Photograph by Mic Smith/AP Photo

Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, center, speaks with voters, Joan Cobb, at left, and her father Harold Turner, at right, and reporters at Orlando’s Pizza in Daniel Island, S.C., on May 6, 2013.

Count Mark Sanford as a vote against expanding background checks for gun-buyers.

Count Sanford as a vote against the immigration bill from a bipartisan group of senators.

That’s if the vote-count in South Carolina’s special congressional election today goes the way of the former governor, a Republican whose tenure was marred by an extramarital affair with an Argentine, or Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch, sister of Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert — in a district that leans heavily Republican, but where the latest public opinion polling showed a race to0 close to call.

Sanford says he wants this contest settled on the issues. He credits a recent debate with his Democratic opponent for bringing some of those issues to the fore — his opposition to “Obamacare” versus his opponent’s support, and more.

He is counting on those issues trumping the tale of the Appalachian Trail, in which the former governor’s office in 2009 told the public he had gone hiking when he actually had gone abroad.

“We finally began to talk about issues” as opposed to his background, going back to 2009, he said this morning in an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” The hosts said Colbert had been invited for an Election Day interview as well, but declined. “In essence we’ve had a conversation here at home, not only about my strengths and weaknesses,” he said, but also about his belief in protecting taxpayers.

“We’re all going to make mistakes in life,” Sanford said of his own. “We all have feet of clay.” Responding to co-host Mika Brzezinski’s question about how the public can trust him going forward after the Appalachian-Argentinian episode, Sanford turned the question on her: “I guarantee you’ve made some personal mistakes in your life.”

If elected, the former governor and congressman was asked, how would he vote on the background check bill that failed to get 60 votes in the Senate.

“I’m a big Second Amendment person,” Sanford said. “I would have voted no.”

On the immigration bill that Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and others are advancing in the Senate: “ think we could learn from history,” he said, pointing to the last major revision of immigration law in 1986 when 3 million undocumented immigrants were legalized with a promise of better border enforcement. The nation needs to start with enforcement first, he said — “I would not support the bill in its present form.”

(That bill, in its present form, requires the Department of Homeland Security to develop and enact a plan for 90-percent effectiveness in security of the highest-risk border sectors before any of the 11 million undocumented already in the country are granted new legal rights.)

Asked how he is feeling about this five-month contest after a crowded party primary, being outspent by the Democrat and forced into a close contest in a district that should be an easy walk for a Republican, Sanford said: “Worn out. All those things you feel at the end of a campaign,” he said. “You get ultimately to the day of judgment… You feel a mixture of calm… And worn out.”

Original post is Sanford ‘Worn Out’ on ‘Judgment Day’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Brynn Anderson/The Palm Beach Post/Zuma Press

Morning Joe’s host Joe Scarborough, center, shares a laugh with show guests in Boca Raton.

Joe Scarborough is a lot of things.

He is a former Republican congressman from Florida’s far-West, far-right Panhandle.

He is a successful co-host of the most popular morning program on cable news, “Morning Joe.”

He’s a doting father and passable guitar player, too.

And now, by his own count, he’s also a “loser.”

I just posted my 20,000th tweet. It’s official. I’m a loser.

— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) May 6, 2013

Today, Scarborough — who was missing in action this morning on the set of that MSNBC program, where co-host Mika Brzezinski was busy launching her new book about the addiction of junk food — has been busy tweeting about Al Gore’s wealth, a story that Bloomberg News explored today, and which New York magazine is weighing in on as well. It’s the lead item on the Drudge Report. Which makes it quite tweetable.

Damn! RT @chuckmeg @joenbcIf W had stolen your election you might be as rich as #AlGore

— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) May 6, 2013

All of which adds up to one successful promotional media strategy for a self-styled loser.

Original post is Joe Scarborough: ‘Loser’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images

Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., right, check on judges former Rep. Vin Weber, R-Minn., left, and House Chaplain Patrick Conroy during the second annual ‘hotdish’ competition in the Capitol Visitor Center, featuring casserole-like dishes from members of the Minnesota Congressional Delegation, on March 7, 2012. The dishes of Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., and Rep. Chip Cravaack, R-Minn., tied for first place in the competition.

Can you smell what Congress is cooking?

Tater-tots and more, washed down with Jell-O.

Not to mention Rep. Michele Bachmann’s volcanic “Metro” dish with a whole can of sweet corn, or Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s hold-the-SPAM (not to be confused with e-mail) pepperoni special.

Al Franken, the Democratic senator from Minnesota, has a well-known sense of humor harking to his SNL days. (And who can forget his 2006 pre-Senate remarks about Dick Cheney shooting a hunting partner in the face?)

