One of John McCain’s closest advisers during the 2008 campaign reveals that Sarah Palin ended up on the short list of Vice-Presidential contenders without much vetting at all:

Aides to John McCain initially added Sarah Palin to his “short list” of potential running mates because McCain wanted a woman on the list, according to his campaign manager.

McCain entered the vice presidential selection process with a list of five possibilities: Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, Michael Bloomberg, Charlie Crist, and Joe Lieberman, according to Washingtonian‘s profile (which isn’t online) of Washington lawyer A.B. Culvahouse, who led the search.

“As the clock was running out, [campaign manager Rick] Davis say McCain asked to have at least one woman on the short list. His advisers went back to the long list and plucked out Palin’s name,” the magazine reported.

This isn’t entirely unsurprising. The campaign book Game Change cataloged just how minimal the McCain campaigns vetting and preparation of Palin was prior to her being announced as McCain’s running mate on August 29, 2008. More generally, though, it serves as further confirmation of the slip-shod, some would say irresponsible, decision making process that McCain engaged in while selecting his running mate.

“I didn’t build a good enough campaign in any one state to win a primary. I had a great national campaign, a terrible primary campaign. And it should be reversed. You’ve got to win primaries in order to get nominated."

This is, of course, the case.  Indeed, it has been the case for, well, decades.  I am constantly amazed how ostensibly smart people fail to recognize and grasp basic elements of the way our political system works.  How is it possible to be a major politico and not understand the fundamental truth that the road to either party’s nomination starts in Iowa and is a step-by-step process?  And yet, here we have an admission that the basics were wholly misunderstood.

It reminds me of the major error made by the Clinton campaign in 2008 when they went into the California primary thinking that the delegate allocation was done by winner-take-all rather than via a proportional process (see here).

Two of former presidential hopeful John Edwards’ top aides testified Thursday to a federal grand jury looking into payments from the North Carolina Democrat’s campaign to his one-time mistress.

Jonathan Prince, who was Edwards’ deputy campaign manager during his unsuccessful 2008 presidential run, and then-spokesman Jennifer Palmieri were called before the grand jury, two sources familiar with the case said.

This comes amid the Justice Department’s investigation into money that went from Edwards’ campaign and from his supporters to Rielle Hunter, who was a videographer with the campaign.

The grand jury has been meeting at the federal courthouse in Raleigh, North Carolina, since last year.

Prince spent four hours in the Raleigh, North Carolina, courthouse on Thursday, reported CNN affiliate WTVD, while Palmieri was inside for about an hour. Both refused comment to reporters as they left the courtroom.

Edwards began his affair with Hunter in 2006, fathering a daughter — Frances Quinn — with her. Yet the former senator denied paternity for more than a year before admitting in January 2010 that he was the father. A week later, Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, announced they were separating.

In October, Edwards’ attorney Wade Smith said that a “sizable” number of subpoenas had been issued in the case.

The affair, of course, is not a legal problem, but the use of campaign funds from a Presidential campaign to support Hunter during her pregnancy would be a serious Federal crime, and an indictment would just be another in the long line of embarrassments that Edwards has suffered over the past two years. As Joe Gandelman said, it couldn’t happen to a more well-deserving guy.

George W. Bush’s bombastic return to the world stage has reminded me of my favourite Bush anecdote, which for various reasons we couldn’t publish at the time. Some of the witnesses still dine out on it.

The venue was the Oval Office. A group of British dignitaries, including Gordon Brown, were paying a visit. It was at the height of the 2008 presidential election campaign, not long after Bush publicly endorsed John McCain as his successor.

Naturally the election came up in conversation. Trying to be even-handed and polite, the Brits said something diplomatic about McCain’s campaign, expecting Bush to express some warm words of support for the Republican candidate.

Not a chance. “I probably won’t even vote for the guy,” Bush told the group, according to two people present.”I had to endorse him. But I’d have endorsed Obama if they’d asked me.”

Given the long standing enmity between Bush and McCain, this is actually plausible.

For all the triumphalism of the Tea Party in taking credit for the Republican wave Tuesday, the fact of the matter is that only a third of their candidates won — which means two-thirds lost. So says NBC’s Alexandra Moe:

In the Senate, 10 candidates backed by the Tea Party ran and at least five were successful. (Race in Alaska has not yet been called.)

In the House, 130 Tea Party-backed candidates ran, and just 40 so far have won.

