The Club for Growth

Mike Huckabee's "dark horse" status in the G.O.P. race is slipping away as he becomes an obvious target for groups that fear he really will become the nominee. In this ad, The Club for Growth attacks his tax record. The Huckabee campaign says these clips are out of context.

In a private address to a conservative group last weekend in Florida, Rudy Giuliani described himself as the only real fiscal conservative in the presidential race. He also took a hard line on security policy, and stressed the notion that his views were consistent.

The speech and the following question and answer session, which I reported on in this week's paper, also showed how Giuliani is continuing to try to smooth over his differences with conservatives on social issues.  read more »

Talking about fiscal discipline to members of the Club for Growth, Giuliani said, "We need a president who has actually practiced it, there in the battlefields, and won battles for fiscal discipline and I'm the only one that's done that." On the subject of security, he said that Democrats aspired to a foreign policy that would "appease" terrorists.

I was at the New School last night to listen to SEIU President Andy Stern, who talked about the union's potentially landscape-altering plan to form a PAC to target... Congressional Democrats.

SEIU's PAC, called They Work For US, is modeled on The Club for Growth -- an anti-tax lobby that keeps Congressional Republicans on a tight leash, Stern told me. The idea of the new PAC from SEIU -- the largest and most politically powerful health care union in America -- would be to go after Democrats who vote against their interests on economic issues.

Some Congressional Democrats -- including New Yorkers Greg Meeks, Joseph Crowley and Ed Towns -- have already sparked the union's ire by voting for free trade agreements and Republican-sponsored bankruptcy bills.

I asked him if his union's focus on Democrats was in conflict with the party's effort to take back the Congress this year.

"I don't want to take back the Congress, I want to elect people that make work pay," he said [full quote]. "Our union was the largest contributor to the Republican Governor's Association and the Democratic Governor's Association in 2004."

You can hear more from Stern here.

-- Azi Paybarah