Update 2: Craig to make an announcement tomorrow from Boise, ID. AP reported that Risch is the one. Otter's people are denying that a decision has been made.
Update: What I'm hearing is that Craig is departing today -- and that Otter is appointing former Lt. Gov. Risch. GOP is saying Risch has money in the bank. That may be true, he's also got hundreds of thousands in debts from his last state race, so there's that. I was also told that he's literally the guy who pushed through a hike in the sales tax, so that might explain his 26% approval rating in Idaho. Anyways, CNN is reporting that Craig is likely to leave soon. My source (and it's a single source right now) says Risch is the guy who'll replace him. We'll see if this stuff bears out.
So, some folks want Sen. Larry Craig to resign in a flurry of outrage not heard from the right since Sen. Vitter 'fessed up to hiring prostitutes (wait, there wasn't similar outrage for a sex scandal involving illegal acts with women; color me confused).
And who knows -- it may actually reach that point. Obviously, I'd prefer otherwise. Larry Craig looks pretty vulnerable right now and heaven knows it'd be sweet to score a U.S. Senate seat in that reddest of all states. But the GOP leadership is pushing hard and Craig might give in.
Would that be the end of our hopes for the seat? Here's a hint: not necessarily.
Gov. Butch Otter would get to appoint Craig's replacement and the natural choices aren't so hot. Their short list comes from a surprisingly shallow bench.
U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson -- Simpson's a natural choice but his favorability is below 50%, he hasn't had a tough race in years, and he's only got $75k in the bank. Add to that the fact that the Club for Growth is basically pledging to primary him (probably with his colleague U.S. Rep. Bill Sali, quite possibly the stupidest man in Washington, D.C., and that's saying something) and you've got a stage set for GOP trouble.
Former Lt. Gov. Jim Risch -- Sure, it's possible, but his approval statewide is 26% and he doesn't have any dough.
Former Gov. Dirk Kempthorne -- How does a former Governor slip to a 46% approval rating? Probably by joining Mr. 25%'s administration. So even Kempthorne is far from a sure thing if he gives up his cushy job to give it a go in a Senate race.
Any of these folks, in other words, are still solid targets for a hard run by Larry LaRocco, who is out kicking ass right now.
Honestly, Idaho's going to be exciting whether Senator Wide Stance stays or goes.
(Matthew Koehler takes on Idaho's endangered Senator - promoted by Matt Singer)
Kudos to the folks at the Western Watersheds Project http://www.westernwa... for sharing with the world some interesting clips of Idaho Senator Larry Craig and Idaho Governor Butch Otter talking global warming and wildfires at recent news conference.
In the first clip here http://www.youtube.c... Senator Craig gives Governor Otter a helping hand with the politically correct term to use when talking about logging our public national forests.
And Senator Craig's profound thoughts on global warming and wildfires is worth a listen here http://www.youtube.c... .
Senator Craig is known to wax poetically about a wide range of subjects, all of which he seems to be an expert, and I've personally been at the receiving end of some of the senator's straw-grasping. Back in the fall of 2002, as the first incarnation of Bush's "Healthy Forest Initiative" was being debated, the Washington Times got hold of a rather innocent email I sent to colleagues letting them know that an NPR reporter was looking for an example of a "thinning" project that we felt would illustrate our concerns with industrial logging being done on our public lands under the guise of "fuel reduction."
The email was published in the Times' Inside the Beltway column and a day letter Senator Craig went to the Senate floor with a blown-up version of the email, which he used to not only blast all environmentalists but to also threaten to de-fund National Public Radio. If memory serves correct, Senator Craig actually used the blown-up version of my email on the floor the next day too. For the life of me, I still can't figure out how or why Senator Craig thought the email correspondence was such a "smoking gun." I mean, do republicans or logging companies or oil companies not work with media outlets on stories?
Last summer, when Senator Craig was still chairman of the Senate's Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests (before the GOP lost control of Congress), I was invited to testify at a Senate hearing reviewing implementation of the Healthy Forest Restoration Act (HFRA). If you're interested, you can check out my testimony here http://energy.senate... .
Senator Craig opened the hearing with a ten minute soliloquy on wildfires, logging and forest management that contained more than a few nuggets of misinformation and gross oversimplifications. The ten senators present then spent nearly two hours blasting then Forest Service chief Dale Bosworth for the Bush administration's failure to implement fuel reduction projects using the HFRA. As was pointed out later in my testimony, in the nearly three years since the HFRA became law, the Forest Service accomplished zero acres of fuel reduction in Montana and Wyoming and 103 acres in Idaho using that tool. Hardly impressive numbers.
Unfortunately, by the time my panel testified, and was opened up to questions, the senators were all tuckered out from going round and round with the Forest Service. I found this somewhat disappointing since I would have relished the opportunity to answer any question Senator Craig would have tossed my way...and I had a few questions for the Seantor myself.
In 2005, I wrote a national op-ed for Knight Ridder newspapers that showed how when right-wing congressional politicians return home as governors from the fantasy land known as Washington, D.C., they often drop their conservative economic elitism in the face of reality. Last week, I wrote that the conservative movement in the Rocky Mountain West is seeing this same economic elitism decline as an effective political cudgel, and not surprisingly, many Rocky Mountain states are watching their Republican parties descend into disrepair (here in Colorado, for instance, the GOP has resorted to hiring as party chairman the same supposed "guru" who most recently helped commandeer his boss George Allen from leading presidential candidate to historical cautionary tale). Now, up in Idaho, we see the convergence of both of these phenomena, as Gov. Butch Otter (R) has become yet another conservative Washington-insider-turned-home-state-economic-realist and yet another Rocky Mountain Republican fleeing his own party's elite consensus.
Gov. Butch Otter has a message for President Bush: Don't send the Idaho National Guard to Iraq again.
[...]
"Idaho families already have made tremendous personal sacrifices for this war. I would certainly make a personal and persuasive argument to the president that our men and women have gone above and beyond," Otter said in a prepared statement.
Statesman reporters noted that Idaho guardsmen and women have already served quite a few months of active duty recently, enough that under Pentagon rules they would be unlikely to be called up.
