Tim Griffin, Barbara Comstock and Karl Rove (Tim Griffin for Congress, Comstock for Delegate, White House photo)

For a candidate making his first bid for office, Tim Griffin couldn’t be in better shape. One week after announcing his campaign against Rep. Vic Snyder (D-Ark.), the incumbent in Arkansas’s most Democratic-leaning district, Griffin had raised $130,000. A Public Policy Polling survey released last week found Griffin only one point behind Snyder, a statistical tie with a congressman who did not even draw a challenger last year.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

“When I go around the district here in Arkansas,” Griffin told TWI before attending a D.C. fundraiser last week, “what I hear about is jobs, private sector versus the government, the national debt, and this health care bill.”

Asked again if his experience working the Bush administration ever comes up with voters, Griffin was insistent. “No,” he said. “No, no, no.”

Griffin’s experience isn’t unique. Nearly a year after George W. Bush left office, some of the Republican strategists who built their reputations on his campaigns, or in his White House, have re-emerged as prominent pundits, legal thinkers and strategists, and some have made the move back into the electoral arena. So far, they’ve had considerable success in winning and in setting up credible operations for 2010. In Minnesota, Sara Taylor, Bush’s former director of the Office of Political Affairs, is advising Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s (R-Minn.) PAC. In Virginia, Republican lawyer Barbara Comstock — who worked for John Ashcroft’s Justice Department and who helped defend I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby — won a tight election for a seat in the House of Delegates. That was a victory that some Democrats see as a prelude to a run for Congress when Comstock’s mentor Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) retires.

It’s a perplexing situation for Democrats. Bush’s presidency had staggered to an end. His approval rating did not rise above 50 percent for the last three years of his tenure; he did not hit the campaign trail for his party’s national ticket in 2008, and only addressed the Republican National Convention via a satellite feed. Democrats felled Republican after Republican in 2008 by putting their headshots next to Bush’s. In the year that’s followed, though, Democrats have watched former Vice President Dick Cheney (and his daughter Liz) resurface as a conversation-driving critic of their foreign policy. Bush Justice Department lawyers like John Yoo and Jay Bybee have thrived in their perches in academia and on the federal bench, respectively. In this year’s race for governor in New Jersey, Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine attacked his Republican opponent, Chris Christie, for having political conversations with Karl Rove while still serving as a U.S. attorney. Christie won the election anyway.

If there’s a way to turn service under Bush into a losing issue for Republican candidates, Democrats haven’t figured it out. Comstock’s upset victory in Virginia, in a race where both candidates spent nearly $1 million, came after months of attacks on her political service. Democrats went after the candidate’s ties with gimmicks like “Barbara Comstock’s lost resume” — experience like “initiated negative campaigning ’storyline’ against Al Gore,” references like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. TV ads and direct mail portrayed Comstock alongside the likes of Cheney and former Attorney General John Ashcroft. And Comstock didn’t wilt under the pressure. She welcomed backing from Republican allies up to and including Rove, who appeared at a September fundraiser on her behalf.

“Elections are always about the future and responding to what people are doing in their everyday lives,” Comstock told TWI, while also saying that she did not want to dwell too much on the attacks against her. “When you don’t do that, well, you look at some of these past elections for Republicans when people didn’t feel we were responding on those economic issues and we lost. In Virginia, we dealt with those real kitchen table issues.”

Democrats viewed Comstock’s win as insult added to an already injurious election night, a defeat that could have been prevented if she hadn’t been allowed to re-make her image. “Comstock ran an effective race,” said Matt Mansell, executive director of the Virginia House Democratic caucus. “She started communicating early and got the best of both worlds by presenting herself as a solutions-oriented moderate candidate while still getting fund-raising help from Ted Olsen and Mitt Romney and Karl Rove.” The party’s mistake, said Mansell, was not “to define her earlier as a Bush political hack.”

