After a year of uncertainty about his political career, Thaddeus McCotter resigned this week from his position as a representative from Michigan’s 11th Congressional district. Thad McCotter briefly ran for the Republican Party’s nomination for president, from July 2nd to September 21st, 2011. After dropping out of the race, McCotter (pictured) attempted to run for re-election to his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. His petitions to be put on the ballot for the congressional race met with a lot of difficulty, as 85% of the signatures supporting McCotter were deemed to be invalid and were rejected by Michigan’s Secretary of State. At the beginning of June, the Congressman announced that he would not be seeking re-election to the U.S. House, then on July 6th, the 47-year-old McCotter officially resigned from his position in Congress.
After failing to gain any traction in the Republican Primary, McCotter, at the very least, ran a congressional campaign which was unable to garner anywhere close to the number of required signatures to get him on the ballot to be re-elected to the House of Representatives, even as an incumbent (which provides numerous benefits to petitioners). Every campaign has a significant number of ballots rejected as invalid. Given signature requirements, convoluted election laws and the difficulties inherent in trying to collect thousands (or tens of thousands) of signatures, it is inevitable that many will be rejected for one reason or another. However, a rejection rate of 85% suggests that there was something very wrong with McCotter’s election staff. For this reason, Thad McCotter is named my political loser of the week.
Although he has much to answer for in respect to supporting an individual health mandate as governor of Massachusetts while currently trying to position himself against Obama’s healthcare law, Mitt Romney has become the main beneficiary of donations from those opposed to the new healthcare law. At least partly sparked by the recent Supreme Court decision upholding the mandate, Romney shattered all previous fund-raising records by bringing over $100 million into his campaign coffers during the month of June. This is another reason that although Obama won big on the healthcare law, he may also be its biggest loser as well. Those donations are 100 million reasons that Mitt Romney is the winner of the week in news from the political arena.
There may be another winner as well — Wikileaks and Julian Assange, who released a huge number of documents this week concerning the Syrian government, which is now embroiled in a civil war. The documents detail various business dealings between the Syrian government and outside contractors, many of whom continued to do business with the government of Syria even after most nations banned weapon sales to the country in a effort to stop violent internal crackdowns. With world opinion so opposed to the Syrian government, Assange helped shed light on a dark government, and with it, may have shed some light on himself.
