May 19, 2008 • Vol. 13, No. 34
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The big election related news from yesterday had nothing to do with the nothing-burger in West Virginia. Sorry Clinton dead-enders – it’s still over. The big news came from Mississippi where in a special congressional election, Democrat Travis Childers defeated Republican Greg Davis, 53-47. President Bush carried the district with 62% of the vote in 2004.
I know this all sounds very grim for what it might mean in the Fall, but worry not. The GOP has a plan. Representative Tom Cole, who has the unenviable task of heading the National Republican Congressional Committee this cycle, assures us the way out is really quite simple:
“The political environment is such that voters remain pessimistic about the direction of the country and the Republican Party in general. Therefore, Republicans must undertake bold efforts to define a forward-looking agenda that offers the kind of positive change voters are looking for. This is something we can do in cooperation with our presidential nominee, but time is short.”
Bold efforts? A forward looking agenda? Positive change? Phew!! For a fleeting moment, I feared the GOP wouldn’t have a clue as to how it should substantively respond to its impending electoral crisis.
Meanwhile, John Boehner, fresh off his bold and forward looking effort to distort Barack Obama’s comments on Israel, bluntly suggests that the GOP should view yesterday’s Mississippi returns as a “wake-up call:”
The results in MS-01 should serve as a wake-up call to Republican candidates nationwide. As I’ve said before, this is a change election, and if we want Americans to vote for us we have to convince them that we can fix Washington. Our presidential nominee, Senator McCain, is an agent of change; candidates who hope to succeed must show that they’re willing and able to join McCain in a leading movement for reform. We need to stop wasteful Washington spending, fight and win the war on terror, and stop the largest tax increase in history. That is truly the change the American people deserve -- and that is a message on which we can succeed.
I don’t mean to kick my party while it’s going down, but the proper time to “wake-up” would have been after the 2006 midterms. Actually, waking up well before the 2006 elections would have been better still, but I’m an easy grader. Even after the 2006 wipeout, the party opted to practice business as usual, returning to leadership positions the same people who had authored the midterm disaster. The concept of bringing in a fresh face with fresh ideas manifested itself in restoring Trent Lott to a leadership role. Shockingly, the Lott Restoration failed to arrest the GOP’s decline. Maybe if he had stuck around instead of going to K Street…well, we can dream, can’t we?
Boehner’s statement also shows the GOP does not intend to be outgunned in the vapid rhetoric department this fall. But is this wise? If we’re going to rely on vapid rhetoric, isn’t that playing on Barack Obama’s home court? In case anyone from the McCain campaign is reading, I’ll let you in on a little secret – if the presidential election boils down to who’s the biggest agent of change, John McCain will not win.
For GOP candidates up and down the ticket, blathering clichés about change won’t do any good. Neither will reactive messages like “Vote for us so we can stop the Democrats from raising your taxes.” Instead, successful Republican candidates will outline serious and persuasive visions for America’s economy and national security. Doing so won’t be enough to win some races in this particular cycle, but at least there will be a nobility of purpose to the enterprise, something that has been sadly lacking all too often in recent years.
Reacting to the news that Barack Obama has indicated a willingness to appear with John McCain at town halls over the course of the campaign, Dean Barnett calls Obama "the king of the teleprompter" and further argues that "Obama does poorly at debates, and is a weak extemporaneous speaker."
Dean's got a keen eye and likes golf, so it's rare that I disagree with him. But he's wrong on this. I saw nearly all of the 47,342 Democratic debates. Obama won a few, lost a few and was average in others. Even if his performances were uneven (and I thought he had more good ones than bad), I'm not convinced most viewers would agree that he "does poorly" as a matter of course.
But most of my difference with Dean comes in his assessment of Obama as "a weak extemporaneous speaker." Not true. When I followed him around Iowa for a week-plus back in December, Obama participated in numerous town halls. He already had a reputation as an excellent orator -- the king of the teleprompter -- and that was certainly in evidence on that trip. But I came away from the trip surprised at how good he was in less formal settings. Obama was best in the routine exchanges with voters and students that dominated his schedule that week -- answering difficult questions with the ease and sophistication of a politician with much greater experience. Yes, he makes the occasional gaffe -- 57 states -- but over time his style will be more an asset than a drawback.