Not surprisingly, Comstock’s success has given a little bit of cheer to other veterans of the Bush administration who have been tarred by the association. Hans van Spakovsky, who was pilloried by Democrats over his work as voting section counsel to the assistant attorney general of the Civil Rights Division, told TWI that his career options were limited by those attacks.

“They were so effectively able to ruin my professional reputation as a lawyer,” said Spakovsky, who now works at the conservative Heritage Foundation, “despite the fact that they were wrong on all of these issues. I couldn’t get confirmed to the FEC. When I was looking for jobs last year, it was very clear to me that at least one of the law firms I talked to in town blackballed me because I was in the Bush administration. It’s a real problem in Washington today that people on the left side of the aisle can’t seem to disagree with people without going after that.”

Tim Griffin’s re-entry into politics, said Spakovsky, was a source of new optimism. “I wish Tim Griffin the best of luck,” he said. “I’m happy to see people who are determined, like him, start to fight back.”

If local Democrats have their way, Griffin’s comeback won’t take him all the way to Congress. “If he’s the nominee against Vic Snyder,” said Mariah Hattah, executive director of Arkansas Democratic Party, “it would pit a proven public servant against a campaign operative who worked for Karl Rove, the master of the dark arts of campaigning.” Hattah getting into a striking degree of specificity for a campaign that is still taking shape, suggested that state Democrats would make voters aware of the “caging” scandal that dogged Griffin before he left the U.S. attorney’s office. “No one likes likes voter suppression,” she said.

David Wasserman, the House race editor of the Cook Political Report, said that Democrats’ chances at making Griffin toxic depend wholly on the political environment. “In any other year that line on the resume would be a huge vulnerability,” said Wasserman. ‘But when the environment is good, it’s like Democrats are wearing velcro, and the Republicans are wearing teflon.”

In the meantime, Griffin is keeping his head down, raising funds and leaving aside much talk of his resume in the Bush years.

“I’ve done a lot of things in my career,” Griffin told TWI. “I’ve been in the army for 13 years. I’m a major. I went to Iraq. I’ve been an army prosecutor, and I’ve done a lot of things. And whatever I’ve done, I’ve just tried to do a really good job. Look — that’s politics. I don’t expect anything different. I’d say that if you get an opportunity to serve your president and your country, you take it.”

After six weeks of drafting a bill behind closed doors, the Majority has produced a bill that increases premiums, raises taxes, and slashes Medicare by half a trillion dollars to create a new government program. This is not what the American people want. I don’t believe they think this is reform. This is not the direction to take.

It’s a little early to grasp everything that’s contained in the bill, but it’s worth noting a few things about the criticisms.

1) The primary tax increases in the Senate bill target only the wealthiest Americans. One bumps Medicare’s payroll tax from 1.45 percent to 1.95 percent for individuals earning more than $200,000 per year, and families earning more than $250,000, while another applies a 40 percent tax to insurance plans costing more than $8,500 for individuals, or $23,000 for families (excepting a number of blue-collar jobs). Those aren’t typically middle-class salaries or insurance rates.

2) The largest chunk of the Medicare cuts ($118 billion worth over 10 years) don’t target Medicare, but the private insurance plans that the government pays to cover Medicare patients. That program, called Medicare Advantage, costs taxpayers roughly 14 percent more per senior than the traditional program. The MA “cuts” actually just scale back the insurance company subsidies so that rates are more closely aligned with those under traditional Medicare.

3) Many of the proposed cuts in Medicare are designed to discourage provider behaviors that lead to needless treatments and expenses. One provision, for example, “cuts” payments to hospitals for treating conditions that were acquired after the patient arrived at the facility.

4) Many other Medicare “cuts” are not really cuts at all, but proposals to slow growth in projected spending. That is, the raise for some providers might be reduced, but it will be a raise nonetheless.

Last year, the Bush administration proposed hundreds of billions of similar Medicare “cuts.”