Identifying Tea Party candidates is undoubtedly inexact. Our criteria, generally, was to include anyone who has either been backed by a Tea Party group or has identified themselves as a member of the Tea Party movement. Toward the end of this cycle, however, seemingly every Republican was trying to associate themselves this way. One left off the list was Dino Rossi, despite Jim DeMint endorsing him, since Tea Party groups backed Clint Didier in the primary.

As Steven Taylor noted Tuesday, it’s hard to know which candidates are Tea Partiers. But  Moe’s method, described above, seems reasonable enough.

In the Senate, it was 50-50:

5 WON – 50% of Tea Party candidates won
PA- Pat Toomey
KY- Rand Paul
FL- Marco Rubio
WI- Ron Johnson
UT- Mike Lee

4 LOST – 40% of Tea Party candidates lost
DE- Christine O’Donnell
NV- Sharron Angle
WV- John Raese
CO- Ken Buck

1 UNDECIDED
AK- Joe Miller

It’s safe at this point to put Miller in the Lost column.

The winners are pretty impressive.  Toomey and Johnson fought hard races well, taking the Arlen Specter and Russ Feingold seats.*  The three others were surely going Republican with or without the Tea Party:  The only Democrats in Utah are passing through and Charlie Crist would have cruised to victory in the Republican primary and the general absent Rubio.   But Rubio, in particular, was actually a quite superb candidate who’s likely a rising star in Republican politics.

The losers, by contrast, all lost races that would have been easy for a more experienced Republican politician.  Mike Castle would have won Delaware without a fight and a random person from Nevada’s voter registry would have beaten Harry Reid.   But crazy is a hard sell.   Thankfully, Alaska is so Republican that the winner was also a Republican.

But here’s where it gets tricky:  Of the 130 Tea Party candidates for the House, 40 won, 82 lost, and 8 were undecided as of last evening.

The problem is that there’s no analysis given of the seats — just a listing of districts and candidates.   15 of the losses were in California alone and another 7 in New York.   Granted, there were also losses in Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Texas, and Utah.   But, offhand, I don’t know how competitive these races would have been.   It’s quite possible, though, given the vagaries of gerrymandered districts, that the reason the Tea Party was able to run candidates is that the Republican primary doesn’t attract much interest.     Losses in seats that were never in serious play shouldn’t count against the Tea Party.

Now, it seems clear that the Tea Party’s selection of truly awful candidates in some Senate races cost the Republicans some seats they could have won — and quite possibly a majority in that body.  But the movement also generated some significant chunk of the vaunted “enthusiasm gap” that helped Republicans take back the House.   It’s a very mixed bag.

_________________
*I know some object to naming seats after the office holders, on the grounds that “They’re the PEOPLE’s seats!”  But it’s a useful shorthand.

Bernard Finel is understandably frustrated that his party looks to get drubbed at the polls today.  But this is over the top:

The idea of his administration as an extreme leftist one is laughable.  It has nothing to do with substance, and everything to do with the fact that Obama appears “alien” to some.  The vowels in his name and the color of his skin have more to do with how angry people are, even if they don’t realize it.

Look, there’s no doubt some anti-Obama sentiment is based on racism and its cousins, xenophobia and Islamophobia.  All the “Barack HUSSEIN Obama” and “He’s a secret Muslim born in Kenya” business is tied into those themes.

But the fact of the matter is that this is the same man who cruised to victory two years ago, winning states and districts that hadn’t voted for a Democrat in years, if not decades.  Aside from his hair turning noticeably whiter, he looks no less “alien” now than then.   The words “President Obama,” once exotic, now roll easily off the tongue.

This seem alien-looking person of color with name of vowel was at 65.5% approval as recently as February 2009. And, while his current 45.7% approval is slightly less than his 49.3% disapproval, it happens to not only still be 20 points higher than the WASP George W. Bush, who has exactly the right number of vowels in his name.

So, no, I don’t think race, large ears, or vowel placement is the deciding issue here.   Rather, as James Carville famously put it some 18 years ago, “It’s the economy, stupid.”  (See this morning’s post “Obama Backlash in Context” for a more nuanced analysis.)

Bernard continues, “Because outright racism is not acceptable, rationalizations are playing a powerful role, which is why about 95% of the bitching about Obama is based on fantasy.”

Obama cut taxes, including in the stimulus bill.

He did, although very modestly.  And he wants to extend most of the Bush tax cuts, too.   But he’s spent a lot of time engaging in the rhetoric of class warfare — raising taxes on the rich on the basis they don’t deserve to keep their money rather than that it’s where the money is — and the Republicans have done a good job of attacking that message.

