Larry King on CNN: Dixville Notch, NH goes for Obama, 15 - 6.First time that city has gone D since 1968.Sign of the times-- the results are already up on Wikipedia, not even 15 minutes after midnight, early election day morning.
I've been curious about the accusation--which can be found in almost any comment thread on a media website--that Obama wrote a "foreword" for the William Ayer's book, A Kind and Just Parent: The...
When Obama's participation in an anti-redlining lawsuit is characterized as a "smoking gun" for his culpability in the current crisis, I know that we're through the looking glass.The bizarreness of...
When a polling organization conducts a mere 300 interviews each day for a national tracking poll, this is what you get: the potential for one day of outlier polling to produce phony movement. Or, to...
What should we consider the limits of responsible campaigning? Like many people, my ideal campaign would focus on policy issues rather than attacks on character. A President's character matters, of course, and I see no ethical reason why attacks on character should be "out of bounds" in a Presidential campaign (but the qualities that make someone a good leader of the Executive Branch are, I would argue, quite different than those the electorate fixates upon). We can all agree, I imagine, that dishonest attacks--those predicated on clear cut falsehoods--have no place in an ethical political...
Rasmussen:Sixty-nine percent (69%) of voters have seen or heard news coverage of McCain’s ad including Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Just 22% believe the ad was racist. But, most say Obama’s comment about not looking like other Presidents on the dollar bill was racist.If I understand this correctly--and Rasmussen does not produce numbers, nor the wording of the question, for the second finding--then a majority of the American public is right about McCain's ad, and wrong about Obama's comment. What all of this suggests is that the McCain's embrace of Rove's (brilliant) tactics creates real...
David Brooks has an Alanis Morisette moment (except this one really is ironic): But he has grown accustomed to putting on this sort of saccharine show for the rock concert masses, and in Berlin his act jumped the shark. His words drift far from reality, and not only when talking about the Senate Banking Committee. His Berlin Victory Column treacle would have made Niebuhr sick to his stomach.Obama has benefited from a week of good images. But substantively, optimism without reality isn’t eloquence. It’s just Disney.But when it comes down to it, Brooks is just being lazy with this column...
I have a very difficult time getting worked into a lather because John McCain has, on more than one occasion, referred to "The Czech Republic" as "Czechoslovakia" (video). I'm less than half McCain's age, and I often slip (during lectures no less) and call Russia the "Soviet Union" and substitute "Soviets" for "Russians." Shockingly enough, I almost always do this, like McCain, in contexts when I'm discussing nuclear deterrence, ballistic missile defense, and other issues that were, um, rather salient during the Cold War. In fact, Howard Dean made the same mistake at a session of Hardball,...
Depending on how one looks at it, the fact that some Democratic Hilary Clinton supporters are willing to betray everything she stands for in order to "punish" the party for nominating Barack Obama is either perplexing, amusing, or just plain sad.Not that there aren't plenty of reasons why someone would support McCain over Clinton and Obama. But the rank ordering of Clinton > McCain > Obama--for anyone with actual policy concerns--is simply bizarre. Which may be why the commentary at such websites is so vicious and vile that it makes a online Halo 3 game full of 12-year olds look like the...
Tom Toles pretty much sums up the issue in yesterday's Washington Post.Truly: 'nuff said.
Pundits have frequently compared the 2008 election to 1980. In both elections, the opposition party fielded strong candidates in the face of an unpopular president brought down by economic insecurity and foreign policy disaster. For his part, Senator Barack Obama has openly compared himself to Ronald Reagan -- not in substance, of course, but in transformational style.Reagan won the 1980 Republican nomination for President, but his main opponent became his Vice President and was later elected for the top job. I was a freshman in college during spring 1980 and was taking a course on campaigns...
I don't typically blog about domestic elections at the Duck, preferring to save my analysis and preferences for my personal blog.However, Super Tuesday was a unique political event. No primary election ever had so much at stake -- at least in terms of the number of states and delegates to the national convention.Hillary Clinton was once the odds-on favorite to win the 2008 Democratic nomination. She secured backing from much of the Party establishment, raised tons of money and led in the polls throughout 2007.Now, she's the former frontrunner -- managing to earn only about 50,000 more votes...