President George W. Bush with judicial nominees Priscilla Owen, Janice Rogers Brown and Carolyn Kuhl in 2003 (whitehouse.gov archives)

On Tuesday, a few hours before the Senate would break an eight-month filibuster on the nomination of Judge David Hamilton to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) reflected on how his party had decided to delay that vote.

“Before [President George W.] Bush left office,” DeMint told TWI, “I went to a reception at the White House for all the nominees, judicial and otherwise, who had not had votes. Many had not even had hearings. I met members of their families, whose lives had been on hold for years. Republicans had made the argument, for years, that we shouldn’t filibuster judicial nominees.” DeMint smiled. “We lost that argument.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

“The president has shown us, with his nominees and his czars, [that he's] not looking for mainstream America with these nominees,” said DeMint.

When Hamilton’s nomination began to flag, it called into question the strategy of trying to navigate the Senate with low-key nominees. Holds and filibusters have put 38 Obama nominees–some for the bench, most for administration jobs–in limbo. It’s in that context that the White House and Senate Democrats are reported to be looking at a strategy shift–coming up with a massive list of judicial nominees to “flood the pipeline” and complicate Republican filibusters.

It’s a strategy that conservative activists understand very well. In conversations with TWI, some of the key conservatives who helped get Bush’s nominees through the Senate expressed surprise at how often President Obama’s nominees–judicial and otherwise–have been dragged down by Senate holds and filibusters.

“When you have a popular president and 60 seats in the Senate, you should be able to do whatever you want,” said one Bush administration veteran who worked on pushing through judicial nominations, speaking anonymously so as not to offend friends still in Washington. “Insofar as they can’t get what they want, it’s entirely up to them. Why the hell can’t Dawn Johnsen [the nominee to head the Office of Legal Counsel in the United States Department of Justice] get a vote? They’ve decided not to use the political capital to get her confirmed.”

Rachel Brand, a former associate counsel in the Bush White House, said that the Republican administration had more success in filling the bench and getting nominees confirmed because it proposed so many nominees, and because much of their attention was put to the effort. “If they had been pulling out all the stops and working as hard as possible to get as many nominations as fast possible,” said Brand, “they might have done the same as us.”

Many of the conservative activists who are working to bolster–and provide cover for–Republican filibusters of Obama nominees played the opposite role in the Bush years. Curt Levey, who left the Department of Justice in to campaign for the confirmation of Supreme Court nominees John Roberts and Samuel Alito, currently leads the Committee for Justice. There, he’s produced sharp-edged critiques of Obama nominees, some of them finding their way into the arguments Republicans made for filibusters. “On the surface,” wrote Levey in a Tuesday memo to conservatives about David Hamilton, “Judge Hamilton’s ruling has nothing to do with Nidal Hasan’s violent rampage. But neither could have taken place without a religious double standard borne of political correctness.”

If Democrats are having problems responding to this, Levey told TWI, a major reason is Obama’s unwillingness to make public pushes for his own nominees. “Whether it’s the Afghanistan decision or health care, he likes to remain above the fray,” said Levey. “When it’s really a problem for the White House, they’re driving the strategy–they’re trying to communicate it to senators and outside groups. Obama’s not doing either of those things.”

A look at Bush’s approach to stalled nominations reveals a stark difference with Obama’s approach. Starting in 2001 and ending in 2003, Democrats–who controlled first 51, then 49 Senate seats–filibustered Miguel Estrada, a nominee for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. On February 11, the president opened a press conference on welfare by talking about the Estrada nomination; he followed up that day with a statement asking for an “up-or-down vote.” February 22, 2003, he devoted the weekly presidential radio address to the Estrada nomination, and accused Democrats of “partisan politics” that were “unfaithful to the Senate’s own obligations.” On February 26, talk about Estrada dominated Bush’s speech to the Latino Coalition. On March 6, Bush released a statement calling the Democratic filibuster of Estrada “a disgrace.” On March 11 Bush sent a letter, the content of which was released to the public, asking then-Senate leaders Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and Sen. Tom Daschle (R-S.D.) to break the filibuster. On March 13, Bush spoke about the filibuster yet again. All of this occurred while the White House was preparing–and making the public case–for the invasion of Iraq on March 20.

