its desire to sting the Russian leadership, Washington has outsmarted itself in the situation surrounding Snowden. The Barack Obama administration has behaved like a capricious woman.
Of course, Obama never thought he'd need to show any backbone where Russia is concerned, so naturally he's not ready to do so. His "reset" policy was supposed to turn Russia into a cooperating partner on issues like Snowden, and it has blown up in his face, just as his critics predicted it would from the first.
Russia was happy to sign a nuclear weapons treaty that called on only the USA to cut weapons. When Obama sought a second round that would actually impose some cuts on Russia, Putin told him to drop dead.
No progress whatsoever has been achieved in inducing Iran to abandon nuclear weapons. To the contrary, Russia not only continues to support Iran, but is now helping Iran support Syria, and flouting U.S. policy there as well.
Putin has escalated an appalling crackdown on civil society, which has seen him arrest his leading critic, Alexei Navalny, on clearly political charges and sentence him to five years at labor. America's moral leadership in Russia has vanished; America has betrayed those who stand for its values.
The most utterly humiliating moment for Obama on Russia, however, has not been on the foreign policy front. Russia recently passed a law making it illegal for any homosexual to act gay in public. This law makes gay Olympic athletes subject to arrest in Sochi, Russia, during the 2014 Winter Olympics scheduled to be staged there. The Kremlin has said it will enforce the measures. This has resulted in a furious backlash. Celebrities from Harvey Fierstein to Steven Fry to Mr. Sulu have openly called for a boycott, and 88 U.S. congressmen have signed a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry demanding action. As a result, Obama faces the lowest moment of his presidency: he must either side with the gays and follow the path of Jimmy Carter into an Olympic boycott, or he must side with his "reset" policy and permanently alienate a key element of his political base. There is no way out.
Everywhere Obama has turned, Putin has been there to stick a finger in his eye. Just like Neville Chamberlain, Obama thought the power of his personality could convert a malignant dictator into a reasonable partner. Just like Chamberlain, Obama's policy of appeasement has collapsed into humiliating failure, with devastating consequences for future generations to bear.
Ironically, in a recent interview with Jay Leno, Obama didn't disagree when Leno accused Putin of acting like Hitler on the homosexual question. This equation is percolating throughout the internet these days. Obama's bitterness at being betrayed by Pooty was palpable. Yet despite acknowledging Putin's evil, Obama is unable to confront it. He can respond only with confused half-measures that just make the situation worse. This is precisely the problem Obama's critics were worried about when he took the Oval Office: his total lack of foreign policy credentials left him adrift and unable to recognize that his balloon was losing altitude until it spectacularly crashed.
On internet forums, Obama's critics have taken to writing his name commencing with the numeral zero rather than a letter, and that just about sums it up. So far, Obama hasn't even had the fortitude to fire his ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, the architect of the ruinous reset, whose service in Russia has been a Keystone Cops fiasco from the first moment. When Snowden walked into Moscow, McFaul should have walked out.
As Hitler could not have wished for better than Chamberlain, Putin could not have dreamed of more than Obama. The president won't make the highest American values part of his relationship with Russia, maybe because he doesn't share them, and he won't stand up for American values and honor by making Putin pay dearly for crossing them, maybe because he doesn't care about them.
1a)Obama’s not to be trusted on foreign policy
Having declared an end to the War on Terror, the US president no longer has any clear idea of his country's global role
By Janet Daley
The West can no longer rely on American leadership in the world. For the remaining duration of the Obama administration, Washington’s judgment and effectiveness in foreign policy cannot be trusted. It is quite an achievement for the one remaining superpower to appear as ineffectual and wrong-footed as the United States has managed to do in the past week. But there it is. The president’s global strategy in his second term was based on two resounding premises. First, al‑Qaeda was “on the run” having been smashed by the killing of Osama bin Laden and the successful US drone operations in Pakistan: in May, Mr Obama gave a triumphal speech in which he declared the War on Terror officially over.
