Feb 3, 2015 6 min read

Wake Up To Politics - February 3, 2015

To read today's edition of Wake Up To Politics in a PDF format, click here. Continue reading to find the text of the Wake Up in the body of the email!

Tuesday, February 3, 2015
644 Days Until Election Day 2016It's Tuesday, February 3, 2015, I'm Gabe Fleisher for Wake Up To Politics, and reporting from WUTP world HQ in my bedroom - Good morning: THIS IS YOUR WAKE UP CALL!!!
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Election Central

2016 Travel Watch: Christie Heads Back from UK New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie returns Tuesday from a trip key to his presidential ambitions. But it wasn’t to Iowa or New Hampshire. It was to the United Kingdom.
The potential 2016 Republican presidential candidate spent three days in London, on the cover of meeting with business leaders and companies tied to state interests. But the trip is about more than that.
It is about forming relationships with top allies, meeting British leaders such as Prime Minister David Cameron, having dinner with members of Cameron’s, and sitting for lunch with the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Not only does this trip help him if Christie finds himself in the White House come 2017, but it is helpful for the 2016 election as well.
The Republican nominee in next year’s presidential race will likely face Democrat Hillary Clinton, who visited 82 countries as First Lady and 112 as Secretary of State. In an attempt to match Clinton’s foreign affairs portfolio, the 2016 GOP nominee will have to also have some travel under his/her belt.
Many potential candidates are already doing so. Christie has also visited Mexico and Canada in the past year, Bobby Jindal recently returned from Europe, and Scott Walker is headed for London next week as well. In the past two years, Rick Perry has visited Switzerland, China, Japan, and gone on a European tour. Israel has also drawn a number of potential candidates, including Christie, Mike Pence in December, and Mike Huckabee later this month.Capitol Hill News
Senate: Status Update The Senate will hold procedural votes today on the House bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security. In the “omnibus” spending bill passed at the end of last year, the DHS was funded only until February 27 as a way to punish Obama for his immigration executive order. Now, the House has passed a bill that would fund the department until September, although it still reverses President Obama’s executive order.
Democrats are expected to filibuster the bill in an attempt to “force the new Republican majority to drop the immigration provisions and send the $40 billion spending bill to the president…calculating that Republican leaders will want to avoid a political backlash from shutting off financing for the border security agency,” according to the New York Times.
Republicans are asking Democrats to allow the bill to proceed for debate, and then work out their differences in the amendments process, but Democrats will likely not even allow that.
WUTP Dictionary A key phrase you’ll hear the Democrats say again and again during this debate is “with no strings attached”. This is the Democratic rallying cry for when they want a “clean” bill
Example: A bill that just funds the DHS and nothing else is “clean” and has “no strings attached”. Adding the reversal of the executive order would be the “string”.
On the committee side: Shaun Donovan, director of the Office of Management and Budget, will testify before the Senate Budget Committee on the President’s FY 2016 budget proposal, which was released yesterday.
House: Status Update The House, meanwhile, will vote to a pass a bill to repeal Obamacare, signaling that in the new Congress, dismantling the President’s signature health care legislation remains a top priority.
Needless to say, President Obama has issued a threat to veto the measure if it reaches his desk.
On the committee side: Treasury Secretary Jack Lew will also be on the Hill today testifying on Obama’s budget, but in front of the House Ways and Means Committee.

White House Watch

The President’s Schedule At 11:35 AM, as the House votes to repeal Obamacare, President Obama will meet with ten Americans who wrote him letters about how they were benefited by the health care law.
At 2:10 PM, the President will hold a Cabinet meeting.
Biden’s Day Vice President Joe Biden will meet with King Abdullah II of Jordan, who is in Washington, D.C. this week.
Abdullah will also meet with Secretary of State John Kerry today.

Gabe's Bookshelf

Hot Book: Power Forward by Reggie Love A book comes out today by Reggie Love, former Personal Aide to President Obama (also known as the President’s “bodyman” or “chief of stuff”). This is the kind of book filled with tidbits that are interesting, but unimportant, and loved by Washington.
In Power Forward: My Presidential Education, Love will tell his journey from star Duke University basketball player to Obama aide.
Excerpts released from the book have revealed some juicy bits already, including:
---Obama is very particular about his shoes (“Shoes were always the biggest challenge for the senator. The man was particular about his feet. He wouldn’t just throw on any old pair of mukluks. They had to look a certain way, feel a certain way. Anytime he couldn’t wear his favored dress flats, it was an issue.”)
---On food: Obama did not chew “gum wrapped in tiny papers,” will not eat “energy bars with fruits,”, cautions that fast food “will kill you,” and once picked all the M&Ms out of a bag of trail mix. Obama is also not a fan of fried food, and hates fried walleye. And salads? “Only in emergencies”.
--- Info on Obama’s Nicotine habits
---Love, and White House trip director Marvin Nicholson, have tattoos reading “365” and “332,” the number of electoral votes Obama won in 2008 and 2012.
---A time when Obama accidentally walked in on Love and a friend in bed.
---Love’s description of his job as Obama’s “DJ, his Kindle, his travel agent, his valet, his daughters’ basketball coach, his messenger, his punching bag, his alarm clock, his vending machine, his chief of stuff, his note passer, his spades partner, his party planner, his workout partner, his caterer, his small forward, his buffer, his gatekeeper, his surrogate son, and ultimately, his friend.”
Hot Book: Guide to Being Awesome Robby Novak and Brad Montague are writing a book. Don’t know who they are? Would it help if I said Kid President and his brother-in-law/producer?
At age 11, Robby is known to millions as Kid President, for his viral YouTube channel in which he gives Pep Talks, and occasionally meets the Adult President (of the United States), and does hilarious and inspirational things.
Anyone who watches Kid President knows he is just all-round awesome, and now you can be too, with Kid President’s Guide to Being Awesome.
Robby Novak 2044!!! (adjusting for my 2036 run, and then re-election in 2040 because naturally we wouldn’t run against each other)

Question of the Day

Yesterday’s Answer Monday’s post-Super Bowl question was….NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s father represented what state in both houses of Congress?
The answer is…New York. Charles Goodell served in the Eisenhower Justice Department before winning a special election to represent New York’s 43^rd District in the U.S. House in 1959 (just three months after the birth of his soon Roger) to fill a vacancy caused by a death. He would be re-elected four more times before being appointed to the U.S. Senate, again to fill a vacancy due to a death – the assassination of Bobby Kennedy.
In his five years in the Senate, Goodell became known as a liberal Republican; he lost a race for re-election in 1970 over his opposition to the Vietnam War.
GREAT JOB…Randy Fleisher, Steve Gitnik, Rick Isserman, and @JoshuaMZeitz, a historian and author of Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln’s Image!