Those statements were backed up by a drumbeat of criticism from conservative groups that did not end even after Estrada withdrew his nomination in late 2003. While Estrada never made it to the bench, conservatives spot a difference between Bush’s doggedness and Obama’s benign neglect. Bush pushed hard for the judicial nominees that ended up getting confirmed in the 2005 “Gang of 14″ deal. By way of comparison, there is no record of Obama speaking about the stalled Hamilton nomination after March 17, when the nomination was announced at the White House. One veteran of Bush’s battles suggested that the “souring” of the process–which, he argued, started with Democrats–was largely to blame. In 2003, while working as an aide to Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), Manny Miranda leaked Democratic memos about the Estrada filibuster to the conservative media. Since then, he’s worked outside the Senate encouraging conservatives to make ideological arguments about the nominees they’re blocking.

“As a working White House,” Miranda told TWI, “it really is stark how few nominations they’ve made. And in the past 10 years, this has all been racheted up.” Despite it all, said Miranda, Republicans in the Bush years were able to push through more nominees with more luck than the Democrats have had so far. But “in the Bush White House, at the end, they were having real trouble finding people to nominate because of this soured process.”

Over the weekend, Miranda criticized fellow conservatives who demanded a filibuster of Hamilton. Instead, he suggested a “real” filibuster that would have forced a debate on Hamilton, a chance for conservatives to explain why, exactly, they considered him so out of bounds. “The issue for conservatives,” he told TWI, “and really for Republican senators, is: Are they going to be consistent? Are they going to be principled? The Senate deserves to have the Senate respond to his nominations.”

Republicans have been content so far to explain the lack of “consistency” the way that DeMint did–Democrats wanted to raise the bar on confirmation votes, and the bar got raised. According to DeMint, Miranda’s argument about the effect of the filibusters–that it leads to delay but not debate–is valid, but hard to overcome. And the key reason is lack of media coverage when Republicans make their stands.

“We’re not being allowed the time,” said DeMint, “because when we allow them to come to the floor, we’re not getting time agreements. We need to expose them, and we’ve put out releases about them. But for the most part there’s not much interest in covering these nominees.”

NPR’s Nina Totenberg this morning had an excellent roundup on the issue, while The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times all have sharply worded editorials today chastising Republicans such as Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Sessions has vowed to vote against cloture for the Hamilton nomination after years of haranguing Democrats for daring to block Republican judicial nominees.

Hamilton is a widely respected federal judge in Indiana who has the support of his home state’s Republican senator, Richard Lugar. But critics, who call him “the anti-Jesus pro-Allah judge”, don’t like that he ruled against allowing sectarian prayers as part of the official proceedings of the Indiana House of Representatives. They also don’t like that he struck down a law requiring women to have face-to-face counseling before being allowed to exercise their constitutional right to an abortion.

While it’s not surprising that some Republicans don’t like those rulings, that’s not supposed to be grounds for blocking a vote on the president’s nominee. No one is arguing that the Yale-educated, former Fulbright fellow who’s won the support of the American Bar Association isn’t qualified for the job. In contrast, Democrats allowed a vote on President George W. Bush’s nomination of Judge Jay Bybee to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, even though as a Justice Department Lawyer Bybee approved memos authorizing the torture and abuse of detainees that even prominent Republicans have since disavowed and that sparked an ethical investigation into his conduct.

But in addition to Republican obstructionism, President Obama hasn’t exactly gone out on a limb to push his judicial nominations forward. Alliance for Justice has issued a report pointing out the paucity of judges nominated and confirmed by the Senate so far under Obama as compared to the first year of the previous administration. After Obama’s first ten months in office, only five judges had been confirmed by the Senate, 22 nominees remained pending and 97 vacancies were still open. During George W. Bush’s first year in office, the president had nominated 64 judges and won confirmation of 18 by mid-November. Meanwhile, Obama is operating with a strong majority of Democrats in the Senate, whereas Bush had to deal with a Democratic-controlled Senate in 2001.