But who knew he also had a chef’s eye bigger than the average person’s stomach?

The Minnesota delegation’s bipartisan “Hotdish-Off” plays on a fine Minnesota tradition — the “hotdish,” usually, as it’s explained at Franken’s official Senate Web-site, a casserole that “goes real good” with Jell-O or a salad.

In the annual contest initiated by Franken two years ago, his own “Mom’s Mahnomin Madness Hotdish” tied for first place with a former congressman’s “Minnesota Wild Strata Hotdish” last year.

Klobuchar took top honors in 2011 with a “Taconite Tater-Tot Hotdish.”

In the latest dish-off, served up on April 10, Rep. Tim Walsh’s “Hermann the German Hotdish” (brats and a bottle of Schell’s beer are the keys) captured first-place, competing with Rep. Rick Nolan’s “Real Deal Danger Ranger Hotdish” (venison, presumably not roadk kill, and wild rice) and Bachmann’s “Southwest Metro Hotdish” (something to do with a can of Green Giant sweet corn and taco seasoning — not to mention two pounds of the ever-popular tater tots).

Rep. Keith Ellison weighed in with a “Juicy Lucy Hotdish” (crumbled hamburger buns, ground beef, mushrooms  and cheese),” and Rep. Betty McCollum cooked “Beef, Beer and Biscuits” in her hotdish.

And Klobuchar was back this year with her “Hormel `I Can’t Believe it’s not SPAM’ Pepperoni Pizza Hotdish”), a mix of donkey meat, hamburger and Ronzoni rotini.

As for Franken, he stuck with Willmar Stew, which he assures us goes well with a Vikings game and, as everyone should know, requires a dutch oven and two pounds of Cannelini beans soaked overnight, turkey thighs — duck or pheasant will do — pork roast plus sausage, bacon and butter and a medley of vegetables (for health) salted to taste.

All the hotdish recipes are here.

And that Cheney talk is here.

Original post is Tater Tots and Pepperoni (Hold the SPAM) — What Congress is Cooking by Political Capital.

Early this morning, a bipartisan group of eight senators who have been working behind closed doors for months on the sort of comprehensive immigration overhaul that President Barack Obama has been seeking filed their bill in the Senate.

Later this morning, a bipartisan group of eight House members who have been talking behind the scenes for years issued a statement:

“Americans want to see the nation’s broken immigration system fixed, and they know it will take bipartisanship to solve this problem in a sensible and rational way. This week, a bipartisan group of senators stepped forward to introduce their proposal, and we applaud their effort. We are also working on a good faith, bipartisan effort in the House. We believe we will soon agree on a reasonable, common-sense plan to finally secure our borders and strengthen our economy with a tough but fair process that respects the rule of law so immigrants can contribute to our country.”

Later today, it looks like the Democratic-run Senate will fail to muster the votes to adopt even the slimmest, stripped-down version of the gun controls that the Obama White House proposed in the aftermath of the Newtown shootings.

More bipartisan groups, of sorts, are in the spotlight:

– Democrats Mark Begich of Alaska, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Max Baucus of Montana, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota — five from red states, including four seeking reelection next year — unwilling to support a bipartisan bill advanced by Republican Sens. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Joe Manchin of West Virginia expanding background checks for gun-buyers.

– Republicans Mark Kirk of Illinois, Susan Collins of Maine and maybe John McCain of Arizona may be willing to support it — few of the 16 Republicans who voted to advance it to debate last week. So there the bill may die.

What makes the proponents of immigration in both parties so confident of success this year, on a measure that has been impossible to move for the better part of the last decade? And prospects for a simple gun bill — supported by nine in 10 of all Americans surveyed — so dim?

2014 and 2016.

It’s good for the Republican Party in 2016, most agree, to tackle immigration reform following the drubbing the party took in 2012.

It’s bad for the senators facing reelection in 2014 in red states — Democrats and Republicans alike — to support a bill that the National Rifle Association so strenuously opposes. Steve Schmidt, a Republican strategist who tried to get McCain elected president in 2008, said this morning on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that those senators simply are not willing to risk it.

Republicans who are risking the support of their party’s base on either issue figure they get “one hall pass” this year, said David Axelrod, who helped get Obama elected in ’08 and ’12, appearing on the same morning show, where he is now a contributor. They’re taking that pass on immigration, but not guns: because one’s good for their party, they figure, the other bad for themselves.

Original post is Republican Immigration ‘Hall Pass’ — 2016 and 2014 Explain it All by Political Capital.

