Will Chris McDaniel Be the Tea Party's Next Favorite Primary Challenger?

Today on NRO VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Putin ends up existing to warn us in the West of what we are not. The Value of Putin. KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON: The Left is at war with economic reality. The Tyranny of Winter. CHARLES C. W. COOKE: Just because we ignore its meaning doesn't mean it changes. Against Reinterpreting the Constitution. YUVAL LEVIN: The White House sees no obligation to follow the rule of law. The Obamacare Adhocracy. MONA CHAREN: The press has decided that the IRS's targeting of conservatives is not newsworthy. Poof: A Scandal Disappears. Morning Jolt . . . with Jim Geraghty February 11, 2014 Will Chris McDaniel Be the Tea Party's Next Favorite Primary Challenger? Meet State Senator Chris McDaniel, Republican candidate for Senate in Mississippi. McDaniel's secret weapon: his extra pair of arms, visible underneath the glass table. Two obstacles stand between McDaniels and his goal of taking the oath of office in January next year. The first is six-term Republican incumbent senator Thad Cochran. The second is the electoral speed bump commonly referred to as the Mississippi Democratic party.  Mississippi is so conservative, that the Democratic option in the Senate race, Bill Marcy, ran as a Republican in 2010 and 2012, emphasizes how conservative he is, and pitches himself as "Plan B" if McDaniel doesn't win the primary. (Marcy is the longest of long-shots, but his bid raises the interesting question of how the press would treat a conservative, former-Republican black Democratic Senator.) If Matt Bevin wasn't taking on Mitch McConnell, the Mississippi Senate race might be seen as the premiere grassroots-outsider-vs.-establishment-incumbent primary fight of the cycle. (Kentucky holds its Senate primary May 20, and Mississippi holds its June 3, so McDaniel could get a big burst of national tea-party enthusiasm and energy in the final weeks.) Cochran was considered a potential retirement this cycle. The URL for his 2008 reelection campaign website, ThadforSenate.com, doesn't appear to be up and running yet, nor his YouTube page.  He's 76, and has spent forty years in Congress when you throw in his years in the U.S. House. He hasn't given conservatives a ton to gripe about on the biggest issues, and doesn't fit the usual "RINO squish" labels. His lifetime ACU rating is 79, which isn't bad, but . . . it's Mississippi. Cochran first joined the Appropriations Committee in 1981, was chairman from 2005 to 2007, and tends to vote like a senior appropriator, which is to say sort of like a king but with more authority to spend money. He's currently ranking member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and thus had a hand in the recent $956 billion farm bill, which expanded crop-insurance subsidies, creates new programs, includes no means-testing, and was described as, "a bill of, by, and for the agriculture lobby." Cochran voted against Obamacare, but once the law was enacted, sought funding for a project in his state from a grant program authorized by the president's signature domestic legislation. Back in 2010, Citizens Against Government Waste crowned him the "King of Pork," accusing him of running up $490 million in earmarks. Cochran was the first Republican to endorse President Obama's selection of Chuck Hagel to be his Secretary of Defense. McDaniel was elected to Mississippi's State Senate in 1998. He was a law clerk for U.S. District Court judge Charles W. Pickering, Sr., and is a partner at the Hortman Harlow firm. He's backed by the Club for Growth, Senate Conservatives Fund, and other aligned groups. Asked directly if he would support Mitch McConnell as leader of the Republicans in the Senate, he gives a direct answer: "No." The polling generally shows a close race. PPP put Cochran up 44 percent to 38 percent in November; Gravis Marketing put both men at 40 percent in early December; Harper Polling put Cochran up 54 percent to 31 percent a week later. The fundraising is reasonably close, particularly for a relatively inexpensive state like this one; Cochran had $1.1 million on hand at the end of the year, McDaniel had about $390,000. In a recent chat with some National Review editors, the challenger declared that everyone who attends a fundraiser of his rival is there "because they have something to gain. Everybody at our events just says, 'go back to the Constitution.'" A couple of cautionary notes about the challenger: The good news is, Chris McDaniel sounds like an enthusiastic supporter of bold entitlement reform. The bad news is, Chris McDaniel sounds like an enthusiastic supporter of bold entitlement reform. This is one of those ideas that Republican primary voters like in theory but may get gun-shy about after the airwaves are filled with commercials depicting a reformer throwing an old lady off a cliff. McDaniel says that regarding the debt ceiling, he wants to see Republicans force the president to make a serious concession in exchange for raising the ceiling again -- "immediate, across-the-board spending cuts, including entitlements." It would indeed be nice to see President Obama agreeing to that. It would also be nice to see health researchers declaring that pizza and ice cream are healthy for you, but neither of those developments is likely to happen. Also, McDaniel says he's willing to draw a hard line on pork, but that's another issue that seems to be more appealing in the abstract than when actual projects, jobs, and dollars are at stake. Bringing home federal spending hasn't hurt Cochran in any of his previous six senate campaigns, nor was it much of an issue for, say, former Mississippi senator Trent Lott. Bad Move, Senator Roberts. Just Answer the Question Speaking of senators who have been in office for a long time, and perhaps have picked up some bad habits… Byron York notes the controversy over whether Senator Pat Roberts, (R., Kan.), actually lives in his home state and asks a reasonable question: How many days per year does the senator spend in his home state? But after several days, the senator's office declines to give the figure. It's not clear how many days in Kansas would be "enough" for Roberts' foes. But being a senator does involve a lot of time out of the state. The Senate is usually in session about 150 days a