That was then. This is now: over the past week, 19 US embassies in the Middle East and North Africa had to be closed for a week, and diplomatic staff evacuated from Yemen because of “specific terrorist threats”. So who exactly is on the run? When the embarrassing contrast between this mass exit of the American presence and the “War on Terror (End of)” speech was pointed out, White House spokesmen clarified – as government spokesmen like to call it – what the president had said: it was al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan that had been all but defeated, not its franchise in Yemen, which was clearly still alive and kicking.
This clarification was followed shortly by the evacuation of diplomatic staff from Lahore in Pakistan due to – a specific terrorist threat. In his most recent comment, Mr Obama rephrased his dismissal of the Islamist forces: al-Qaeda may not be “on the run” but it is “on its heels”. (Meaning: still facing forward and able to fight?) More confusingly still, Mr Obama is apparently determined to return some Guantánamo prisoners to Yemen, where they will presumably add to the dangerous mix of jihadi terrorists.
The questions remain: is the US “at war” with global jihad or isn’t it? It is now engaged in drone attacks on Yemen, whose government is repeatedly declaring victory over the local al-Qaeda branch. What precisely is America’s role in this, if not as part of an international “War on Terror”? When Barack Obama first ran for the presidency, he committed himself to the war in Afghanistan (rather than Iraq) and refused to rule out the possibility of invading Pakistan. Does he now have any clear, coherent objectives or is his White House simply reacting to events?
The second plank of the Obama global plan was that America’s contentious relationship with Russia would be “re-set”, thereby eliminating one of the main obstacles to the West’s attempts to deal with Syria and Iran. But last week, to pursue the computing metaphor, the re-set crashed rather spectacularly taking the entire software program with it. The White House decided to cancel the scheduled Obama-Putin meeting during the G20 summit in what was publicly presented as a “snub” to the Russian president, who had been so famously unhelpful over the matter of Edward Snowden.
Well, one man’s “snub” is another’s attempt to save face. In fact, one commentator close to the Obama administration put it quite frankly: “The calculation… was [that] going to Moscow would have yielded no benefit to the president’s agenda and he would have paid a price over Snowden and human rights in Russia.”
In other words, Mr Obama would have emerged from this one-to-one meeting having to admit that he had gained absolutely nothing from an obdurate Mr Putin. So he decided to get his own snub in first, and to try to make it seem like an international humiliation for Russia – when in reality Russia has made the US look impotently furious over the Snowden affair. This presupposes, of course, that we take the White House statements over Snowden at face value. Suppose we assume for a moment that, in foreign diplomacy, nothing is as it seems. Does the administration really want to take Snowden back to America to be put on trial for espionage or treason?
Public opinion polls in the US show that a majority of the electorate is concerned about NSA surveillance and could be ready to see Snowden as a genuine whistleblower who performed a national service. And this dissident view stretches right up to Capitol Hill, where two politicians of wildly different orientations – liberal Democrat Congressman John Lewis and Republican Senator Rand Paul – have both compared Snowden to Martin Luther King, which is about as close as you can get in American political culture to secular sainthood. (This may be why the president was tying himself in knots at his Friday press conference, insisting that the NSA surveillance programme was not being abused – but that he was still determined to reform it.)
So if Snowden, who has shown himself to be very articulate indeed, was taken back to the US and put on trial, isn’t there a chance that, with the help of a clever defence counsel, he might inspire an enormous national controversy about mass surveillance and data mining that would create serious problems for the administration? Might it be that the US security services are quietly advising the White House not to try too hard to get Snowden back? The Obama putdown of Putin looking like the “bored kid at the back of the class” was an attempt to counter the damage done to US prestige by the mischievous Russian president.
But a bit of international embarrassment is preferable to the undermining of your entire intelligence programme, and American transparency being what it is, an awful lot of awkward questions might have to be answered about how much access the federal government already has to everybody’s “private” electronic communications. At any rate, the heavily publicised cancellation of the one-on-one session with Putin is neither here nor there. The US and Russian foreign and defence secretaries were meeting as planned in Washington, quite as if nothing had happened. The presidential sulk on both sides is public relations tosh.
