Campaign Diaries

Just a week after making it clear she was hoping to be appointed to Ken Salazar’s vacant Senate seat, Rep. Diana DeGette removed herself from consideration, saying that she preferred to stay in the House where she has been rising in the Democratic leadership.

DeGette was the most liberal of the Democrats that were mentioned as Salazar’s possible successors, and it was considered unlikely that moderate-to-conservative Governor Bill Ritter would appoint someone with her ideological profile. The best progressives can hope for is for Ritter to choose Rep. Ed Permlutter over Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper or Rep. John Salazar.

DeGette’s withdrawal is also noteworthy in the context of the gender discussion she herself launched last week when she noted that Colorado had never had a female Senator or Governor. But DeGette is now the third high-profile woman to remove her name from consideration, after the state’s Lieutenant Governor and Treasurer.

(It might be unfair to lump DeGette with Illinois’s embattled Roland Burris and New York’s challenged Caroline Kennedy, but hopefully the Denver congresswoman will forgive me for doing just that in this post’s title.)

—

In Illinois, meanwhile, Rep. Bobby Rush raised the stakes further in the battle over Raymond Burris’s appointment. A day after using the racially chard word “lynch” to warn the Senate, Rush compared Burris’s critics to George Wallace and other segregationists from the 1950s:

“You know, the recent history of our nation has shown us that sometimes there could be individuals and there could be situations where schoolchildren — where you have officials standing in the doorway of schoolchildren. You know, I’m talking about all of us back in 1957 in Little Rock, Ark. I’m talking about George Wallace, Bull Connor and I’m sure that the U.S. Senate don’t want to see themselves placed in the same position.“

Senate Democrats can consider themselves warned.

In an interesting development, Rep. Danny Davis - another African-American House member mentioned as a possible Senator before Blagojevich’s arrest - revealed that he had been offered the Senate seat a few days ago but that he refused the job; only then did the Governor contact Burris. This confirms that Blagojevich was looking to fill Obama’s seat with a black Senator, either because he cares about ensuring racial diversity in the US Senate or because he is cynically trying to exploit racial divisions to extend his lease in the Governor’s mansion.

—

In New York, finally, Kennedy suffered days of bad press in the hands of the New York press, especially in the Gray Lady. The main issue was her connection to New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, as I explained a few days ago. The New York Post now reports, however, that Bloomberg’s allies are now pulling away from actively supporting Kennedy’s bid because they think that their efforts have “backfired.”

The Post adds that the plan was to make Kennedy look so inevitable as to quickly lock in support of most prominent state Democrats, but the situation played out a bit differently as Kennedy attracted the vitriol of officials like Sheldon Silver.

Another interesting came out from David Paterson’s side of the story: The Governor just interviewed Assemblyman Danny O’Donnell, whose name had not yet circulated in connection to the Senate seat. O’Donnell would be the country’s first openly gay Senator.

It is hard to tell whether Caroline Kennedy’s odds have truly fallen over the past week or whether her appointment has become so certain that her allies are simply trying to create diversions for Kennedy to avoid looking inevitable and too dynastically entitled. That also applies to Paterson’s public efforts to show he is still undecided; Rep. Charlie Rangel did say last week that Paterson had already settled on an appointee, after all.