year. Then there is work senators do in Washington on days when the Senate is not in session. And then there is travel time. There are a few direct flights from Washington to Kansas City — it takes about three hours —but if Roberts' destination is Dodge City, he'll have many hours of driving on top of that. So a number of days would be taken by travel. Put it all together, and Roberts could make a reasonable case that the normal work of a senator whose home state is more than 1,000 miles from Washington requires a lot of time outside of Kansas. But now Roberts has chosen not go give out the information. Of course that will raise suspicions. His trips to Kansas are public record, and someone, perhaps in the press or a political rival, will start the work of calculating Roberts' time in Kansas. In the end, Roberts will likely have to address the issue again. And maybe then, he'll give out the information he doesn't want to divulge now. A little while back, I purchased trial lawyer Gerry Spence's book, HowtoArgue and Win Every Time. (A skill everyone would love to have, huh?) I'm not doing it justice (no pun intended) in a one-sentence summary, but the gist is: speak from the heart, be authentic, admit your mistakes and weaknesses, and prepare like a madman. Kansas voters would prefer to hear this information from the senator than from somebody else. Oh, Look, Another Delay in Another Obamacare Provision This is the first delay in an Obamacare provision since oh, mid-January or so. The federal government announced yet another delay in Obamacare's rules for employers on Monday, and also weakened requirements for complying with the law. The government will now exempt companies employing between 50 and 100 full-time workers from complying with the mandate that they offer employees affordable health insurance by another year, until 2016. Companies that have 100 or more full-time workers, defined as employees who work more than 30 hours per week, still will have to begin complying with the mandate to offer such coverage in 2015 or face financial penalties of up to $3,000 per worker. Officials said that any business claiming they are eligible for the new one-year delay because they have fewer than 100 workers must certify, under penalty of perjury, that it had not reduced its workforce merely to qualify for that exemption. How are they going to prove that? Gabe Malor: "It will be such sweet turnabout to use the Obama Precedent against Democratic programs in 2017. The Obamacare employer mandate is actually a tax enforcement statute. Having established that Presidents can simply decide not to enforce taxes they do not like, I can't wait for President Perry to start nixing taxes by executive fiat. Also, that pesky EPA that holds down economic growth? Sayonara sucker!" Stephen Green: "Damn those tricky Democrats for burying the 'Just kidding!' clause on page 2,237 of the Affordable Care Act." The editors of the Wall Street Journal: "'ObamaCare' is useful shorthand for the Affordable Care Act not least because the law increasingly means whatever President Obama says it does on any given day. His latest lawless rewrite arrived on Monday as the White House decided to delay the law's employer mandate for another year and in some cases maybe forever." In other Obamacare news: Hundreds of people with HIV/AIDS in Louisiana trying to obtain coverage under President Barack Obama's healthcare reform are in danger of being thrown out of the insurance plan they selected in a dispute over federal subsidies and the interpretation of federal rules about preventing Obamacare fraud. The state's largest carrier, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana,  is rejecting checks from a federal program designed to help these patients pay for AIDS drugs and insurance premiums, and has begun notifying customers that their enrollment in its Obamacare plans will be discontinued. And meet the new Healthcare.gov administrators, increasingly unlikely to be much better than the old Healthcare.gov administrators: Accenture, the contractor urgently tapped to help fix the federal health-insurance Web site, is a favorite of corporate America but has a record that includes troubled projects and allegations of ethical lapses, a review of the consulting giant's history shows. At the University of Michigan, students and faculty members are protesting the school's use of Accenture to help cut costs, citing a report by a committee of alumni and graduate students that said the firm has "a disturbing pattern of problematic past performance." In North Carolina, glitches in an Accenture-configured computer system contributed to massive backlogs for food-stamp recipients, leading the Obama administration last month to threaten to withdraw the state's food-stamp funding. Federal officials have also on occasion criticized the company's integrity. The U.S. Postal Service Inspector General's Office wrote in June that Accenture had "demonstrated an absence of business ethics" and said that the agency should consider terminating the firm's more than $200 million in contracts. The office cited in part a 2011 settlement with the Justice Department in which Accenture paid $63 million to resolve allegations of what the government called "kickbacks" and "bid-rigging" in numerous federal contracts. The company denied wrongdoing in the case. ADDENDUM: Looks like the GOP donor class isn't ready to give up on Christie: "The Republican Governors Association said Tuesday that it set a monthly fundraising record in January, a $6 million haul that comes despite the traffic-scandal troubles of its chairman, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie." To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com Why not forward this to a friend? Encourage them to sign up for NR's great free newsletters here. Save 75%... Subscribe to National Review magazine today and get 75% off the newsstand price. Click here for the print edition or here for the digital. National Review also makes a great gift! Click here to send a full-year of NR Digital or here to send the print edition to family, friends, and fellow conservatives. Follow Tweet Subscribe Send National Review, Inc. Manage your National Review subscriptions. We respect your right to privacy. View our policy. This email was sent by: National Review, Inc. 215 Lexington Avenue, 11th Floor New York, NY 10016