But for the rest of the free world, or the West as it is now loosely defined (including, as it does, much of Eastern Europe), this is all deeply worrying. The American government seems to be incapable of stating – or acting – in a consistent, decisive way at a very dangerous time. Mr Obama has accused Mr Putin of having a Cold War mentality. This is a charge with a real sting, since we all know that the Russian president is an authoritarian KGB man at heart.
But there must be at least a glimmering of doubt even in Europe – where the Obama presidency has been given an absurdly easy ride – that America, too, is adrift in the post-Cold War landscape: that it no longer has any clear conception of its global role. Mr Obama, who talks constantly about his hopes for the future, seems to have very little interest in the new demands this new landscape might make on his country.
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2)The Budget Sequester Is a Success
The Obama spending blitz is over and the deficit is heading below 4% of GDP.
By STEPHEN MOORE
The biggest under-reported story out of Washington this year is that the federal budget is shrinking and much more than anyone in either party expected.
Consider the numbers: According to the Congressional Budget Office, annual outlays peaked at $3.598 trillion in fiscal 2011. After President Obama's first two years in office, many in Washington expected that number to hit $4 trillion by 2014. Instead, spending fell to $3.537 trillion in fiscal 2012, and is on pace to fall below $3.45 trillion by the end of this fiscal year (Sept. 30). The $150 billion budget decline of 4% is the first time federal expenditures have fallen for two consecutive years since the end of the Korean War.
This reversal from the spending binge in 2009 and 2010 began with the debt-ceiling agreement between Mr. Obama and House Speaker John Boehner in 2011. The agreement set $2 trillion in tight caps on spending over a decade and created this year's budget sequester, which will save more than $50 billion in fiscal 2013.
As long as Republicans don't foolishly undo this amazing progress by agreeing to Mr. Obama's demands for a "balanced approach" to the 2014 budget in exchange for calling off the sequester, additional expenditure cuts will continue automatically. Those cuts are built into the current budget law.
In other words, Mr. Obama has inadvertently chained himself to fiscal restraints that could flatten federal spending for the rest of his presidency. If the country sees any normal acceleration of economic growth (from the anemic 1.4% growth rate so far this year), the deficit is on a path to drop steadily at least through 2015. Already the deficit has fallen from its Mount Everest peak of 10.2% of gross domestic product in 2009, to about 4% this year. That's a bullish six percentage points less of the GDP of new federal debt each year.
Admittedly, this fiscal progress follows the gigantic budget blowout that began with the last year of George W. Bush's presidency and the first two years of Mr. Obama's. In fiscal 2009 alone, federal spending surged by $600 billion. That same year, outlays as a share of GDP reached a post-World War II high of 25.2%. But by the end of this fiscal year, outlays as a share of GDP could fall to as low as 21.5%. At least for now, the great Washington spending blitz of the Obama first term is over.
Some $80 billion of the outlay savings have come from one-time partial repayments back to the government for the hundreds of billions spent on the bailouts of banks and of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And defense hawks won't be happy that at least half of the fiscal retrenchment has been due to cuts in military spending. The defense budget is on a pace to hit its lowest level (as a share of GDP) since the days of the post-Cold War "peace dividend" during the Clinton years. These deep cutbacks could be dangerous to national security, but as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were winding down, defense would have been cut under any scenario. To their credit, at least Speaker Boehner and House Republicans have made sure that the defense drawdown has gone toward deficit reduction—instead of being spent on domestic social-welfare programs, as happened after the Vietnam War.
The sequester cuts in annual budgets for the military, education, transportation and other discretionary programs have also been an underappreciated success, with none of the anticipated negative consequences.
Discretionary spending soared to $1.347 billion in fiscal 2011, according to the CBO, but was then cut by $62 billion in 2012 and another $72 billion this year. That's an impressive 10% shrinkage. And these are real cuts, not pixie-dust reductions off some sham baseline. Discretionary spending as a share of the economy hit 9.4% of GDP in fiscal 2010 but fell to 7.6% this year and is scheduled to slide to 6.4% in Mr. Obama's last year in office.