I have long thought there was a risk in dismissing Obama as a lightweight or as merely a good speaker. I still think that's true.
But there is good reason for McCain to draw Obama out in these public settings: The more he talks, the more he will reveal his far-left politics. Obama will say things that would elicit nods of approval among his spiritual mentors in Chicago or in the Senate Democratic cloakroom or from his wife. (See his moral preening on the issue of the flag lapel pin, for instance.) Engage terrorist-supporting dictators without conditions? For most of the country, that's crazy. In left-wing intellectual circles it's not controversial. It's why, when controversy first surfaced over the mad rantings of Reverend Wright, Obama thought they could be best understood in context. It never occurred to him that such context was as offensive as the stray quotes that made news.
McCain's campaign is confident -- maybe overconfident -- about his chances in head-to-head debates/town halls with Obama. This is why.
Hillary Clinton fundraising chief and noted Fox News admirer Terry McAuliffe took to MSNBC's airwaves (cable-waves?) a few hours ago to boast that that Hillary has raised over $10 million online from over 50,000 new donors since her victory last night. Markos Moulitsas channels my own thoughts on this development: “Impressive if true.”
Assuming it's true, this is excellent news for Republicans who have been hoping for a competitive primary race on the Democratic side that will run right through the convention. Yet it's even better news for students of Terry McAuliffe's insufferability which is sure to be driven to astonishing new heights by this latest coup. The flights of ego that this cash haul will surely generate will leave even veteran McAuliffe observers agape.
John Dickerson at Slate has an interesting look at John McCain's next campaign tour. (I wrote about that tour and McCain's general election campaign here.)
McCain will be visiting places "Republicans fear to tread," as the somewhat overwrought headline puts it. The plans include stops in heavily-black urban areas and poverty-stricken rural areas, where McCain will make himself available to voters who don't often see Republicans in person and don't often vote for them, anyway.
McCain advisers want to highlight the contrast between his style of campaigning -- freewheeling, accessible, open -- and the style of his likely opponent. Although Barack Obama can be quite good in give-and-take formats like town halls, he does this infrequently. His campaign controls tightly his access to reporters, too, rarely making him available for press conferences and turning down requests for time with him even from publications that might seem friendly. (My repeated requests for an interview with Obama have, not surprisingly, gone unanswered. In fact, my repeated requests for time with Obama press staffers -- i.e. the people paid to talk to people like me -- have gone unanswered, too.)
As Mark Salter, McCain's top adviser, told Dickerson: "This isn't just his style. It's a part of his message."
McCain does well in town halls. He likes them, he told me, because interacting with voters keeps him on his toes. Rather than simply repeating the same lines in stump speeches, he actually has to use his mind to provide answers to their questions.
Such a tour, Dickerson notes, is risky.
For all the energy McCain derives from town hall appearances, so far his minority crowds have been limited to Indian reservations and poor Mexican-American areas in his home state. McCain is also going to be talking about education, health care, and the economy, issues he is far less comfortable addressing than issues of defense and national security. Still, McCain and his aides are hoping that the points they win for trying will overcome the downside of possible fumbles and missteps.
It's risky for another reason, too. Although McCain has quietly sought to mend fences with some conservatives who did not support him in the primaries, he has done little of substance to ease their concerns. The risk is not that these conservatives oppose reaching out to voters (and non-voters) who don't normally vote Republicans. They don't. It's that in a campaign with limited time and limited resources, McCain is choosing to spend time with people unlikely to vote for him rather than, say, giving a speech on the importance of missile defense or stopping in at a successful charter school or visiting a pro-adoption crisis pregnancy center. The risk is that such a tour could reinforce the perception among conservatives that McCain cares much less about winning their approval than he does about the approval of his opponents and the news media.