There was no “government takeover” of health care.

No, but government is going to play a much larger role in health care than it did before ObamaCare.  And he’s paved the way for a lot of companies to drop health coverage and put people into the government-created pool.

There isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Obama and Bush on defense policy. Hell, Obama kept Bush’s Secretary of Defense!

Which is why it hasn’t been much of a campaign issue this time around.

Sotomayor and Kagan are absolutely mainstream picks for justices.  Heck, Kagan is as bland as Roberts pretends to be.

Well, it remains to be seen what kind of judges they’ll turn out to be.  But, yes, they’re mainstream Democrats.  But Roberts and Alito were mainstream Republicans and got pilloried.  That’s how the game is played these days.

But, again, the economy, the bailouts, and the government mandate on healthcare are the biggest policy issues this cycle — with the economy far, far, far and away the biggest.

UPDATE: Commenter PD Shaw points out that I’ve missed the most obvious retort:  ”The polls show that Democrats lost support from independents. If Bernard wants to argue that independents are conspiratorial racists, that’s a pretty broad bush to tar with.”

That’s exactly right.  The fact that staunch Republicans campaigning against the Obama agenda are exaggerating the degree to which it’s “extreme” really isn’t the issue. They were against Obama to begin with.  The reason the Democrats are likely to lose the House today is that they’ve lost Independents, not that Republicans are angry.

Now that the  book is out, of course, that’s a different story and McCain is telling a story about Palin that, while not flattering, isn’t necessarily bad either:

For the first time since the end of her father’s 2008 presidential bid, Meghan McCain, Sen. John McCain’s daughter, spoke out about Sarah Palin, writing in a new book that Palin brought “drama, stress, complications, panic and loads of uncertainty” to the losing campaign.

Although McCain wrote that during the campaign she wondered whether the loss “was Sarah Palin’s fault,” McCain told “Good Morning America” in an exclusive interview today that Palin was not the reason the campaign failed.

“I do clearly state at the end that we did not lose because of her, and I’m speaking out now because I do have conflicting feelings about her,” McCain told “GMA’s” George Stephanopoulos. “She brought so much momentum and enthusiasm to the campaign.”

Before Palin came onboard, McCain said she knew drama was brewing.

“I had learned a few things on the campaign already, and knew that change always brought complications and chaos and sometimes a little entertainment. Drama was inevitable on a campaign and created almost out of thin air. Tempers were always flying, and feelings were always being hurt. There was no question that a running mate would add to the confusion and upset. There would be less time for fun,” she writes. “But I couldn’t have predicted just how serious it was going to get.”

McCain admitted that during the campaign she stumbled when asked whether she had doubts about Palin’s presence on the ticket and in the book said that Joe Lieberman was her favorite pick.

After the interview, however, McCain described the first time she realized her father might lose, and “if we did, I wondered if it was Sarah Palin’s fault.”

In the book, McCain refers to Palin as “the Time Bomb,” and calls her selection the very definition of the “line between genius and insanity.”

One area where McCain does not stumble is her take on Sarah Palin’s “disastrous” interview with CBS News’ Katie Couric before the vice presidential debate, when Palin couldn’t even state what newspapers she read.

“Katie Couric’s interview with her before the vice presidential debate had been disastrous. Unhappy with her performance, Palin seemed to blame the interview on the campaign. And she continued to blame other poor interviews and snafus on the campaign too,” McCain writes. “Sarah Palin. She was turning out to be somebody who leaves a wake of confusion and chaos — to the point of dizziness — wherever she went.”

At first, the chaos was overwhelming, McCain said.

“She was not just an overnight success or even a political Cinderella story. She was a sudden, freakishly huge, full-fledged phenomenon. It seemed too much. And it seemed too easy,” McCain writes.

Video:

This isn’t all that different from what we’ve heard from other McCain campaign insiders, and in books like Game Change, about the chaos that Palin brought to the campaign, and I’m sure there are more stories to be told in the years to come. Nonetheless, it’s another piece of the puzzle and further confirmation to me that, in the end, the Palin pick was a disastrous decision for McCain.

Joe Biden’s failed 2008 presidential campaign was sloppily run and violated campaign finances laws, a Federal Election Commission audit shows.

Politico, which seems to have broken the news, titles the story “Joe Biden fined $219K for 2008 presidential campaign violations.”

