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Utah Senate candidate Mike Lee (R) unveils his own big endorsements, Illinois adds a big spender to the Senate race and Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) won't be going to Colorado after all. I'll see your senator and raise you a congressman Lee was thought to be losing momentum in his bid for the Utah GOP Senate nomination after his rival, Tim Bridgewater, rolled out endorsements from Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah) and fourth-place convention finisher Cherilyn Eagar (R). But Lee was able to fire back this week with endorsements from Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and the Tea Party Express, which helped...

Tea Party Express takes sides in Utah battlePosted: June 15th, 2010 08:23 AM ET From CNN Deputy Political Director Paul Steinhauser Utah Senate hopeful Mike Lee was endorsed by the Tea Party Express on Tuesday. (CNN) – With one week to go until Utah's primary, one of the two Republican Senate candidates in the race is getting a major endorsement.The national Tea Party organization Tea Party Express Tuesday backed Mike Lee in the battle to succeed fellow Republican Bob Bennett.The move comes four days after Bennett endorsed Tim Bridgewater, the other candidate in the contest.Bridgewater and Lee finished first and...

WASHINGTON — Not long after news leaked last month that Andrew Romanoff was determined to make a Democratic primary run against Sen. Michael Bennet, Romanoff received an unexpected communication from one of the most powerful men in Washington. Jim Messina, President Barack Obama's deputy chief of staff and a storied fixer in the White House political shop, suggested a place for Romanoff might be found in the administration and offered specific suggestions, according to several sources who described the communication to The Denver Post. Romanoff turned down the overture, which included mention of a job at USAID, the foreign aid...

On paper, GOP Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama should have been a great target for a Tea Party challenge. He’s a notorious porker, has a lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union of 75 (lower than Utah Sen. Bob Bennett’s 83), and switched parties from the Democrats to Republicans, although it was back in 1994. Shelby did attract a Tea Party challenger in the GOP primary, Clint Moser. Yet Moser played Bambi to Shelby’s Godzilla,

I sent a letter to the OIP and Ombudsman this morning, requesting an investigation into whether the HDOH illegally destroyed permanent government records. I cc'ed Gov Lingle, Lt Gov Aiona, and AG Bennett. Because the letter contains a link I will post the entire letter in the first response to this post. A brief summary for those who are new to this issue: The retention schedule says that the original (hand-written) birth index was submitted for review in 1980 and it was determined that this record should be retained permanently. The schedule also says that the certificates themselves and the...

Jimmy Carter won the White House in 1976 by riding the wave of anger and disillusionment that followed Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon. Carter tapped into that anger with the slogan "I will never lie to you." An angry electorate, disgusted with Nixon, decided that was reason enough to give Carter the presidency. He won, in large part, because he made it clear that he wasn't Richard Nixon. Pundits called Carter a political genius. Four years later, however, he was a political pariah. Voters embraced Ronald Reagan because he wasn't Jimmy Carter, proving that good slogans do not necessarily...

Unless Sen. Bob Bennett's political fortunes change dramatically in the next two weeks, he could become Utah's first incumbent U.S. senator to lose his party's nomination in seven decades. A new Salt Lake Tribune poll of Republican delegates shows Bennett running in third, behind GOP challengers Mike Lee and Tim Bridgewater. Lee logged 37 percent support in the survey, while Bridgewater came in at 20 percent, and Bennett lagged at 16 percent. The survey of 400 Republican delegates, with a 4.4 percent margin of error, was conducted April 22-25 by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc. of Washington, D.C. It comes...

Utah Sen. Robert Bennett announced Thursday he will not pursue a write-in campaign for reelection, ruling out the final option that might have allowed him to retain his seat after being denied his party's nomination at the state GOP convention earlier this month.

Sen. Bob Bennett, who failed to win nomination at the May 8 Republican convention, has called a press conference on Thursday at noon to "announce his plans for his political future," according to a release from his office.

Bob Bennett's defeat in last Saturday's Republican primary might be the beginning of a national trend. In the early 1990s, when incumbent members of Congress long thought to hold safe seats suddenly found themselves in political trouble over tax increases and the House bank, a Washington lobbyist friend lamented to me, "This is a tough year for the overdog." The same can be said, and perhaps with more emphasis, about election year 2010. Case in point: Bob Bennett of Utah. Mr. Bennett, who has served three terms in the Senate, was just denied a place on the primary ballot by...