Will it matter in November if some conservatives remain unsatisfied with McCain? That's debateable, but we may be on our way to finding out.
Bob Kerrey is making sense: "You don't change the rules in the middle of the game. Period," he said in response to a question about whether or not Michigan and Florida's delegates ought to be seated at the Democratic National Convention.
Funny stuff: Martin Short explaining his paparazzi rage to David Letterman.
And no, I am not a regular reader of "Jezebel." I got this link from Defamer. I swear.
James Taranto collects reports on the apparently widespread phenomenon of people requiring medical attention after they faint at Obama rallies. Maybe it's time for the FDA to consider requiring a Surgeon General's warning for Obama events.
Read. Krauthammer. Now.
(Or as soon as it's convenient.)
Looks like the 2008 issue matrix is shaping up to be ... rather similar to the 2004 issue matrix. If this speech and this statement are any indication, John McCain plans a general election campaign highlighting the contrasts between him and the Democratic nominee on national security and the economy.
It seems to me, however, that there are two differences between this election and the last. One is John McCain, and the other is Barack Obama. If Obama is the Democratic nominee, the presidential candidates in both parties will be likable (and well-liked) political figures with proven abilities to broaden their party's base of support. That wasn't exactly the case in 2004, if you recall.
Another potential difference between the two elections is that public opinion polls seem to indicate that, on a variety of issues (every issue except abortion and guns, from what I can tell), the political center has shifted left. If that had been the case in 2004, George W. Bush would not have won reelection. But it is 2008, and John McCain understands, and knows how to win, the political center, wherever it falls on the ideological spectrum. Which means no particular outcome is certain. And no issue is off the table.
Romney signs on. It would be a helluva ticket.
For the moment, pretty well. According to last week's Quinnipiac poll cited here, Clinton leads Obama in Ohio 55 percent to 34 percent and in Pennsylvania, which holds its primary on April 22, 52 percent to 36 percent. Rasmussen's latest Ohio tracking poll has Clinton up 51 percent to 37 percent. There hasn't been any recent Texas polling, from what I can tell.
Here's the thing, though. The latest Rasmussen national tracking poll has Obama up 12 points. Ohio's primary is more than two weeks away. If Obama wins Wisconsin and Hawaii on Tuesday, he'll continue to gather momentum. The stories out of the Clinton camp will continue to be negative. And it's likely that the Ohio spread will narrow in the coming weeks.
From today's Wall Street Journal story on turmoil inside the Clinton campaign:
[T]he campaign has something of a shellshocked feel, as staffers privately chew over a blowup last week where internal frictions flared into the open. Clinton campaign operatives say it happened as top Clinton advisers gathered in Arlington, Va., campaign headquarters to preview a TV commercial. 'Your ad doesn't work,' strategist Mark Penn yelled at ad-maker Mandy Grunwald. 'The execution is all wrong,' he said, according to the operatives.
'Oh, it's always the ad, never the message,' Ms. Grunwald fired back, say the operatives. The clash got so heated that political director Guy Cecil left the room, saying, 'I'm out of here.'"
Memo to Clinton campaign headquarters: It's not the ad. It's not the message. It's the candidate.
Dick Morris on February 6: "The California result likely means that Hillary will be the Democratic nominee."
Morris today: "Hillary Clinton has blown an almost sure shot at the Democratic presidential nomination."
For some reason, this David Leondhardt item was buried in today's Times business section:
"There have been six recessions since 1968, the year that the quarterly survey of economists began. At the start of each one, economists put the odds that the economy would shrink in the current quarter at 40 percent or more. ...
"In the latest survey, the forecasters also said there was a 43 percent chance that the economy would shrink in the second quarter of 2008. Every time that reading has risen above 40 percent, the economy has gone into recession."
Uh, oh.