The Federal Election Commission has penalized Vice President Joe Biden’s 2008 presidential campaign $219,000 for accepting over-the-limit contributions and a discounted flight on a jet owned by a New York hedge fund. His campaign also was charged with sloppy record-keeping.

Biden’s campaign has indicated it will pay the penalty to the U.S. Treasury to resolve the campaign finance compliance issues, which were revealed in an audit report released Friday by the commission.

Elizabeth Alexander, a spokeswoman for Biden in the vice president’s office, called the FEC-ordered repayment “relatively small,” and said “some repayment is commonplace after presidential campaign audits.”

[...]

It appears that most of the excess contributions stemmed from individuals who donated $4,600 to Biden’s campaign, which would have been the maximum allowable contribution had Biden won the Democratic presidential nomination and progressed to the general election ($2,300 for the primary and another $2,300 for the general).

Biden’s campaign told the FEC it would re-pay the $106,000 into the Treasury for the excessive contributions. But it also stressed that it had previously attempted to contact each of the maxed-out donors to properly dispense with their excess contributions, partly by re-designating some of that money to Biden’s still-operational Senate campaign committee and leadership political action committee, Unite Our States.

Yet the report states Biden’s campaign “staff was unable to locate the letters or evidence that they were sent,” attributing the confusion to records lost when the campaign moved offices, as well as the death of the staffer “primarily responsible for sending the compliance letters, including letters to resolve excessive contributions.”

Ah, the old dead staffer defense.

NYT goes with the more innocuous headline “Biden Owes $219,000 for Campaign Violations.”

The Biden for President campaign committee owes the Treasury more than $219,000 because it accepted excessive campaign contributions and understated the value of a trip taken on a private plane in the 2008 campaign, the Federal Election Commission said in a new report.

[...]

The report paints a picture of sloppy bookkeeping by Mr. Biden’s campaign. But aides to the vice president said the errors were relatively minor. The excess contributions were less than 1 percent of the total raised by the campaign, they said.

So, were the errors “relatively minor”?    It would seem so.    Indeed, it seems that being fined by the FEC for violations is part and parcel of running a presidential campaign.

The Reagan-Bush 1984 campaign was fined $10,000 in 1988. Bob Dole’s campaign was fined $100,000 back in 1993 for violations related to his 1988 bid.  The Swift Boat Veterans got fined $300,000 and The Media Fund $580,000 for violations in the 2004 campaign.   And John Kerry’s campaign was ordered to repay $1.3 million.  And that’s from a pretty cursory set of Google searches.  (Incidentally, Google’s new algorithm, which privileges newer content, makes it much less useful than it once was for doing historical research.)

So, ultimately, this is no big fining deal.

The bottom line is that campaign finance laws are a giant mess and running afoul of them is a near certainty.  But apparently the FEC is now handing out bigger fines and doing so more quickly.

Over at National Review, Abigail Thernstrom, an AEI scholar who also happens to the Vice-Chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, tells her fellow conservatives that they are over-reacting to the supposed scandal over voter intimidation at a Philadelphia polling place:

Forget about the New Black Panther Party case; it is very small potatoes. Perhaps the Panthers should have been prosecuted under section 11 (b) of the Voting Rights Act for their actions of November 2008, but the legal standards that must be met to prove voter intimidation — the charge — are very high.

In the 45 years since the act was passed, there have been a total of three successful prosecutions. The incident involved only two Panthers at a single majority-black precinct in Philadelphia. So far — after months of hearings, testimony and investigation — no one has produced actual evidence that any voters were too scared to cast their ballots. Too much overheated rhetoric filled with insinuations and unsubstantiated charges has been devoted to this case.

A number of conservatives have charged that the Philadelphia Black Panther decision demonstrates that attorneys in the Civil Rights Division have racial double standards. How many attorneys in what positions? A pervasive culture that affected the handling of this case? No direct quotations or other evidence substantiate the charge.

Thomas Perez, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, makes a perfectly plausible argument: Different lawyers read this barely litigated statutory provision differently. It happens all the time, especially when administrations change in the middle of litigation. Democrats and Republicans seldom agree on how best to enforce civil-rights statutes; this is not the first instance of a war between Left and Right within the Civil Rights Division.

The two Panthers have been described as “armed” — which suggests guns. One of them was carrying a billy club, and it is alleged that his repeated slapping of the club against his palm constituted brandishing it in a menacing way. They have also been described as wearing “jackboots,” but the boots were no different from a pair my husband owns.