Hamilton is likely to get a vote this week. Even so, the Obama administration still has a lot of catching up to do.

After the jump, check out the ads.

First, Rubio:

Now, Obama:

Notice that the equivalent of the picture with Bush is a picture of Crist with Obama.

Gordon Brown, prime minister, made an impassioned appeal at a private meeting with fellow socialists to back Mr Blair.

“You need to get real – this is a unique opportunity to get a strong progressive politician to be president of the council,” he said. But there was little backing for a man whose support for the Iraq war was divisive.

What’s striking about this is that the numbers have only marginally gotten worse for President Obama in the three months since Fox News last asked this question. In July, it was 16 percent who blamed Obama and 61 percent who blamed Bush. That is, needless to say, not what Fox News viewers hear when they tune into the network. But it’s essential to understanding why the president remains popular and why Republicans are failing to really capitalize on economic gloom.

An executive order published by George W. Bush in January 2008 delineated the board’s powers. As the board reviews intelligence operations, Bush empowered it to “immediately report” on activities that “may be unlawful or contrary to Executive Order or presidential directive.” But that directive gave its reporting power to the president — who may have been the one who ordered such activities, in letter or spirit, in the first place. So it’s not much of a safeguard against lawlessness.

But President Obama changed that. The new executive order updating the 2008 one inserts language instructing the board to:

forward to the Attorney General information concerning intelligence activities that involve possible violations of Federal criminal laws or otherwise implicate the authority of the Attorney General

That holds out the prospect of the board becoming a check on intelligence abuses, as the attorney general — in theory — is beholden to enforce U.S. laws, not presidential prerogatives. We’ll have to see how this reporting requirement works in practice. But perhaps the board won’t be a backwater entity anymore.

Now, not disputing that Biden’s favorable ratings have fallen more than one might expect — and not disputing that this might inspire a “will Obama dump Biden in 2012″ pseudo-news narrative that is going to be sort of excruciating for three years — it’s got to be noted that Gallup’s average includes the massive popularity/approval surge that Cheney, and everyone else in the administration, received after the events of 9/11. A look back at pre-9/11 polls finds that Cheney’s popularity started in the high 50s and low 60s and fell as low as the high 40s — although in those days, when he was known more for battling some heart problems than for pushing for neoconservative foreign policies, he often outpaced President Bush.

What’s the meaning of all this for the White House? Nothing, really — being less popular means being less popular. But the massive shift in public opinion after 9/11 is going to have a distorting effect on presidential polling — I think it saves Bush from having the lowest average ratings during his entire presidency since Truman — and that’s worth remembering.

Running through the list of situations that we’ve been reporting on in which the Obama administration continues to conceal evidence of torture — from the efforts of British resident Binyam Mohamed to seek justice for his “extraordinary rendition” and torture; to the administration’s continued efforts to dismiss cases alleging government-sponsored torture and illegal wiretapping by raising the “state secrets” privilege; to President Obama’s continued insistence on hiding photos of brutal detainee abuse — The Times highlights how President Obama, despite his grand promises of openness and accountability in the early days of his administration, has caved to Republicans and some conservative Democrats who want to bury the evidence of criminal and moral wrongdoing by the United States government.

“We do not take seriously the government’s claim that it is trying to protect intelligence or avoid harm to national security,” The Times writes. And it shouldn’t. As we’ve pointed out repeatedly at TWI, the outlines of our government’s abusive and in some cases criminal conduct is already well-known and can hardly endanger us further. Only by unearthing, acknowledging and accounting completely for the past can the new administration finally move beyond it to focus, unencumbered, on making sure it does not happen in the future.