Photograph by Timorthy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images

A man looks at a shotgun during the 8th Annual East Coast Fine Arms Show in Stamford, Connecticut.

Updated at 1:15 pm EDT

Credit Sens. Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey for doing what too few lawmakers of opposing parties do these days.

Talking.

The Democrat from West Virginia and Republican from Pennsylvania have just announced their agreement on a plan for improving background checks for gun-buyers. Manchin, a former West Virginia governor and A-rated member of the National Rifle Association, was among the first in his party to speak out about the need for new controls in the aftermath of the Newtown shootings.

Yet the background checks fall short of what even Manchin suggested was necessary: restrictions on assault-style weapons and mega-ammunition clips like the Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle and 30-round magazines employed in the firing of 154 rounds at a Connecticut elementary school in December, killing 20 first-graders and six educators.

The Senate does not have the votes for such measures, though Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says he does have the 60 votes needed to squash any Republican filibuster when he seeks a vote tomorrow advancing the Senate’s gun bill to debate. Americans support tougher background checks by 9-1.

The Manchin-Toomey deal exempts the transfer of guns among family members, and states that there will be no national gun registry as a part of expanded background checks — expanding them for buyers at gun-shows, which account for nearly half of all transactions, and for gun-buyers shopping online.

The agreement will “prevent criminals and the mentally ill from getting firearms and harming people,” Manchin told reporters today, with Toomey at his side. Toomey added: “I don’t consider criminal background checks to be gun control — it’s just common sense.”

Twelve relatives of the 26 victims at Sandy Hook Elementary School are in Washington today to press Congress for action. Today, they saw a bipartisan announcement by a couple of NRA-A-rated lawmakers, and tomorrow they’ll see the start of a debate in the Senate about what Americans can do about all this.

It was said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” today that Manchin and Toomey were seen talking last night at a surprise birthday party for host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman from Florida.

The families of Newtown hope that everyone keeps talking.

They plan to join Manchin and Toomey this afternoon in an appearance at Manchin’s Senate office. The families and senators are expected to have more to say about the bipartisan effort to close loopholes in the so-called Brady law — the background checks that were legislated after James Brady, press secretary to President Ronald Reagan, was severely wounded in an assassination attempt on the president.

Original post is Manchin, Toomey: ‘Common Sense’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Zbigniew Brzezinski speaks during a forum on U.S. and Saudi relations in Washington, DC.

This is @zbig:

Zbigniew Brzezinski, the stern-voiced former National Security Adviser and a trustee at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, has started tweeting.

About cyber attacks.

In his debut today on Twitter, ”Dad,” as daughter Mika introduces him frequently on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” and the author of “Strategic Vision,” is pictured in the Oval Office a few decades ago with his former boss, President Jimmy Carter:

In our new age of cyber attacks, for my first tweet, some thoughts on how to prevent “Anonymous Wars.” #anonymouswars on.ft.com/14IJ8lD

— Zbigniew Brzezinski (@zbig) April 4, 2013

Original post is Zbig News: Tweeting on Cyber Attacks by Political Capital.

It was Bobby Jindal who warned his party to “stop being the stupid party.”

And Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, said today that his party needs to stop running around saying “biologically stupid things” — and avoid the “traveling circus” of last year’s 20-plus debates.

Priebus, overseeing a move to reset the party for the next round of elections, says: “It’s all about branding, marketing, telling a story and the history of the Republican Party.”

“One, I think mechanically we’ve got to be a permanent campaign,” he said, pointing to the success of Mitt Romney’s campaign in contacting more voters than a nominee traditionally had — yet noting that the Democrats is already out there in communities today with clipboards collecting data.

“It’s tone as well,” Priebus said in an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” today. “It’s not necessarily what you say, but it’s how you say it, and if you go around and you say a lot of biologically stupid things and you poison the well and you create a caricature, or you at least allow a caricature to become reality, it hurts your ability to win an election.”

It was Todd Akin, the Republican candidate for Senate in Missouri, who famously introduced the concept of “legitimate rape” during the 2012 election campaigns and suggested that rape is less likely to result in pregnancy. He apologized for all that — “the fact is, rape can lead to pregnancy,” Akin allowed — but not before sinking his party’s hopes of taking the seat from Sen. Claire McCaskill, the Democratic incumbent.

Priebus’s party has been handed a prescription for changing direction and tone by a group that recommended hundreds of ideas.

“We need to break a few pieces of China in order to get some things straight,” he said. “One is our tone, our mechanics — who disagrees that our digital data needs to be updated?”