A disaffected former Justice Department attorney has written: “We had indications that polling-place thugs were deployed elsewhere.” “Indications”? Again, evidence has yet to be offered.

Get a grip, folks. The New Black Panther Party is a lunatic fringe group that is clearly into racial theater of minor importance. It may dream of a large-scale effort to suppress voting — like the Socialist Workers Party dreams of a national campaign to demonstrate its position as the vanguard of the proletariat. But the Panthers have not realized their dream even on a small scale. This case is a one-off.

Moreover, as others have pointed out, the district at which these two members of the NBPP were filmed was a majority black district that had gone overwhelmingly for John Kerry in 2004. If these two guys were really interested in intimidating white voters in the Philadelphia metro area rather than engaging in street theater, they would’ve shown up at a polling place in King of Prussia or Bensalem, not one in the inner-city at which, conveniently a guy with a video camera had shown up.

As I noted in an earlier post, there’s no evidence that any actual voters were intimidated by these two men, or even that their “protest” lasted longer than the amount of time that the camera crew was there filming them. In fact, judging from this video, it seems clear to me that these two guys were playing for the cameras:

Back on Election Day 2008 when this story was breaking, Politico’s Ben Smith said this:

I’d been a bit skeptical of the reports that the Black Panthers were out intimidating voters on Obama’s behalf, largely because the precinct is in the city’s northern 14th Ward, which went (.pdf) overwhelmingly — more than 95% — for John Kerry in 2004. You don’t typically intimidate your own voters.

But a reader sends over a link to clinch the deal: The Panther in question appears to be one King Shamir Shabazz — and he’s no Obama supporter.

“[Obama] is a puppet on a string. I don’t support no black man running for white politics. I will not vote for who will be the next slavemaster,” he told the Philadelphia Daily News a few days ago, one of the least crazy things he said amid some straightforwardly racist riffs.

(…)

So what was he doing there with his nightstick? Trying to intimidate Obama voters? Just hanging around? There isn’t actually any evidence that he tried to chase away any of the ward’s (overwhelmingly black) voters.

In other words, street theater, just as Thernstrom described it.

As for the alleged “scandal” related to the dropping of the civil claim against the NBPP, it is worth noting that there is reason to doubt the credibility of J. Christian Adams, the former DOJ attorney who has become the darling of Fox News and the conservative talk show circuit. More importantly, though, Thernstrom makes a persuasive case that this whole issue is much ado about very, very little.

H/T to commenter Sam in his comment to this post for the link to Thernstrom’s NRO article.

A new study by a group trying to prove felons put Al Franken in the Senate finds that felons put Al Franken in the Senate, Fox News reports.

The six-month election recount that turned former “Saturday Night Live” comedian Al Franken into a U.S. senator may have been decided by convicted felons who voted illegally in Minnesota’s Twin Cities.

That’s the finding of an 18-month study conducted by Minnesota Majority, a conservative watchdog group, which found that at least 341 convicted felons in largely Democratic Minneapolis-St. Paul voted illegally in the 2008 Senate race between Franken, a Democrat, and his Republican opponent, then-incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman.

The final recount vote in the race, determined six months after Election Day, showed Franken beat Coleman by 312 votes — fewer votes than the number of felons whose illegal ballots were counted, according to Minnesota Majority’s newly released study, which matched publicly available conviction lists with voting records.

[...]

A spokesman for both county attorneys’ offices belittled the information, saying it was “just plain wrong” and full of errors, which prompted the group to go back and start an in-depth look at the records.

“What we did this time is irrefutable,” McGrath said. “We took the voting lists and matched them with conviction lists and then went back to the records and found the roster lists, where voters sign in before walking to the voting booth, and matched them by hand.

“The only way we can be wrong is if someone with the same first, middle and last names, same year of birth as the felon, and living in the same community, has voted. And that isn’t very likely.”

Presuming all the lists are accurate, the methodology is plausible enough.  But, while it “isn’t very likely” that most of these names overlap, it’s quite likely that at least some of them do.  It’s even more likely that there are errors in the felons list itself.

But we’re talking very tiny margins here.  The group found 341 felons voted illegally.   Even if that’s 100 percent accurate, the difference between that number and Franken’s 312 margin is only 29.  Are we sure that none of the felons voted for Norm Coleman or Dean Barkley?   That strikes me as extremely implausible in a race where 41.994% of the recorded votes went to Franken, 41.983% went to Coleman, and 15.150% went to Barkley.