The sequester is squeezing the very programs liberals care most about—including the National Endowment for the Arts, green-energy subsidies, the Environmental Protection Agency and National Public Radio. Outside Washington, the sequester is forcing a fiscal retrenchment for such liberal special-interest groups as Planned Parenthood and the National Council of La Raza, which have grown dependent on government largess.
But the fiscal story isn't all rosy. The major entitlements remain on autopilot and are roaring toward insolvency. Thanks in large part to Mr. Obama's aversion to practical fixes, the Congressional Budget Office calculates that through July of this year Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid spending are up $73 billion from just last year. This doesn't include ObamaCare, which is scheduled to add $1 trillion of new costs over the next decade.
So the fiscal progress reported here is no excuse for complacency. But it does call into question the wisdom of a government-shutdown confrontation over the budget this fall or a debt-default showdown that runs the risk of suspending the spending caps and sequester and revitalizing an increasingly irrelevant president.
Liberals had hoped that re-electing Mr. Obama, the most pro-spending president since LBJ, would unleash another four years of Great Society government expansion. Instead, spending caps and the sequester are squashing these progressive dreams. Welcome to the new fiscal reality in Washington. All Republicans need to do is enforce the budget laws Mr. Obama has already agreed to. Entitlement reforms will come when liberals realize that the unhappy alternative is to allow every program they cherish to keep shrinking.
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3)GOP anxiety grows over Ga. Senate race
Republicans are increasingly concerned about Georgia's Senate race, where a crowded primary threatens to produce a flawed candidate who could put at risk a seat in a Republican-leaning state.
Losing Georgia's open Senate seat would do severe damage to Republicans' hopes of winning the net of six seats necessary to take control of the Senate.
“Gingrey has a history of making some gaffes, and Broun it seems like it's a gaffe every other day. Those are the two that worry Republicans the most as potential problems going into the general election,” said Georgia Republican strategist Joel McElhannon, who’s neutral in the race.
Georgia Republicans say they have the upper hand in the race to replace retiring Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) in a state where President Obama won 45 percent of the vote in 2012. But they voice concern over a number of potential scenarios in a primary that’s anyone’s for the taking.
Nonprofit CEO Michelle Nunn (D), the daughter of former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), has a clear Democratic field and is positioning herself as an economically centrist problem solver. While she’s an untested candidate, Democrats are excited about her profile, and she ran slightly ahead of or even with every Republican in a recent poll conducted by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling.
The scenario that panics Republicans is Broun winning the nomination. The Tea Party-affiliated congressman has generated controversy by calling evolution and the big bang theory “lies straight from the pit of hell” and routinely referring to President Obama as a socialist.
He has some strong support in the GOP base and sports a perfect rating with the deep-pocketed, fiscally conservative Club for Growth, which could give him a big financial boost if they decide to get involved in the race. Many think they might, especially if Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), a longtime appropriator with a more centrist record, makes the two-candidate runoff.
Broun is the underdog — he’s far behind in the money race, and many believe his rhetoric will disqualify him with enough Georgia Republicans. Broun had $400,000 in the bank and sat in second place with 19 percent support in PPP’s recent poll.
But he could hurt the field without winning the nomination by pushing the rest of the field hard right.
“The political elite may not like everything Paul Broun says, but Georgia voters support the way he votes,” a Broun campaign spokeswoman emailed to The Hill. “The other candidates are running to be Paul Broun, their problem is that Paul Broun is going to be on the ballot."
Kingston is off to a strong fundraising start, and many Republicans believe would be the safest general-election candidate. He has promised to “yield no ground to any of my opponents as to who is the most conservative.”
Broun introduced a “No amnesty” bill earlier this week that would bar any legal status for immigrants who are in the country illegally. Two days later, Kingston sent a campaign email with the subject line “stopping tax credits for illegal immigrants.”
Eric Tanenblatt, a Georgia strategist who advised and was national finance co-chair for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, says he’s worried the candidates haven’t acknowledged the state’s shifting demographics. Georgia has fast-growing African-American and Hispanic populations and a large number of younger voters moving in from across the country.