The roadmap calls for fewer presidential party debates and an earlier convention. The party doesn’t want to see its “candidates run around in a traveling circus” doing 20 debates, “slicing and dicing each other,” he said.

Presumably, its candidates next time around will also be able to name the three agencies of the federal government they’d cut — “oops.” 

And that brings us back to Jindal, the Louisiana governor who delighted the audience at this year’s Gridiron Club dinner with more talk about the party that set out to defeat itself last year.

“They say this is a place where you can come and tell jokes about the president, poke fun at yourself, set political ambition aside and just generally say anything you want,” Jindal, a supporter of Republican Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign for president, said in his stand-up routine — “kind of like the Romney campaign.”

Original post is Priebus: ‘Traveling Circus’ Out — ‘Biologically Stupid’ Talk Forbidden by Political Capital.

Photograph by Scott Olson/Getty Images

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush speaks during the final day of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida.

Jeb Bush appears “locked and loaded for bear,” fellow Republican and Floridian Joe Scarborough says.

The former Florida governor’s run of interviews with a new book on immigration is the clearest sign that another Bush is looking at a run for the White House in 2016, the MSNBC talk-show host and former congressman from Pensacola says.

The tip-off, he says, is Bush’s modified stance on what Congress should offer for the millions of undocumented immigrants already living in the U.S. — long a supporter of a pathway to citizenship, Bush now says in his book, “Immigration Wars,” that the undocumented should be limited to a path to legal residency. Yet, he said in many interviews this week, he could support that citizenship path if done right — which is precisely what Sen. Marco Rubio, another Floridian viewed as a 2016 Republican prospect, is doing.

“This to me seems to be the greatest sign that Jeb Bush is looking to run in 2016,” Scarborough said.

Jeb Bush 2016? video.msnbc.msn.com/morning-joe/51…

— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) March 6, 2013

Bush, addressing the question with us, maintained that he is trying to make immigration reform more appealing to conservatives, while open to compromise.

The reversal of course drew an onslaught of headlines and commentary about flip-flopping. Yet it was another comment Bush made at the start of his run through the media this week that drew as much attention.

He said he has not ruled out running for president in 2016.

Still, this wasn’t all that different from what he said last year, when he told Charlie Rose that 2012 probably was his “window of opportunity”  – while that didn’t mean it was the last window.

“This was probably my time,” Bush said in that interview in June on CBS News’ “This Morning.”

“There’s a window of opportunity, in life, and for all sorts of reasons,” said Bush,  former two-term Florida governor, brother of former President George W. Bush and son of former President George H.W. Bush. This doesn’t mean there couldn’t be another window, he suggested.

“Have you made a decision that you don’t want to be president?” CBS host Rose asked Bush.

“I have not made that decision,”  Bush said.

Original post is Jeb Bush’s 2016 Window: Still Open by Political Capital.

Photograph by William Thomas Cain/Getty Images

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush speaks to the media after being named Chairman of the National Constitution Center’s Board of Trustees in Philadelphia.

Updated again at 7 am EST, March 5

Jeb Bush’s new book, “Immigration Wars,” is billed as a “call for systemic reform.”

In announcing the book last fall with co-author Clint Bolick, a research fellow with the Hoover Institution, the former governor of Florida, brother of one president and son of another said he hoped it would “help point the way to resolving a vitally important issue that has suffered from a colossal failure of political leadership on both sides of the partisan divide.”

In initially withholding his endorsement from any of his party’s candidates for president before his own state’s primary election in 2012, Bush was sending a message that the debate over immigration had grown too polarizing, alienating an important and growing electorate.

During the campaign, later signing on with nominee Mitt Romney and speaking for him at the Republican National Convention, Bush spoke proudly of what his older brother had attempted to achieve with immigration reform. Romney too shelved his own send-’em-home rhetoric from the party’s primaries.

“My brother attempted to do it… He had the votes,” Bush said of immigration legislation that would have enabled undocumented immigrants to seek a path to citizenship — he said this over breakfast at the Tampa convention with editors and reporters from Bloomberg News and the Washington Post. “We wouldn’t be talking about the issue if we’d had immigration reform in 2006.”

His party, he said, should evolve from the GOP to the “Grand Solutions Party.”

Yet, as the immigration debate of 2013 gets underway, with Republicans and Democrats in both the Senate and House working on plans for the comprehensive sort of reform that Bush advocates, he stops short of endorsing one of the tenets of the past attempt at reform and the newest one as well: Offering a path, or roadmap, to citizenship for many of the 11 million undocumented immigrants already living in the United States.