Further, while I very much support running elections according to the rules, 341 votes in a contest in which 1.7 million people participated amounts to less than a rounding error.   It’s a dead certainty that more than 341 votes were cast in error or not counted through some vagary of the system.

The fact of the matter is that, in extremely close elections with large numbers of votes, we never know who “should” have won.   That’s why I opposed all the recounts and challenges in this race:  They begin with the false premise that we can get it precisely right and only serve to enhance bitterness on the part of the losing side.

Two widely-hyped reports have Wall Street firms donating less money to Democrats as payback for financial reform efforts. But a closer look reveals no such thing.

Politico‘s Ben White (“Wall St. plans payback for reg reform“):

With the financial reform bill likely to hit President Barack Obama’s desk in coming weeks, Wall Street’s top political players are warning Democrats to brace themselves for the next phase of the fight: the fundraising blowback.

Democrats who backed the bill are finding big banks far less eager to host fundraisers and provide campaign cash heading into the tightly contested midterm elections this fall, insiders say.

Some banks, in fact, have discussed not attending or hosting fundraisers at all for the next few months. Goldman Sachs is already staying away from all fundraisers, according to two sources. The company would not comment.

“I think at least in the short term there is going to be a great deal of frustration with people who were beating the hell out of us — then turning around and asking for money,” said a senior executive of a Wall Street bank.

One member coming in for special criticism: Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), viewed as largely unwilling to publicly defend her home state’s top industry but who continues to make fundraising requests, according to Wall Street insiders.

“Sometimes their chutzpah just has no bounds,” an executive said, referring to Gillibrand, who is on the ballot this fall. “People like her who didn’t stand up for us at all during the debate are certainly going to feel some pushback.”

T.W. Farnam and Paul Kane for WaPo (“Democratic campaign committees losing big Wall Street donors“):

A revolt among big donors on Wall Street is hurting fundraising for the Democrats’ two congressional campaign committees, with contributions from the world’s financial capital down 65 percent from two years ago.

The drop in support comes from many of the same bankers, hedge fund executives and financial services chief executives who are most upset about the financial regulatory reform bill that House Democrats passed last week with almost no Republican support. The Senate expects to take up the measure this month.

This fundraising free fall from the New York area has left Democrats with diminished resources to defend their House and Senate majorities in November’s midterm elections. Although the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee have seen just a 16 percent drop in overall donations compared with this stage of the 2008 campaign, party leaders are concerned about the loss of big-dollar donors. The two congressional committees have raised $49.5 million this election cycle from people giving $1,000 or more at a time, compared with $81.3 million at this point in the last election.

[...]

Reasons for the plummeting donations include concern about the economic recovery and the personalities of the campaign committee leaders, Democratic experts say. But the overwhelming factor is the rising anger among financial executives who think they have not been treated well based on their support of Democrats over the past four years, according to lawmakers, party strategists and fundraisers. Several of the party’s biggest New York donors declined through spokesmen to be interviewed. Some Democrats say pushing Wall Street reform is more important than any slippage in political donations.

None of this would be surprising if political contributions worked the way they do in theory, with firms and individuals casting their support to politicians and parties who they think best serve their interests.  But, in reality, major corporate donors tend to hedge their bets to curry favor with those with the power to regulate them, regardless of party.  Indeed, they typically donate to both candidates in a competitive race.

Further, given that Wall Street was at the heart of the financial crisis, we would expect aggregate donations to have plummeted compared to two years ago, before the crisis was at its worst.  Especially since this is an off-year election — and one in which Democrats are widely expected to get hammered! — compared to a much more competitive presidential cycle in 2008.

Deep into his provocative article, Smith tells us:

Signs of the shift of Wall Street cash away from Democrats this election cycle began to emerge this spring. In an analysis in April, the Wall Street Journal found that 52 percent of political giving by the 12 largest banks on Wall Street went to Republicans, a reversal from last year.

In the first 15 months of the most recent midterm cycle, in 2006, the Democratic and Republican parties — including candidates and campaign committees — each received $20 million from employees of securities and investment firms, according to an analysis done for POLITICO by the Center for Responsive Politics. During the first 15 months of the current cycle, Democrats raised close to $27 million from the industry — an increase probably attributable in part to the fact that Democrats hold the White House and both houses of Congress. But, despite being largely shut out of power, Republicans have raised $19.5 million this cycle, the CRP study found.