There is one small but influential group of GOP political insiders who are praying for Mike Huckabee to continue his increasingly Quixotic campaign for the Republican nomination: voter mail and list consultants. Huckabee is doing a great job of showing state-by-state exactly where the evangelical voters are and are not, right down to the local precinct level. This is useful data in future races, so the voter phone, mail, and database crowd is hoping the Huck keeps on going, enhancing one Republican primary voter file after the next. Huckabee's presidential effort may not make it past the convention, but on primary voter lists, geo-targeting computer screens, and voter-contact-planning meetings, the "Huckabee precincts select" will live on long after his campaign is gone.
May I recommend Stanley Kurtz's Claremont Review of Books essay on Akbar Ahmed and Waziristan. There's more information here concerning the challenges American policymakers face in Pakistan's tribal areas than I have seen anywhere else.
From "I Love You, But You Love Meat," in today's New York Times:
"June Deadrick, 40, a lobbyist in Houston, said she would have a hard time loving a man who did not share her fondness for multicourse meals including wild game and artisanal cheeses. 'And I'm talking cheese from a cow, not that awful soy stuff,' she said."
No, I don't mean Obama, who also has been on a hot streak lately. I mean New York magazine, the last two issues of which have been fantastic. May I recommend this Po Bronson piece on why kids lie; this Stephen Rodrick piece on the strange life (and death) of hedge fund impresario Seth Tobias; and Joe Hagan's timely profile of Clemens's trainer and accuser Brian McNamee.
It'll never be the same again for the Hillary Clinton campaign. She is unlikely to recover. Everything has a tipping point, and in the Democratic race for president the ten day sweep that Barack Obama started on Saturday and is very likely to finish next Tuesday in Wisconsin is the final body blow the Clinton campaign will not recover from. It is not the simple fact that Obama has won a series of real states that is the crushing force grinding down the Clinton campaign. It is the powerful shockwave his string of victories is sending across the Democratic party. The message is clear and powerful: Obama is a winner. Clinton is a loser. Sure, there may be a final HRC win in TX or OH, but neither can deliver enough delegates in the Democrat's proportional system to stop Obama.
Although it will take days and weeks to show, the unsinkable Hillary for President operation has succumbed to an iceberg of titanic dimensions. The signs are everywhere. Super delegates are rethinking their position. Staff is leaving the campaign. Donors are in a panic. The race has tipped.
Mike Huckabee made it clear to a group of reporters this morning that he will not concede until John McCain secures the 1,191 delegates needed to become the Republican presidential nominee. "It could be that nobody ends up with 1,191 delegates prior to the convention," Huckabee said at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. "While a lot of people say that would be terrible, those are the rules. I didn't make up the rules. The party did."
Huckabee declared that he "absolutely, categorically" would not drop out of the presidential race and run for the seat held by Arkansas senator Mark Pryor, who is up for reelection this year. "There's a greater chance that I would dye my hair green and get tattoos all over my body and do a rock tour with Amy Winehouse," Huckabee said. Despite his start in politics as a U.S. Senate candidate in 1992, Huckabee now believes he has the "temperament of a chief executive" and has no interest in running for Senate in two years when Arkansas's other Democratic senator Blanche Lincoln is up for reelection.
Right now, Huckabee is focused on tailoring his message to each and every primary and caucus, hoping to pluck away as many delegates as he can along the way. In a robocall to voters in the District of Columbia, Huckabee pledged support for D.C. congressional representation, though he clarified this morning that he believes D.C. should have representation in the House but not the Senate, and he thinks a Constitutional amendment would be necessary to make this change. In Wisconsin's February 19 primary, Huckabee says he will have an advantage because Wisconsin is a "a strong pro-life state among Republican voters," and, in contrast to Huckabee, McCain is opposed to a Human Life Amendment and has supported federal funding for embryo-destructive stem cell research.
In order to prevent the Republican race from heading to a brokered convention in September, John McCain would need to garner about 45 percent of the remaining delegates, while Huckabee would need to win almost every single delegate in the remaining contests - including today's primaries in Virginia, Maryland, and D.C. As Huckabee likes to say, he majored in miracles, not math.
