Via Eric Kleefeld, a bold proclamation from Senator Richard Burr (R-NC): “The fact is it is impossible for any candidate to get to the right of me from an ideological standpoint of my record.”

According to DW-NOMINATE, in the 111th Senate Burr is close to correct, only Senators Burr, Ensign, Sessions, Kyl, Inhofe, Bunning, DeMint, and Coburn are more rightwing. In the 110th he was slightly more rightwing, with only seven Senators to his right. In the 109th there were only five to his right. So the ideological space to the right of Richard Burr is, indeed, extremely small. In recent years, thought, I would say that Senators Kyl and DeMint have been the most consistently on the right.

Thus far, Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) doesn’t have an announced opponent in 2010, but one possible candidate would be North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper. And even if Cooper doesn’t throw his hat in the ring, this is not the polling an incumbent likes to see:

In a recent poll of nearly one thousand voters across the state, Attorney General Cooper, a Democrat, leads Burr by four points in a hypothetical Senate race. NewsChannel3 asked Cooper if he will run for Burr’s Senate seat. “No, I have not made a decision on that. I want to serve the people of North Carolina and just need to determine the best way to do that.”

Given that Obama carried North Carolina, and that Burr doesn’t seem very popular, I find it surprising that Burr doesn’t seem to be trying harder to find a high-profile issue on which he can buck his party and partner with the president. Certainly, blanket opposition is a novel strategy under the circumstances.

Richard Burr continues to be dogged by complaints about his irresponsible rhetoric on bank deposits, and his allies, such as Richard Danos, chairman of the Henderson County Republican Party, continue to dissemble about what he said:

The Times-News reported that as part of an economic talk to the County Chamber of Commerce, Burr told of urging his wife to withdraw some cash from their ATM during the banking crisis — a story he has repeated dozens of times. Many Americans took out some extra cash as a common sense precaution during that period.

Look. People withdraw cash from ATMs all the time. That would be a ridiculous anecdote to tell. Here’s what he actually said:

“On Friday night, I called my wife and I said, ‘Brooke, I am not coming home this weekend. I will call you on Monday. Tonight, I want you to go to the ATM machine, and I want you to draw out everything it will let you take,” Burr said, according to the Hendersonville Times-News. “And I want you to tomorrow, and I want you to go Sunday.’ I was convinced on Friday night that if you put a plastic card in an ATM machine the last thing you were going to get was cash.”

This is Burr, implying to his audience, that their bank deposits are not safe. In fact, bank deposits are insured by the FDIC. This is supposed to give people confidence that they need to have these kind of fears, and thus prevent bank runs. And with few bank runs, there’s little need for the FDIC to actually step in. When Burr implies that the deposits are not safe, he’s encouraging runs on banks. That won’t lead to anyone losing their deposits—whether or not Burr understands it, the deposits are insured—but it will lead to losses for taxpayers who need to pay out insurance claims, and it will lead to bank failures and job losses.

This isn’t a huge deal, in the scheme of things, but it was an irresponsible thing to say. Burr and his friends should just take responsibility and move on.

Roll Call looks at three Senators whose weak poll numbers usually spell big-time trouble for incumbents—Jim Bunning (R-KY), Chris Dodd (D-CT), and Richard Burr (R-NC).

The Bunning situation is clearly sui generis, so I’ll leave it one side. I think a flaw in the article is that it treats the Burr and Dodd situations as basically similar when they’re actually extremely different. Dodd is basically a case of a politician coming under a cloud of unpopularity for idiosyncratic reasons. It seems that if Dodd were to bow out of the race and be replaced by Richard Blumenthal or any other reasonable Democrat, that the Democrat would be very strongly favored. Consequently, Dodd’s strategy is to play up the idea of Chris Dodd Generic Democrat. Legislatively, he’s aiming to be an ally of the popular president Barack Obama and emphasize his likely opponent’s support for the failed and unpopular agenda of George W. Bush.

The Burr situation is rather different. He seems to be a more unusual case of a politician who was elected at a time when being an orthodox conservative was a great political strategy in his state, now running for re-election at a time when it’s not clear that that’s true anymore. Suddenly it seems that North Carolina has a Democratic governor, one Democratic US Senator, and was carried by a Democrat in the presidential election, and its incumbent conservative Republican Senator Richard Burr is polling poorly. It’s potentially a state that’s just transforming its demographics and political culture under Burr’s feet. And he doesn’t seem to be trying to adapt. He’s not trying to position himself as a moderate by selectively supporting some element of the Obama agenda. He’s just charging ahead on the assumption that North Carolina will swiftly return to its conservative roots.

And maybe it will. But it seems like a risk.