So . . . Democrats — who were in the ascendancy — increased their take in the previous cycle and are seeing a very modest return to the normal pattern in a year in which they’re extremely uncompetitive?

According to the center’s executive director, Sheila Krumholz, the Democrats’ recent advantage with Wall Street money could shrink further because the GOP is now viewed as having a better shot at taking back the House and because of blowback from the financial reform bill.

But that wouldn’t be a backlash but rather a shrewd analysis of where the smart money is. One doesn’t hedge one’s bets when faced with a sure thing.

Farnam and Kane bury this well beyond the point where most would have stopped reading:

Republicans, aware of Wall Street’s unease with their former Democratic allies, have tried to reap the benefits, to mixed results. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, made a much-touted trip to New York in April, and House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (Ohio) lunched with Dimon in late January.

The two Republican committees that are focused on congressional races have received $2.7 million from the New York area, slightly more than at this point in 2008 but less than the $4 million they raised at this point in the 2004 cycle when the party still controlled Congress.

The two Democratic committees also have more money on hand than their rivals for this fall’s elections — $46.2 million compared with $30.2 million.

“We’re aiming for parity,” said Rep. Pete Sessions (Tex.), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. He has a long way to go. Sessions had $12 million in the bank at the end of May, while the DCCC had $28.6 million. But Sessions finds himself in far better shape than his predecessor, who trailed Democrats by 8 to 1 in ready cash for the five-month sprint to finish the 2008 campaign season.

Again, that ain’t a backlash. And there’s more:

“There’s something fundamental going on, which is a complete disaffection with the committees,” said one New York donor in the finance industry who raised about $3 million for Democrats in the 2008 cycle. The fundraiser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the Democrats freely, said progressive donors were reluctant to give the party committees money out of belief that they often back the more conservative candidates. “Progressives have been throwing up their arms,” the fundraiser said. “There’s a tremendous amount of disaffection with the administration and how the caucuses have performed — or not performed.”

Now that’s a backlash, but not against Democrats and not against finreg. Rather, it’s yet another data point in a long trend away from strong political parties. With corporations recently freed from spending limits in individual races by the Supreme Court, one would expect that to take off.

Republican Charles Djou emerged victorious tonight in the special election to fill Hawaii’s vacancy in Congress, giving Hawaii its first GOP member of Congress in 20 years.

Djou won the special mail-in election with 39.7 percent of the vote in the final printout, released at 9 p.m.

The final printout represented 171,417 ballots returned by voters in the district, which stretches from Waikiki and downtown to Mililani.

Democrat Colleen Hanabusa was second at 31 percent, with Democrat Ed Case third at 27.8 percent.

“This is a momentous day,” Djou told a jubilant crowd at state party headquarters. “We have sent a message to the United States Congress. We have sent a message to the ex-governors. We have sent a message to the national Democrats! We have sent a message to the machine.

“We have told them that we will not stand idly by as our great nation is overburdened by too much taxes, too much debt and too much wasteful spending.”

Djou is Hawaii’s first GOP member of Congress since Pat Saiki, who represented the party from 1987 to 1991.

A quick look at the results should show fairly clearly why the celebration should perhaps be a little muted. But for the fact that there were two Democrats in the race, Djou clearly would’ve lost. This is a district that went for President Obama 70%-28% in the 2008 Election, and for it’s then-incumbent Democratic Congressman 77%-19%. With numbers like these, it’s hard to believe that Djou will be quite as fortunate come November.

My definition of broken is simple. It is a system in which Republicans will be voted out for doing the right thing (raising taxes when needed) and Democrats will be voted out for doing the right thing (cutting services when needed). When your political system punishes lawmakers for the doing the right things, it is broken. That is why we need political innovation that takes America’s disempowered radical center and enables it to act in proportion to its true size, unconstrained by the two parties, interest groups and orthodoxies that have tied our politics in knots.

The radical center is “radical” in its desire for a radical departure from politics as usual. It advocates: raising taxes to close our budgetary shortfalls, but doing so with a spirit of equity and social justice; guaranteeing that every American is covered by health insurance, but with market reforms to really bring down costs; legally expanding immigration to attract more job-creators to America’s shores; increasing corporate tax credits for research and lowering corporate taxes if companies will move more manufacturing jobs back onshore; investing more in our public schools, while insisting on rising national education standards and greater accountability for teachers, principals and parents; massively investing in clean energy, including nuclear, while allowing more offshore drilling in the transition. You get the idea.