If Huckabee's strategy is to win enough delegates to provide leverage for a vice presidential bid, he didn't let on when he provided generic answers to questions about what qualities are needed in a vice president. Unless Huckabee upsets McCain today, chances of the race dragging on until the convention will diminish significantly.
But who knows what will happen? Perhaps divine intervention still has a role to play in the Republican race. Though I for one will be praying for Providence to convince Amy Winehouse that she desperately needs a smooth-talking, fair-taxing Southern Baptist bass player. Then Huckabee might realize a run for U.S. Senate isn't such a bad idea after all.
"Mr. Bush never sounds surer of himself than when the subject is Sept. 11, even when his critics argue that he has squandered the country's moral authority, violated American and international law, and led the United States into the foolhardy distraction of Iraq."
-- "Trial's Focus to Suit Bush," New York Times, February 12, 2008, p. 1.
"A widening array of financial-market problems threatens to trigger a new phase in the global credit crunch, extending it beyond the risky mortgages that have cost banks and investors more than $100 billion in losses and helped push the U.S. economy toward recession"
--"New Hitches in Markets May Widen Credit Woes," Wall Street Journal, February 11, 2008, page A1.
"The credit crisis is no longer just a subprime mortgage problem.
"As home prices fall and banks tighten lending standards, people with good, or prime, credit histories are falling behind on their payments for home loans, auto loans and credit cards at a quickening pace, according to industry data and economists"
--"Mortgage Crisis Spreads Past Subprime Loans," New York Times, February 12, 2008, pg. 1.
... Place your hopes in contests that are three weeks away.
John Podhoretz:
It is a great irony that the best political news for Republicans in a notably unfavorable election year - with the public telling pollsters that it is desirous of change and prefers Democratic stands on most issues by margins ranging from ten to twenty points - may come out of Iraq. Should the surge's progress continue and deepen, the Democratic nominee may find himself or herself in a very uncomfortable position come autumn. The Democratic base will not have changed its mind about the war's evil, and it will not be happy with a leader who does. So the nominee will find it almost impossible to embrace the surge, and certainly not after having disparaged it caustically in the past. But if the nominee does not embrace the real possibility of victory in Iraq, he or she will run the risk of appearing defeatist, or worse, in the eyes of the same independent voters who fled the GOP in droves in 2006.
In other words: everything rides on Iraq. As it has since September 2002, when Bush took his case to the United Nations.
Run, don't walk, to read Podhoretz's entire piece.
In Sunday's 60 Minutes interview with the inestimable Katie Couric, Hillary Clinton explained one of the keys to staying healthy on the campaign trail: "Wash your hands all the time." It's probably not bad advice, but still, you'd think the echos would have stopped her saying it: Out, damned spot! out, I say! ... What, will these hands ne'er be clean? ... Here's the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!
Clinton's very able press-meister Howard Wolfson and her rather-less-able chief strategist Mark Penn held a media conference call today to explain why Hillary Clinton is best able to beat John McCain in November. You can listen to this interesting call here.
Penn's basic pitch is: McCain will run against the Democratic nominee with assistance of the Well-Oiled "Republican Attack Machine" (WORAM) and only Hillary is tough and savvy enough to fend off McCain and his fearsome goon squad. (McCain and the WORAM have their own issues to resolve, a significant point the Clinton Apparatchiks carefully avoid.) Second, Penn claims Hillary Clinton has more experience on national security issues. Third, Hillary is far better known and less vulnerable to vicious WORAM attacks on unknown details of her voting record. Finally, Penn throws up a mist of micro-vote stuff; security women, Latinos, etc., who he claims are more Clinton friendly. There was also some expectations-spinning about the likely HRC wipeout on Tuesday. The spin: See you in Denver at the convention, via "a better month" in March in TX and OH.
My take? Nice try, fellas. But everybody knows Hillary polarizes half the country and would go into a general election with significant weaknesses.
P.S.: Best nasty press question. Some Brit from the Times of London. How is HRC's hold out for Texas and Ohio different from Rudy's similar spin about Florida near the end of his campaign? Wolfson responds with a long list of Clinton wins in various primary states.