One of the classic examples of the failure of politicians to communicate with the citizenry is found in a video of Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu, giving what turned out to be his last speech to the teeming masses gathered in a square in Bucharest. Oblivious to the mood of the people, Ceausescu is at his bombastic, self-important best until he realizes that the chants from the crowd below are not praise, but something rather to the contrary. The look on his face: priceless. You could say that Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, and Rep. Alan Mollohan, D-W.V., have just experienced their...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Heron Lake - and I must admit, I did not know there were lakes in New Mexico, but here's a guy that lives on one, Dave, great to have you on the program. Hi. CALLER: Good day. Yeah, I wanted to bring up the subject of Utah. They threw out Bennett in the primary. RUSH: Yeah. CALLER: Is this an ongoing thing that, say, Schumer, Waxman, or McCain better start thinking about. It's not a Democrat thing or Republican thing, the people are -- pardon the pun -- pissed. They're throwing all of these people that think...

Sen. Robert Bennett, an honorable and sincere politician, was brought down by the rank and file of the Utah Republican party over the weekend. Bennett, visibly shaken by his loss, seemed as stunned as anybody that he didn’t pass muster with his own party. He had good reason to be shocked. Bennett is reliably conservative with considerable seniority. He’s also one of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s right-hand men. In every way, he represented the establishment within the GOP. And, ultimately, that’s why he lost. His gravest sins, according to critics, were his longtime support for a health-insurance mandate and...

Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah), who lost his bid for re-nomination on Saturday, has not ruled out running as a write-in candidate for the Senate this fall. "I've made no decisions to make a decision," he said Tuesday when asked about his political future. “I’ve made a firm decision not to make any decisions at the moment.” Bennett would only say he'd make a decision "later." Such a decision would put his colleagues - who personally like Bennett but will only endorse a GOP candidate in the primary - in a tough position. "It's a little like going to your own...

Democrats and assorted commentators are professing to be alarmed about the defeat on the weekend of three-term Utah Republican Senator Bob Bennett at a GOP nominating convention. They say it signals the triumph of the tea party and other allegedly uncouth sorts, which is said to be bad for bipartisanship and other Beltway bromides.

TARP is, of course, the prime (but certainly not only) reason offered by Bennett’s opponents as to why he had to be torpedoed in Utah. The problem, as Dave Weigel notes: A lot of Republicans voted for TARP and not all of them are notorious RINOs. Why, here’s one now… RN: You’re not facing opposition in South Dakota. How have you finessed this issue — how do Republicans explain why they voted for TARP? [JOHN] THUNE: There was a tremendous, broad support in South Dakota among the small business community, the financial community, the South Dakota pension funds, the governor...

Over the weekend, a Utah GOP convention failed to nominate Sen. Bob Bennett in his third re-election bid to Congress. When a party rejects its own incumbent in a primary - and he's a mild-mannered Uncle Bob-type not involved in a sex scandal or facing criminal indictment - that's huge. On the one hand, it's healthy when voters demonstrate that no incumbent owns his or her seat. On the other hand, when party voters demand the kind of purity sought by Bennett's opponents, they risk triggering a stampede from the center. And woe be the lawmaker who works across the...

“This is a damn outrage,” a disgusted David Brooks, the faux conservative columnist for the New York Times, declared on Sunday’s Meet the Press reacting to Republican Senator Bob Bennett’s loss Saturday at Utah’s Republican convention which chose two others to compete in a June primary for the seat. Brooks fretted he was punished for being “a good conservative who was trying to get things done” by “bravely” working with Democrats on health care and supporting TARP. “Now,” he repeated, “he's losing his career over that. And it's just a damn outrage.” Sitting beside Brooks on NBC’s roundtable, liberal Washington...

Incumbent Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) was ousted Saturday from his state’s Republican primary by caucus voters fed up with big government spending, "stimulus," bailouts and the passage of Obamacare -- for starters. His ouster from the primary is proof GOP voters are not limiting their ire to Democrats. Bennett has been a big spender over his 18 years in the Senate, consistently voting to the left of his constituency. And from the red state of Utah that’s not a plan for lifetime Senate employment. When first elected back in 1992, Bennett pledged he would term-limit himself and serve no more...

There’s a lot of political ferment and discontent out there, a sense that the political universe may be reordering itself in unpredictable ways. And over the weekend, it claimed a prominent victim. From Politico: “SALT LAKE CITY — It’s on. The first incumbent of the 2010 election year crashed and burned Saturday, and there’s ample cause for alarm for officeholders everywhere. There was no personal scandal, no whiff of corruption, no silver bullet here. Republican Sen. Robert Bennett was one of the most powerful and likable members of the Senate, he diligently protected Utah’s interests from his post in GOP...