Too good for their own good

Many observers have long suspected that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is his own worst enemy, but he confirmed it Tuesday.

Asked to comment on Congress’s ever sinking poll numbers since Democrats took over, Reid said he knew exactly why Americans were disappointed with the new majority.

{mosads}“We raised the bar too high. Remember, we started this Iraq debate with 49 senators, and so it’s a little hard when you have 49 to get to 60,” Reid patiently explained. “But when we were able to get a bill passed, and the president vetoed it, that raised everyone’s expectations.”

Let this be a lesson for future leaders: Try not to rock too much, too soon. Do it for the nation.

 

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Switching sides, or just lost?

 

Members of the House of Representatives gathered yesterday for their annual historical bed-check: the official congressional photo.

The process is agonizingly slow, as members select their seats for a picture that will live on long after they are gone. Comb-overs are smoothed; lipstick is reapplied. Some member carefully choose their positions.

But not everybody takes full advantage of the amount of time it takes to organize the 435 members of the lower chamber, along with a handful of non-voting delegates.

Take Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), for instance.

When he digs up the photo so he can remember his time in the 110th Congress, he will be reminded of a day when he was a little confused.

At least, we are assuming that’s why Issa smiled up for the photo from the Democratic side of the aisle. Unless he has something to tell us. 

 

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Fashion trumps policy on the Senate floor

 

If Alberto Gonzales was watching C-SPAN Tuesday — and he says he wasn’t — he would have seen a growing crew of Democratic senators apparently deep in conversation during a procedural vote that could have affected Gonzales’s own fate.
In the center of that crowd was Charles Schumer (N.Y.), the man who orchestrated the vote in an effort to hasten the unpopular attorney general’s exit. So was he reminding his colleagues of what he thought were Gonzales’s sins? Was he hashing out his strategy for his next step?

Not exactly. He was showing off his tie.

The tie was a sort of riddle, and it appeared to take nearly 10 percent of the Senate to figure it out. Decorated with small pigs, eggs and cheese wedges, Schumer said the tie represented something in particular.

More and more members walking past the crowd were drawn into the circle, including Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).

“We thought he was trying to say he wanted to be on the Ag committee,” Klobuchar ventured.

“He just had to tell us: It was an omelet.”

As for the procedural vote, Schumer lost.

 

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Idaho’s Craig: ‘Hey brother, can you spare a quarter?’

 

Everyone could use a little more money, but that’s not why Sen. Larry Craig wanted a quarter.

In fact, the Idaho Republican, along with the rest of his delegation, would just like to get a look at the coin released on June 4 to represent his state. 

The U.S. Mint distributed some 500 million of the quarters to the Federal Reserve Bank, each stamped with the likeness of a Peregrine falcon. The Mint began issuing state coins in 1999 at the rate of five a year, in the order each state was admitted to the union. Idaho was 43rd.

“I didn’t know we had one,” Craig said Tuesday.

Sharing the commemorative coin with the congressional Idahoans might have engendered a slightly kinder review of its design.

“Some people think the falcon looks like a vulture,” Craig said.

Asked why the coin doesn’t bear the likeness of something more closely identified with Idaho, such as the potato, the Snake River or the Sawtooth Mountains, Craig replied, “I was wondering that myself.”

Even former Gov. Dirk Kempthorne (R), who backed the choice of the menacing-looking bird, has yet to see any of the product of his lobbying.

Kempthorne, who recommended the falcon design shortly before becoming secretary of the Interior, said at the time that the bird reflects “Idahoans’ traditional values and esteem for nature.”

But his choice has drawn criticism from many Idahoans, including leaders of the state’s potato growers, who bring in over $2 billion to the state each year. “It’s almost a denial of the roots of the state,” Keith Esplin, executive director of the Potato Growers of Idaho, told the Idaho State Journal last year.

This is just a guess, but somebody out there might have decided that even a vulture-looking bird is more photogenic than a potato.

 

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It’s not a bad occasion for some free PR

 

One high-dollar public-relations firm for a foreign government appears to be doing a little pro bono work.

Qorvis Communications, a massive firm best known in Washington for representing Saudi Arabia, filed required paperwork with the Justice Department that it would also be representing Bandar bin Sultan in an effort to promote a biography of the Saudi prince and former ambassador to the United States.

The Prince: The Secret Story of the World’s Most Intriguing Royal, written by William Simpson with Bandar’s
collaboration, was released last year.

Bandar has been in the news recently, fending off accusations that he accepted money from an aerospace contractor that then benefited from a deal Bandar helped broker.

Qorvis spokesman Matt Lauer said that the company agreed to do the work for Bandar “as a courtesy,” after many years of working with him when he was the ambassador.

But Lauer added that the work was not totally gratis. Qorvis made its money on the book by marking up the cost of services used to promote it.

Albert Eisele and Kevin Bogardus contributed to this page.