The New York Times thinks it may have figured out why the Catholic vote is going for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries: "Mrs. Clinton owes some of her success to the nuns who were once a potent presence in American Catholicism."
Well, now, that's an idea. I admit there's some resemblance between Mrs. Clinton and the popular image of the stern, knuckle-rapping nun, but those nuns all disappeared around 1965, and, anyway, who would want to vote for one?
'Maybe we [Catholics are] a little bit more open to female leadership,' said [Catherine T. Nolan] Nolan, chairwoman of the Assembly Education Committee, one of the most powerful legislative posts in Albany. 'We had female role models from an early age. When I was growing up, all the Catholic school principals were women, and almost none of the public school principals were. That's changed now, but we've been used to female authority figures for much longer than other groups.' ...
Ms. Nolan recalled, as a girl, going on a field trip in Upper Manhattan to the shrine of Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini - an immigrant nun from Italy who in the late 19th century built 67 orphanages, hospitals and schools, amassing and wielding power against a stubborn hierarchy. She was the first American to be canonized a saint.
The destination was the shrine where an effigy of the saint, along with some of her remains, are displayed under glass beneath the altar. 'When you're a fourth grader coming from Queens and you see that - well, you talk about female role models,' Ms. Nolan said. 'Not that I'm putting Hillary Clinton in that category.'
Oh, why not? I often speak of Mrs. Clinton and Mother Cabrini in the same breath. While I work my way through the peculiar data from the exit polls, I take comfort in the fact that the New York Times is even more lost than I am. And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.
From Matt Bai's review of former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown's new book:
"Brown devotes an entire chapter to his philosophy of womanizing. Just after he was elected mayor, he relates, a friend of his wife, Blanche, asked her about his latest paramour. 'Listen, she may have him at the moment,' Brown quotes her as saying, 'but come inauguration day and he's up there on the platform being sworn in, I'll be the bitch holding the Bible.'"
Michael Tomasky: "Whether Obama can cut, even modestly, into Clinton's white working-class margin is, in my view, the single most important factor that will decide who wins this nomination. If he can, he has a strong shot at Ohio (March 4) and Pennsylvania (April 22). If he can't, Clinton will probably be able to hold him off."
In his New York Times column today, Bill Kristol argues that Obama is up to the challenge:
Obama will have momentum. He will likely have more money than Clinton for advertising. His ballot performance among Hispanics and working-class whites has generally been improving as the primary season has gone on. He intends to push a more robust economic message that could help him further narrow the gap among lower-income voters. And an interesting regression analysis at the Daily Kos Web site (poblano.dailykos.com) of the determinants of the Democratic vote so far, applied to the demographics of the Ohio electorate, suggests that Obama has a better chance than is generally realized in Ohio.
As for Texas, look for a couple of possible endorsements to help Obama there. If John Edwards campaigns for Obama in East Texas, and Bill Richardson defies the pleas of Bill Clinton and travels across the border from New Mexico to help out, Obama could prevail.
Can he? Obama has already proven himself a major player in American politics. It's looking like it may take more than a staff shakeup to stop him.
It's going to be a long week for Das Clinton Apparat. Obama wins LA, NE, and WA state on Saturday and Maine on Sunday. And he's favored to do well on Tuesday in DC, MD, and VA. He'll end the week with a solid delegate lead, at least in pledged delegates. This likely Obama sweep, plus a fundraising machine that is apparently raising Obama about $650,000 a day while Ms. Clinton is selling the family silver, is certain to trigger a panic of sorts inside Clinton-ville. South Carolina was clear proof that when things are going south, former President Bill Clinton gets a powerful itch to grab a microphone, turn purple, and uncork. Stay tuned for entertaining fireworks, especially later this coming week in the ramp up to Wisconsin's critical primary on February 19.