“No comprehensive immigration plan can ignore the many millions of people living illegally in the United States,” Bush and Bolick write in their book being released this week. At the same time, while trying to “put ourselves in the shoes of people who have entered the country illegally,” the nation cannot allow people to “immigrate illegally without consequence while millions of others wait to enter through lawful means.” This, they contend, would only create “a strong incentive for illegal immigration.”

The issue, they write, has two components, the adults who entered illegally, and those who came as children.

“We propose a path to permanent legal resident status for those who entered our country illegally as adults and who have committed no additional crimes of significance,” they write. “Permanent residency in this context, however, should not lead to citizenship. It is absolutely vital to the integrity of our immigration system that actions have consequences — in this case, that those who violated the laws can remain but cannot obtain the cherished fruits of citizenship.”

It’s different for children, they write — they were brought here under the control of adults and are not responsible for their wrongdoing. They embrace the goals of the DREAM Act, offering citizenship for children brought here illegally and who have lived here at least five years. And children born in the U.S. of illegal immigrant parents already have the right of citizenship.

On the question of citizenship for adults, it would appear that Bush has evolved in his thinking from last summer. In an interview with Charlie Rose in June 2012 he acknowledged that his support for a path to citizenship for the undocumented placed him at odds with many in his party. “You have to deal with the issue,” Bush said then. “You can’t ignore it. And so, either a path to citizenship — which I would support and that does put me probably out of the mainstream of most conservatives — or a path to legalization, a path to residency of some kind.”

Update: Last night, Bush explained that he hasn’t had a change of heart, and that indeed he’d remain open to compromise on the issue of citizenship as it’s debated.

“My views on this are based on the principle that those that come illegally should not be treated better than those that have waited patiently to come legally and never get called to come,” Bush replied in an e-mail to our question about his thinking on the question. “If a compromise is done dealing with this principle, then I could support such a compromise. That has been my view. No change of heart. We have written a book to try to pursuade conservatives to engage in the comprehensive reform debate.”

And then this morning, on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Bush said that he could support a bill providing a path to citizenship provided it were crafted in a way that didn’t encourage more illegal immigration. His book doesn’t propose that, he said, because he views his plan as a “clearer” way forward, yet, yes, he could support a well-constructed citizenship path.

It’s not only Hispanic voters with whom the Republican Party must recraft its tone and appeal, he added. It’s also Asian-American voters – the real “canary in the coal mine,” they gave three-quarters of their vote to Obama last year, he noted of the exit polls. Fair or not, he said, these generally more educated and affluent voters feel “stiff-armed” by Republicans.

As he first explained his thinking about residency and citizenship yesterday on NBC’s “Today” Show, Bush made some headlines in Washington and elsewhere: Romney, he said, had “put himself in a box” in the primaries by “trying to (out-do) conservatives… and he never really recovered from it.” At the same time, he said: “There has to be some difference between people who come here legally and illegally.”

Most notable of the day’s headlines: The Huffington Post’s, which suggests that another Republican who could figure prominently in his party’s presidential election contests has reversed positions — the headline spelling Immigration Reform backwards.

Bush said on “Today” that he hadn’t ruled out a run in 2016.

As he addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington next week, conservatives will be watching the path — a fine line, perhaps — that Bush treads between residency and citizenship on an issue that remains critical to his party’s successes at the polls.

Original post is Jeb Bush’s Path to Immigration Reform: Walking a Line by Political Capital.

Photograph by Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg

Repairs are made to the USS Bulkeley as it is docked at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia, on Feb. 28, 2013.

As President Barack Obama gathers leaders of both parties of both houses of Congress today at the White House, before the near-midnight point at which the White House will have to order an across-the-board sequestration of discretionary spending, a former White House aide says an “accident in slow motion’ is about to start.

Cuts in Defense and other discretionary pending won’t be felt immediately, past advisers say.

Melody Barnes, former domestic policy adviser for the Obama administration, said today on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that the cuts will play out more like a “slow-moving accident.”

”This is going to be a slow-rolling deal,” David Axelrod, former White House adviser and campaign strategist for Obama, said on the morning program with Barnes.

Some communities will see an impact, said Axelrod, who also is a political contributor for MSNBC now, but most communities won’t feel it. That’s a more measured prediction than what the administration has been making about the severity of the budget cuts. The public, Axelrod added, is suffering some “fatigue” over Washington’s budget battles.

And many people, he said, have “tuned out.”

Bloomberg’s Todd Shields and Lorraine Woellert report today on cuts that won’t be “immediately apparent.”

Original post is Sequestration ‘Slow-Motion Accident’ by Political Capital.