“Georgia is changing, and the further you go to the right in the primary, the more difficult that becomes in the general,” he says. “If we're not careful, we could create an unfortunate situation for ourselves.”
Another Georgia Republican strategist pointed to recent votes on the Farm Bill and some appropriations bills as evidence Broun was already having an impact on the race.
“All of the candidates better be careful that they stick to their own values and not be driven to the hard right because of one candidate in the race,” she said.
Gingrey could also win the primary — he led in PPP’s poll with 25 percent support and has $2.6 million in the bank. While Republicans aren’t as nervous about him as Broun, he has his own history of gaffes: The obstetrician said former Rep. Todd Akin’s (R-Mo.) infamous remarks about rape and abortion were “partly right,” though he later apologized for the comment, and recently called for grade-school classes to teach children about traditional gender roles.
Sources close to Gingrey say he knows he’s made mistakes and is focused on being a more disciplined candidate, and many believe if he continues to make gaffes, he won’t be the nominee. But surviving the primary without a gaffe doesn’t mean he won’t slip up during the general election.
Some Republicans are wary a nasty primary could hurt their nomine, pointing to Senate candidate and former Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel’s (R) hard-charging campaign style.
Handel and Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal (R) faced off in a particularly nasty 2010 primary — on the eve of the election, after some harsh criticism lobbed by Deal’s campaign, Handel called him a “corrupt relic of Washington.”
She seems to be following a similar playbook this cycle. Her campaign’s website, onlyinwashingtondc.com, is a laundry list of “42 ridiculous things that happen only in Washington.”
“On primary day the three congressmen in this race will have spent a combined 42 years in Washington. 42 years? That’s just way too long! We need a proven conservative outsider, with a record of achieving conservative results,” Handel says on the site.
“Hopefully, they can keep the shots above the belt and keep it somewhere civil,” said one strategist in the state who said Handel “refused to do anything to help Deal and was very critical of him” in 2010 and is “already taking swings at folks and being aggressive.”
“Karen is tough in defending her principles … and there's a real hunger for people who'll be more concerned about what’s right than running for the next election,” Handel campaign manager Corry Bliss told The Hill.
Handel is off to a slow fundraising start, raising just $150,000 in her first month of the campaign, but she is the only woman currently running, has high name recognition from her earlier campaigns and could be a serious player in the race.
Businessman David Perdue (R), the cousin of former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue (R), is also in the race, and has promised to self-fund his campaign. Insiders say many close to Gov. Perdue who backed Handel’s gubernatorial run are now in his cousin’s camp.
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3)GOP anxiety grows over Ga. Senate race
Republicans are increasingly concerned about Georgia's Senate race, where a crowded primary threatens to produce a flawed candidate who could put at risk a seat in a Republican-leaning state.
Recent polling shows the two candidates Republicans are most anxious about — Reps. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) and Paul Broun (R-Ga.) — leading the pack. Whoever emerges from the clown-car primary, with seven candidates and counting, will face a candidate Democrats are high on in a state where shifting demographics benefit their party.
Losing Georgia's open Senate seat would do severe damage to Republicans' hopes of winning the net of six seats necessary to take control of the Senate.
“Gingrey has a history of making some gaffes, and Broun it seems like it's a gaffe every other day. Those are the two that worry Republicans the most as potential problems going into the general election,” said Georgia Republican strategist Joel McElhannon, who’s neutral in the race.
Georgia Republicans say they have the upper hand in the race to replace retiring Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) in a state where President Obama won 45 percent of the vote in 2012. But they voice concern over a number of potential scenarios in a primary that’s anyone’s for the taking.
Nonprofit CEO Michelle Nunn (D), the daughter of former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), has a clear Democratic field and is positioning herself as an economically centrist problem solver. While she’s an untested candidate, Democrats are excited about her profile, and she ran slightly ahead of or even with every Republican in a recent poll conducted by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling.
The scenario that panics Republicans is Broun winning the nomination. The Tea Party-affiliated congressman has generated controversy by calling evolution and the big bang theory “lies straight from the pit of hell” and routinely referring to President Obama as a socialist.
