Trends
Ron Paul hints third-party run still possible ...
04.26.08 -- 1:44 PM
Politico's Jonathan Martin has a piece on how Texas GOP Congressman Ron Paul who dropped out of the Republican presidential nomination race in March is still turning out enthusiastic crowds. But more importantly Martin reports that Paul is not entirely slamming the door shut on a third-party run .
Two candidates not named John McCain got a combined 219,913 votes in the Pennsylvania Republican primary Tuesday, and one of them is still in the race.
Sort of.
“I’m a real candidate, but I try to keep everybody living in the real world,” Ron Paul said in an interview, alluding to the exuberance of his supporters.
Despite posting a video on his website last month conceding that he couldn’t win and indicating that he was winding down his campaign, Paul continues to be a presence in the GOP contest. He aired a radio ad before the Pennsylvania primary, is still traveling the country to appear at campaign events and, as of the end of March, had more than $5 million in the bank.
He got 16 percent of the vote Tuesday, which, combined with Mike Huckabee’s vote share, meant that more than a quarter of the voters in the Keystone State’s closed Republican primary voted for somebody other than their party’s all-but-certain nominee.
The libertarian-leaning obstetrician-turned-congressman's long-shot candidacy continues to take on a life of its own — and he admits he’s in no rush to tamp down the enthusiasm.
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Dems giving McCain a free ride ...
04.06.08 -- 2:24 PM
According to the politico it just keeps getting better for the GOP presumptive presidential nominee John McCain ...
Democratic talk of an early, hard-hitting campaign to "define" and tar Arizona Senator John McCain appears to have fizzled for lack of money, leading to a quiet round of finger-pointing among Democratic operatives and donors as McCain assembles a campaign and a public image relatively unmolested.
Despite the millions of dollars pooling around Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, anti-McCain funds have fallen far short of the hopes set in November, when a key organizer, Tom Matzzie, reportedly told the Washington Post that the "Fund for America" would raise more than $100 million to support the activities of a range of allied groups.
The Democratic National Committee, too, is organizing an anti-McCain campaign, but a spokeswoman, Karen Finney, said fundraising to support that effort has met "mixed" results.
So while press releases and Internet ads have been launched, the largest bore weapon in contemporary politics — a sustained television campaign - hasn't. That's because, people involved say, the soft-money groups don't have the soft money.
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Dem civil war ... to be or not to be? ...
03.31.08 -- 5:27 PM
Politico is reporting that the Democrats are working hard to avoid a civil war ...
Hoping to avoid a summer-long bloodbath for the Democratic presidential nomination, some party leaders such as Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen have urged a convention of superdelegates in June, after the caucuses and primaries are over.
The idea sounds exotic, but recent public declarations and Politico interviews with top Democratic officials have made clear that something like what Bredesen proposed is already underway — not with a big meeting but with an intensifying series of exchanges among party elites.
The early voting in this virtual convention is bad news for Hillary Rodham Clinton. Her hope that Democratic leaders will settle the nomination is starting to come true — with Barack Obama so far emerging as the beneficiary.
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It keeps getting more and more interesting...
03.28.08 -- 5:47 PM
The Clinton soap opera continues to generate more fun. Chelsea Clinton, whose opinion on this should be worth a penny or two, says unequivocally that her mother would make a better president and commander-in-chief than her father . Oh my ...
It's a topic that would likely make for awkward conversation at a Clinton family dinner: Who would be the better president, Bill or Hillary?
But daughter Chelsea Clinton made her position on the matter clear Friday, saying unequivocally that she thinks her mom will make a better president than her dad.
"I don't take anything for granted, but hopefully with Pennsylvania's help, she will be our next president, and yes, I do think she'll be a better president," the former first daughter said during a campaign event in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
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Is Obama trying to run away from the 'liberal' label?
03.24.08 -- 7:13 AM
Is Democratic presidential nomination frontrunner Barack Obama trying to run away from the 'liberal' label ? That's what a report on the International Herald Tribune report seems to suggest ...
At the core of Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign is a promise that he can transcend the starkly red-and-blue politics of the last 15 years, end the partisan and ideological wars, and build a new governing majority.
To achieve the change the country wants, he says, "we need a leader who can finally move beyond the divisive politics of Washington and bring Democrats, independents and Republicans together to get things done."
It is a promise that convinced 67 percent of all registered voters in the last New York Times/CBS News Poll, in late February, that Obama "would be the kind of president who would be able to unify the country" - far more than those who identified his Democratic rival, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, or the presumptive Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, that way.
But this promise leads, inevitably, to a question: Can such a majority be built and led by Obama, whose voting record was, by one ranking, the most liberal in the Senate last year?