The North Carolina press is starting to deliver a little heat to Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) over his irresponsible comments that could have sparked dangerous bank runs. But instead of just admitting he messed up, Burr is spinning weird and nonsensical rationalizations. Here he tells WTVD from Raleigh that he was right to risk sparking bank runs but covers himself by saying that now is not a good time to panic:

Eyewitness News spoke with Burr Thursday, and he said the comment was misconstrued. He reacted to his Democratic critics and says he meant what he said 6 months ago, but times have changed. “That was done long ago. That part of the economic crisis is over. And it was I think helpful. I think to people who heard me speak to give them a firsthand understanding of my frame of mind in that early week,” he said.

Still unclear here is why it’s ever a good time for political leaders to be sparking runs on banks. But it’s nice that Senator Burr is acknowledging that we’ve brought some additional stability to the financial system. Under the circumstances, I wonder if he regrets his vote against a key element of the financial stabilization package?

Meanwhile, talking to WGHP Burr offered a somewhat different take and “said his point is every American should keep some cash on hand and not be totally dependent on ATMs and banks.” That bears no resemblance whatsoever to his original comment, “Tonight, I want you to go to the ATM machine, and I want you to draw out everything it will let you take . . . And I want you to tomorrow, and I want you to go Sunday.” You’d have to be pretty dumb to mistake those remarks for a pragmatic warning that you should keep some cash on hand in case of a blackout or something.

I’m not sure I understand why it’s so hard for Burr to just admit he made a mistake and try to move on. It’s a kind of unseemly arrogance.

I noted back on Tuesday that Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) has apparently been touring the state trying to spark bank runs with an anecdote about telling his wife to panic and pull money out of their bank accounts. It seemed irresponsible to me. And the issue caught some fire in the blogosphere, then the DSCC started pushing it out, then the North Carolina press started taking a closer look. So naturally the RSCC is firing back. But as Chris Orr observes, the RSCC is firing in a strange direction; instead of just dismissing the story as a mountain/molehill kind of thing being constructed out of a joke, their spokesman is saying that “The Democrats’ response highlights perfectly the competing views of the two parties when it comes to strengthening the economy.”

The Democrats’ response, as best I can tell, is that it’s a bad idea for politicians to frighten people and provoke bank runs. Is that really such a bad approach?

Via Chris Orr, some irresponsible talk from Senator Richard Burr, who really ought to know better:

During a speech on the economy last night, [Sen. Richard] Burr related his immediate reaction the week the crisis began.

“On Friday night, I called my wife and I said, ‘Brooke, I am not coming home this weekend. I will call you on Monday. Tonight, I want you to go to the ATM machine, and I want you to draw out everything it will let you take,” Burr said, according to the Hendersonville Times-News. “And I want you to tomorrow, and I want you to go Sunday.’ I was convinced on Friday night that if you put a plastic card in an ATM machine the last thing you were going to get was cash.”

Thanks to deposit insurance, there’s no actual need for people to be worried. But Senator Burr’s effort to whip people into a panic could lead to runs and bank failures. That, in turn, will lead to people losing jobs. People could even lose their business through no fault of their own other than having customers who chose to take the words of a United States Senator seriously. I’m having a hard to imagining what Burr could have been thinking.

I’ve been remarking for some time on how odd it strikes me that the bulk of Republican Senators representing states that Barack Obama carried in November seem to have no worries that blanket opposition to his agenda will hurt them at the polls. Now via Steve Benen, I Rob Christensen in the Raleigh News & Observer wondering if Richard Burr (D-NC) is going down to defeat: “Two statewide polls show Burr’s approval rating in the mid-30 percent range, regarded as a dangerously low number for an incumbent.”

That really is dangerously low. I have no idea what kind of candidates are out there to run against him, but mid-thirties is terrible for an incumbent in re-election cycle.

Meanwhile, you don’t seem to hear much about Kay Hagan, do you? But I suppose the same could be said for all the newly elected Senators. The newly appointed ones seem to have hogged most of the press.

Chris Cillizza reports that Organizing for America, the successor-organization to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, is going to kick into gear for the first time to try to mobilize support for the president’s budget. That seems like a good idea to me. Ordinarily, you think of a brand-new president’s main initiatives as being able to attract a fair amount of support from opposition party legislators whose constituencies he carried in the election. After all, an Obama platform of letting the Bush tax cuts expiring and auctioning carbon permits in order to pay for health care and a tax cut for working people carried the day in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Maine, Ohio, Indiana, Florida, and Iowa so you might think that Richard Burr, Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, George Voinovich, Dick Lugar, Mel Martinez, and Chuck Grassley would be a bit leery of opposing a budget framework that just lays out those campaign promises. But instead Obama’s seemed to have trouble getting Democrats on his side—including Democrats in whose states he’s popular.

Organizing, roughly speaking, is the difference. The top two percent and the pollution lobby don’t really care who won the election, aren’t impressed by slogans about how elections have consequences, and don’t care if people have health care or if the working class gets a tax cut. They just go to work every day to press for their agenda, and they’ll get their way unless people are pressing back.