I do!

The problem with this is manifold but, most obviously, as Ramesh Ponnuru points out, “The fundamental reason that politicians haven’t cut entitlements and raised middle-class taxes isn’t the power of hard-core liberals and conservatives. It’s that the public—including most people who could reasonably be described as moderates—doesn’t want them to do these things.”

Aside from overreading his own idiosyncratic policy preferences into a majority view — an amusing but forgivable error given how common it is in the pundit class — Friedman fundamentally misunderstands our institutions.  He wants to “Break the oligopoly of our two-party system,” despite the fact that two-party systems follow first-past-the-post, single member district setups like night follows day.   How?

First, let every state emulate California’s recent grass-roots initiative that took away the power to design Congressional districts from the state legislature and put it in the hands of an independent, politically neutral, Citizens Redistricting Commission. It will go to work after the 2010 census and reshape California’s Congressional districts for the 2012 elections. Henceforth, districts in California will not be designed to be automatically Democratic or Republican — so more of them will be competitive, so more candidates will only be electable if they appeal to the center, not just cater to one party.

While perhaps not in the spirit of the Framers, who clearly intended redistricting to be a political process, this is a reasonable enough idea.  So much so that at least 12 states — not including California — were doing it in 2000.  And several others have advisory committees and other extra-legislative inputs. (See, “The Experiences of Other States — A Comparison of Redistricting Commissions,” PDF.) I’m not sure there’s any evidence that those states are less partisan, much less more prone to tax hikes, benefit cuts, or passing others of Friedman’s pet programs.

Second, get states to adopt “alternative voting.” One reason independent, third-party, centrist candidates can’t get elected is because if, in a three-person race, a Democrat votes for an independent, and the independent loses, the Democrat fears his vote will have actually helped the Republican win, or vice versa. Alternative voting allows you to rank the independent candidate your No. 1 choice, and the Democrat or Republican No. 2. Therefore, if the independent does not win, your vote is immediately transferred to your second choice, say, the Democrat.

Again, I tend to like the idea, which I tend to think of as an “instant run-off” since the effect of “alternative voting” would almost always be to decide very close races, especially those where there’s no majority winner.  But let’s not kid ourselves: The impact would be to continue to elect Democrats and Republicans in almost every instance.  It’s rare, indeed, that a third party candidate is in second place in the polls going into Election Day.

Regardless of whether we pass these changes — and I see very little groundswell, indeed, for either, especially the second — we’re still going to have a very polarized polity.   We’re genuinely divided on major issues of war and peace, freedom and security, and cultural stability vs. tolerance.   And we live in a 24/7/365 permanent campaign conducted in a self-selected communications environment.

It’s safe to see that it’s going to take more than a few tweaks — or another six months — to turn us into a nation of Friedmans.

This anecdote is news to those who, like myself, haven’t read Palin’s Going Rogue.   But, as Robert Costa and Mel Bryant point out, Palin shared this anecdote on page 289.

I think it would have been funnier to work “O’Biden” into the debate intentionally.

A perhaps more newsy revelation that will be coming out in a new book Monday:

Until only days before the Republican Convention, Sen. John McCain was still thinking Sen. Joe Lieberman would be his running mate, until the “blowback” was so strong, they feared Lieberman would be rejected by the party, forcing the last-minute choice of Palin for the role. Schmidt said he believes the Obama-Biden victory would have been even more lopsided without Palin on the Republican ticket.

Despite my misgivings about Palin, all the polling I’ve seen confirms that.  She doubtless hurt McCain with some elite fence-sitters but she more than made up for it by energizing a base that was none-too-thrilled about McCain.   But I still think Lieberman would have been a game changer, both doubling down on the experience factor that was McCain’s main non-Vietnam-related selling point and sending a powerful signal that the ticket would work across the aisle.

Barack Obama began his presidency with an open hand toward the man he had just defeated in a race that was at times bitter.

“There are few Americans who understand this need for common purpose and common effort better than John McCain,” said Obama at an inauguration-eve tribute dinner to his former foe.

But in the year since that evening of comity and collegiality, McCain has emerged as one of the leading critics of the new president. On foreign policy, his traditional area of expertise, and domestic affairs, where McCain has shown new passion, the 73-year-old Arizonan is making it plain that he has no plans to serve out his years in the rank-and-file, as a politician known more for what he lost than what he will yet accomplish.

I, for one, never saw this coming.