He has some strong support in the GOP base and sports a perfect rating with the deep-pocketed, fiscally conservative Club for Growth, which could give him a big financial boost if they decide to get involved in the race. Many think they might, especially if Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), a longtime appropriator with a more centrist record, makes the two-candidate runoff.
Broun is the underdog — he’s far behind in the money race, and many believe his rhetoric will disqualify him with enough Georgia Republicans. Broun had $400,000 in the bank and sat in second place with 19 percent support in PPP’s recent poll.
But he could hurt the field without winning the nomination by pushing the rest of the field hard right.
“The political elite may not like everything Paul Broun says, but Georgia voters support the way he votes,” a Broun campaign spokeswoman emailed to The Hill. “The other candidates are running to be Paul Broun, their problem is that Paul Broun is going to be on the ballot."
Kingston is off to a strong fundraising start, and many Republicans believe would be the safest general-election candidate. He has promised to “yield no ground to any of my opponents as to who is the most conservative.”
Broun introduced a “No amnesty” bill earlier this week that would bar any legal status for immigrants who are in the country illegally. Two days later, Kingston sent a campaign email with the subject line “stopping tax credits for illegal immigrants.”
Eric Tanenblatt, a Georgia strategist who advised and was national finance co-chair for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, says he’s worried the candidates haven’t acknowledged the state’s shifting demographics. Georgia has fast-growing African-American and Hispanic populations and a large number of younger voters moving in from across the country.
“Georgia is changing, and the further you go to the right in the primary, the more difficult that becomes in the general,” he says. “If we're not careful, we could create an unfortunate situation for ourselves.”
Another Georgia Republican strategist pointed to recent votes on the Farm Bill and some appropriations bills as evidence Broun was already having an impact on the race.
“All of the candidates better be careful that they stick to their own values and not be driven to the hard right because of one candidate in the race,” she said.
Gingrey could also win the primary — he led in PPP’s poll with 25 percent support and has $2.6 million in the bank. While Republicans aren’t as nervous about him as Broun, he has his own history of gaffes: The obstetrician said former Rep. Todd Akin’s (R-Mo.) infamous remarks about rape and abortion were “partly right,” though he later apologized for the comment, and recently called for grade-school classes to teach children about traditional gender roles.
Sources close to Gingrey say he knows he’s made mistakes and is focused on being a more disciplined candidate, and many believe if he continues to make gaffes, he won’t be the nominee. But surviving the primary without a gaffe doesn’t mean he won’t slip up during the general election.
Some Republicans are wary a nasty primary could hurt their nomine, pointing to Senate candidate and former Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel’s (R) hard-charging campaign style.
Handel and Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal (R) faced off in a particularly nasty 2010 primary — on the eve of the election, after some harsh criticism lobbed by Deal’s campaign, Handel called him a “corrupt relic of Washington.”
She seems to be following a similar playbook this cycle. Her campaign’s website, onlyinwashingtondc.com, is a laundry list of “42 ridiculous things that happen only in Washington.”
“On primary day the three congressmen in this race will have spent a combined 42 years in Washington. 42 years? That’s just way too long! We need a proven conservative outsider, with a record of achieving conservative results,” Handel says on the site.
“Hopefully, they can keep the shots above the belt and keep it somewhere civil,” said one strategist in the state who said Handel “refused to do anything to help Deal and was very critical of him” in 2010 and is “already taking swings at folks and being aggressive.”
“Karen is tough in defending her principles … and there's a real hunger for people who'll be more concerned about what’s right than running for the next election,” Handel campaign manager Corry Bliss told The Hill.
Handel is off to a slow fundraising start, raising just $150,000 in her first month of the campaign, but she is the only woman currently running, has high name recognition from her earlier campaigns and could be a serious player in the race.
Businessman David Perdue (R), the cousin of former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue (R), is also in the race, and has promised to self-fund his campaign. Insiders say many close to Gov. Perdue who backed Handel’s gubernatorial run are now in his cousin’s camp.
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