Also, and more immediately, if Obama wins the Democratic nomination, how will his promise of a new and less polarized type of politics fare against the Republican attacks that since the 1980s have portrayed Democrats as far out of step with the country's values?
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End of the Road for Clinton?...
03.21.08 -- 8:29 PM
Politico's Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen have a story that is a must read . Basically, they argue that it's all over for Clinton but that the media for some reasons, including self interest in a protracted nomination battle, have been underreporting this "big fact" ...
One big fact has largely been lost in the recent coverage of the Democratic presidential race: Hillary Rodham Clinton has virtually no chance of winning.
Her own campaign acknowledges there is no way that she will finish ahead in pledged delegates. That means the only way she wins is if Democratic superdelegates are ready to risk a backlash of historic proportions from the party’s most reliable constituency.
Unless Clinton is able to at least win the primary popular vote — which also would take nothing less than an electoral miracle — and use that achievement to pressure superdelegates, she has only one scenario for victory. An African-American opponent and his backers would be told that, even though he won the contest with voters, the prize is going to someone else.
People who think that scenario is even remotely likely are living on another planet.
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Rev. Jeremiah Wright ... friend or foe of Obama?
03.16.08 -- 7:34 PM
Is there some secret agenda by Rev. Jeremiah Wright to derail the candidacy of Barack Obama? According to this CNN report, Wright's church is escalating the war of words over the minister's "incendiary' sermon in which he blasted the United States and condemned it for its treatment of blacks. But isn't it Obama's advantage for this issue to fade out quietly? If Wright really wants Obama to win the Democratic nomination and possibly make history as the first Black president of the United States why would he continue to make "incendiary" remarks that would alienate White voters whose support Obama critically needs to pull it off?
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright's former church sharply criticized the media Sunday for recent coverage of his past controversial sermons, saying in a statement that Wright's "character is being assassinated in the public sphere."
The statement comes two days after Barack Obama, a longtime friend of Wright and attendee of the Trinity United Church of Christ, formally denounced the sermons that have recently become the subject of controversy, calling them "inflammatory and appalling."
"It is an indictment on Dr. Wright’s ministerial legacy to present his global ministry within a 15- or 30-second sound bite,” the Rev. Otis Moss III, the current pastor of the church said in the statement.
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Cohen: Democrats slouching towards defeat in November ...
03.11.08 -- 6:48 PM
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen thinks the Democrats are digging their own graves preparatory to the November presidential elections...
By official count, The Post's 10th most e-mailed column of 2007 was published last June under the headline "How the GOP Could Win." It said that the Republican Party would promote national security as the salient issue of the campaign, making a silk purse (victory in November) out of a sow's ear (the quagmire in Iraq), and keep the White House for four more years. Increasingly, I think I might have been right.
It was Mitt Romney, the Harvard MBA, who left John McCain with what could be the winning business plan. In his campaign swan song, Romney used the two words you will hear repeatedly in the fall: retreat and defeat. Referring to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Romney said, "They would retreat, declare defeat, and the consequence of that would be devastating."
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Dream Ticket...
03.10.08 -- 6:50 PM
CNN's Alexander Mooney asks if Clinton is benefiting from "Dream Ticket" talk. But of course it's obvious she is...
It's an idea that's increasingly getting kicked around, especially by one campaign in particular.
The prospect of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama running on the same ticket has long been the subject of speculation, even before voters started weighing in at the polls earlier this year.
But following Clinton's wins in Texas, Ohio, and Rhode Island last week — a trifecta of victories that essentially salvaged her presidential hopes — the New York senator and her surrogates have repeatedly raised the issue themselves; raised it so often, in fact, that Obama made sure to shoot down the idea at a campaign event in Mississippi Monday.
"I want everybody to be absolutely clear," he said. "I'm not running for vice president. I'm running for president of the United States of America."
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Is she getting desperate? ...
03.03.08 -- 6:43 AM
Is Hillary Clinton getting desperate? Barack Obama thinks so...
On the heels of Hillary Clinton's new campaign ad suggesting Barack Obama is ill-equipped to handle an early-morning foreign policy crisis, the Illinois senator said he thinks his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination is becoming a "little desperate."
"I think she has got a little desperate toward the end of this campaign," Obama told ABC in an interview set to air Monday night. "[She] has been a lot more aggressive in her negative attacks."
Obama's comments come only days after the Clinton campaign released a hard-hitting television spot in Texas that portrays children asleep in their bed while a phone rings in the background. The ad's narrator raises the prospect of a foreign policy crisis and asks, "It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want answering the phone?”
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