Mo Brooks is officially in AL-05 race
WHNT has this “exclusive” story:
The election for North Alabama’s congressional seat is still more than a year away. But one of the biggest names in Madison County politics is now throwing his hat in the ring.
Madison County commissioner Mo Brooks announced his intentions to run for Congress Tuesday. After meeting with top Republicans in Washington last week, Brooks decided to make his long-rumored candidacy for the 5th district congressional seat official.
Of course regular readers here knew this over a week ago.
The long-time commissioner is well-known for his outspoken views on fiscal conservatism and immigration reform, and hopes that message will resonate with voters next year. Democratic congressman Parker Griffith just won the seat last November, but Brooks says the freshman Democrat is already a first-term flop. Brooks says Griffith’s support of current house speaker Nancy Pelosi has put thousands of North Alabama jobs in jeopardy due to her support of missile defense cuts.
“Once Mr. Griffith cast his vote for Nancy Pelosi, none of his other votes have had any significance,” said Brooks. “Her policies are not good for the 5th congressional district with ballistic missile defense cuts, with threats to NASA, with threats to our local economy in so many ways. We’ve got to unseat Nancy Pelosi.”
Midterms are often hard on the new president’s party and the fact that the Democrats seem hell bent on turning us into North Cuba will fuel a backlash in my opinion. That will put Griffith, who narrowly won in 2008 and won’t have Obama at the top of the ticket in 2010, in a very tough situation. But Griffith “ain’t no dummy” and has been voting smartly thus far – opposing the stimulus disaster and the cap and trade bill that is (hopefully) destined to die in the Senate. He’ll have a couple of key tests in the future – card check and health care come to mind – so he still has time to slip up.
I personally don’t like the “he voted for Pelosi” attack. It can be an element of the attack, but it is not a sufficient foundation in my opinion. Nancy Pelosi’s name will not be on the ballot in North Alabama (lucky for her!). You need to give people a reason to vote for you and hopefully a reason to vote against your opponent. Griffith hasn’t give opponents much ammunition on the latter (other than the aforementioned Pelosi vote and probably some missile defense funding cuts). As such the only avenue of attack is to go after his party since his comrades are the ones causing mischief. I’m just leery of how well that attack will stick.
I called this at the Tax Day Tea Party.
Didn’t some really clever guy put that bug in your ear? :)
Did you just use an emoticon?
I agree about the Pelosi attack. People that pay enough attention to understand that attack have already made up their minds. Griffith will make it tough for Brooks if he keeps voting like a conservative. While I’ll definitely vote for Brooks in the primary and general, I have to say I’m not terribly upset about Griffith’s votes in congress thus far.
Griffith is smart enough to understand that he is in his “probationary period” right now. If he can survive the midterm election going up against conservative stalwarts like Brooks and Phillip and do so during the most expantionist, socialistic administration and Congress in U.S. history, he knows he’ll be very hard to unseat after that.
Bud Cramer already followed this path. Even though his votes got more and more liberal over the years, his ability to rake in the federal dollars ensured he didn’t face any serious challenges once he had secured his second term. Griffith supported Howard “The Scream” Dean during the ‘04 presidential primary, so you know his liberal side is going to come out once he considers his position “safe.” And Pelosi will make sure he gets the kind of pork clout he needs to make it happen, too.
Bottom line: Forget how Griffith has voted so far — We have to get this guy out of there next year.
Guys:
He who controls where the battle is fought, controls the outcome of the battle. Witness Fredricksburg and Gettysburg.
We cannot let Griffith shift the debate and battle to the “I voted conservative” argument. His misleading PR machine may carry the day for him if that is the battlefield. Go to the Washington Post website to see how false and misleading his claim is. Griffith votes 89% of the time with the Socialist Democrats.
But Griffith is doing a good job highlighting that 11%, and hiding the 89%. For example, look at the Cap and Trade Energy Tax bill. Griffith voted for the Cap and Trade Energy Tax bill before he voted against it. Yet no one has paid any attention to his vote for the Cap and Trade Energy Tax bill immediately before his vote against it on final passage (the first vote showed a preference for the Cap and Trade Energy Tax over the Republican alternative (New Manhattan Energy Project)).
The point about Nancy Pelosi is this. Once Griffith voted for Pelosi for Speaker of the House, all of his subsequent votes were insignificant and none of them changed a single House vote outcome one iota. There have been 477 votes so far. Pelosi won 477 times. The power of the House Speaker position determines House vote outcomes 99.9% of the time, period.
Not once, out of 477 votes, has Griffith voted against Pelosi when she needed him.
If we can make the debate (battle) his vote to empower Nancy Pelosi, Charles Rangell, Barney Frank, Maxine Waters, etc., then we win.
I hope you will help get this message out.
Sincerely,
Mo Brooks
Ah, Mo.
Pulling the old procedural vote trick.
Don’t worry, North Alabamians are smarter than that.
Where do you go (campaign hq)to volunteer for the Mo Brooks campaign???
It is a good point James. Hillary abdicated her constitutional power to declare war and gave W unfettered power to wage war then had teh nerve to discavow any responsibility. You can’t vote to give someone power then act as though you bear zero resposibility for how that power is used.
Well, Griffith has given his opponents more ammunition…his comment on Health Care and the Constitution at the Town Hall in Huntsville Thursday night. I think Mo Brooks needs to really run with this one!
It is obvious to me what the Dems are doing. They hold several votes and barely win them all giving each Congressmen the ability to vote against the bills a few times to abdicate themselves of responsibility…. They’ve won every vote but they’re intelligent enough to do it in a way that keeps them in power… keeps the money of PACs flowing through their hands. They don’t know much about what they’re voting on. That isn’t what’s important to them.