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.”

Today, Menendez is enjoying a little payback courtesy of his colleague, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.).

New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg is calling for a federal investigation into allegations that Chris Christie, the Republican candidate for governor, used his office for political gain while U.S. attorney.

The call for a Justice Department investigation follows months of accusations that Christie politicized the office of the top federal prosecutor.

Christie denies the charges.

The Democratic establishment is piling on Christie this week, who clings to the narrowest of leads — the Pollster.com average has him only 0.4 points ahead of Gov. Jon Corzine (D-N.J.).

I’ve obtained the an invitation to the event. It’s below the fold, with the contact information redacted.

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You can follow TWI on Twitter and Facebook.

He was a remarkable journalist and a principled person.

Mr. Rove’s statements demonstrate that while Mr. Christie was the U.S. Attorney, he met with individuals to plan the logistics and strategy of a campaign and to seek support in his efforts to secure the Republican nomination for governor in violation of the Hatch Act.  The Merit Systems Protection Board has held the OSC retains jurisdiction over such matters even whereas here, the employee has left the federal government.

At Netroots Nation, Gov. Jon Corzine (D-N.J.) called Christie a “lawbreaker” based on initial reports about the Rove connection.

The dismissal of New Mexico U.S. Attorney David C. Iglesias in December 2006 followed extensive communication among lawyers and political aides in the White House who hashed over complaints about his work on public corruption cases against Democrats, according to newly released e-mails and transcripts of closed-door House testimony by former Bush counsel Harriet Miers and political chief Karl Rove.

A campaign to oust Iglesias intensified after state party officials and GOP members of the congressional delegation apparently concluded he was not pursuing the cases against Democrats in a way that would help then- Rep. Heather Wilson in a tight releection race, according to interviews and Bush White House e-mails released Tuesday by congressional investigators. The documents place the genesis of Iglesias’s dismissal earlier than previously known. [...]

The House focused most of its attention on Iglesias, a rising star in New Mexico who came to displease his political patrons. Miers told investigators that Rove called her in September 2006, “agitated” about the slow pace of public corruption cases against Democrats and weak efforts to pursue voter fraud cases in the state. In the call, Miers said that Rove had described Iglesias as a “serious problem” and said he wanted “something done” about it. Miers testified that she called then Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty to pass along the concerns.

Also, The Post reports that the debilitating amnesia that afflicted former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales when he testified before Congress appears to be contagious.

In their testimony in June and July 2009, both Miers and Rove failed to recall key incidents , according to the transcripts. Miers said she could not recall events nearly 150 times in the course of her 10-hour deposition. Rove portrayed himself as receiving hundreds of e-mails a day, so that “asking me to remember replies is like asking me to remember a raindrop in a thunderstorm.”

Michael Patrick Leahy, the conservative #TCOT and Tea Party activist who has been dogging reporters to cover the birth certificate “issue,” has a good, rather annoyed post about Orly Taitz’s reckless strategy of posting this bogus document on the Internet and asking courts to “validate it.”

Ms. Taitz is asking a Federal Judge to authorize a fishing expedition for documents pertaining to President Obama’s birth that might exist in the Governmental files of the Republic of Kenya, and she fails to offer any evidence as to the origin of the digital image upon which this request is based ? If I were the judge, that is the first of many questions I would ask Ms. Taitz when she comes before me next in court.

Several of the lawyers and activists who are following or pushing this story have grown irritated with Taitz’s incompetence and wild antics. This might be a breaking point.

The Washington Post has obtained those emails and reports that they reveal contacts between Rove, Bush aides and White House lawyers about the firing of three of the nine federal prosecutors dismissed in 2006.  According to The Post, those prosecutors are “New Mexico’s David C. Iglesias, the focus of ire from GOP lawmakers; Missouri’s Todd Graves, who had clashed with one of Rove’s former clients; and Arkansas’s Bud Cummins, who was pushed out to make way for a Rove protégé.”

Rove had previously described himself as “merely passing along complaints by senators and state party officials to White House lawyers.”

Rove yesterday finished his second day of closed-door testimony to the committee — testimony that was negotiated after he and former White House counsel Harriet Miers had refused to testify, and the House sued to compel their testimony. As part of the negotiation, transcripts of their testimony could be released in August.

Meanwhile, Assistant U.S. Attorney Nora R. Dannehy is still investigating whether the apparently politically motivated firings could warrant any criminal charges.

“I am excited and pleased to be joining The Examiner, which is among the bright new stars of American journalism,” Gingrich said. “This is one of the most unique and crucial eras in our nation’s history and to know what’s going on, you have to be reading this newspaper.”

“Even those who were opposed to the stimulus spending will see some of the projects that are underway in their communities as they’re initiated,” she added. “I’ve just been meeting with a lot of municipal officials and really it is amazing the number of projects that are getting under way.”

This as Karl Rove tweets that “Obama has made taxes and spending the big issues again.”