Monday Open Thread [6.24.13]

If not Hillary or Joe Biden in 2016 for the Democrats, then who? I’ve pretty much decided that it will be Martin O’Malley for me:

“He was a middle-class, suburban Washington kid who chose to build a political career in one of the grittiest, most troubled cities in America, with all the challenges and risks that entailed. He spent eight years on the Baltimore City Council and seven as mayor before moving to Annapolis to begin two terms as governor in January 2007. O’Malley has been closely identified with statistics-based governing in both of his executive positions: CitiStat to improve management and services in Baltimore; StateStat to do the same across Maryland; even BayStat to revive the Chesapeake Bay. Fusing passion with dispassion, he has deployed numbers to fight crime and pollution, to win approval for gambling casinos and gun restrictions, to pass tuition breaks for illegal immigrant students, and even to repeal the death penalty.”

“At the same time, over the past few years, he has steadily ascended in national politics–as a key supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton and later Barack Obama in 2008, as chairman of the Democratic Governors Association in 2011 and 2012, and as a prominent media spokesman for Obama and Democrats during the 2012 presidential campaign. He continues in a DGA leadership role as finance chairman, an ideal job for someone who might need to raise a lot of money for a presidential campaign in a year or two.”

I am starting to have some respect for Senator Lindsay Graham, Republican of South Carolina. For it seems to me that he has decided, and has said as much, that he is going to do and say what he thinks is right and damn the radical tea party base of his party that is sure to primary him. He is saying things like this more and more:

“Schumer’s been incredible. He’s a worthy successor to Ted Kennedy, and that’s saying a lot.”

Now, in the neandrathal minds of the tea party, you don’t laud either Chuck Schumer or Ted Kennedy. You dance on the latter’s grave while you dig one for the former. So these comments are not going to go over well.

Several weekend polls put Representative Ed Markey (D-MA) up by 10 or more over Republican Gabriel Gomez in the Massachusetts special election to replace former Senator and current Secretary of State John Kerry. But there is also a Get-out-the-Vote alarm going off up there, since special elections in the summer during family vacations are always a nightmare. If the Dems turn out, Markey wins.

E. J. Dionne on the surprise defeat of the Farm Bill last week that once again exposed John Boehner as the weakest House Speaker in the history of time:

“[R]ep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) exposed hypocrisy on the matter of government handouts by excoriating Republican House members who had benefited from farm subsidies but voted to cut food stamps…The collapse of the farm bill will generally be played as a political story about Boehner’s failure to rally his own right wing. That’s true as far as it goes and should remind everyone of the current House leadership’s inability to govern. But this is above all a story about morality: There is something profoundly wrong when a legislative majority is so eager to risk leaving so many Americans hungry. That’s what the bill would have done, and why defeating it was a moral imperative.”