I'd missed it earlier in the week, but over at Salon on Tuesday, Mike Madden noted that after the Georgetown-West Virginia game on January 26, John McCain called Mark Salter, his "longtime speechwriter/Senate chief of staff/intellectual alter ego," to describe the goaltend (er, block, I mean; yes, block) by which Patrick Ewing Jr. had won the game.
"A Georgetown alum," Madden notes, "Salter has season tickets in the front row at the Verizon Center; about the only thing that gets him more fired up than Mitt Romney is Big East basketball. (At the bar after the Super Bowl Sunday night, he cursed at the TV when the Boston Fox affiliate compared the Giants' win to Villanova's 1985 NCAA tournament upset win over Georgetown)."
Seems pretty newsworthy to me, but Madden pushes it into the mystical territory of the true Georgetown fanatic where my daughter and I dwell when he adds: "The Hoyas have been a near-perfect predictor of McCain's fortunes this year. The last time Georgetown lost a game was the night before the Michigan primary, when Pitt beat them 69-60; the next day, Romney beat McCain. The day of the South Carolina primary, where McCain narrowly beat Mike Huckabee to avenge his 2000 loss to George W. Bush, the Hoyas crushed Notre Dame."
Good thing McCain has pretty much locked up the nomination, because even some of Georgetown's die-hard fans are worried about Saturday night's game against Louisville. Personally, I think the McCain boost puts it away for the Hoyas.
Hail, oh Georgetown, Alma Mater,
Swift Potomac's lovely daughter,
Ever watching by the water,
Smiles on us today.
Now her children gather 'round her,
Lo, with garlands they have crowned her,
Reverent hands and fond enwound her,
With the Blue and Gray.
Last night the Obama campaign sent out an email boasting of having had more than 300,000 donors since January 1. As of 9:40 this morning the number was 331,241. They've set a new goal of 500,000 donors by March 4 and they say that people who contribute from here on in will have their donations matched by one of the 300,000 contributors already onboard in the new year. Obama doesn't give dollar totals.
Contrast that with a Clinton fundraising email out this morning boasting of more than 45,000 contributors ponying up $6.4 million in the two days following Super Tuesday, for a total of $7.5 million raised online in the last week.
The Huck should take a lesson from Mitt Romney's classy performance yesterday and fold up his medicine show. Romney did a lot today to show the country and the party the classy and principled Mitt Romney that his friends have known for years. (One tribute to the guy is that everybody who works for him loves him.) It was the right thing to do and Mitt deserves the credit he'll get for it. Meanwhile it is hard to find a purpose in Huckabee trying to run much longer. The delegate math is even harder for him than it was for Romney. The Huck hasn't won a primary outside the south. He has no money. Sure, he can continue to plug along and almost certainly lose DC, VA, and MD next week, but to what purpose? I guess we'll wait for that and next Wednesday morning Gov. Huckabee can examine the math, think it over, and do the right thing.
Now that John McCain is the presumptive - don't you hate that word! - Republican presidential nominee, the big question is who will be his vice presidential running mate. At the moment, that's unknowable, because McCain himself doesn't know whom he might pick. But here's what we do know: it won't be ex-Florida governor Jeb Bush, the son of one president and brother of another. Politicians often deny an interest in the vice presidency while actually craving a chance to run for the job. But, I'm reliably informed, not Jeb. He really doesn't want to be anyone's choice for veep.
Why not? Well, a number of reasons. After eight years in Tallahassee, he's moved back to Miami and would like to make some money. Nothing wrong with that. Another reason is that he wouldn't want to allow Democrats, just because a Bush is on the ticket, to make his brother's administration the focus of the campaign instead of their nominee's high-dollar liberalism on domestic policy and defeatism on foreign affairs. Still another reason is Bush simply doesn't want to endure months of campaigning. At least not now. He's not ruling out a presidential race later.
Too bad he's not available. Jeb perfectly meets the specifications of what McCain, or any Republican presidential nominee, needs in a running mate. He's had a splendidly successful political career. He's not only a favorite of economic conservatives, he's also highly regarded by social and foreign policy conservatives as well. And he's likeable and experienced. What more could McCain want? Maybe a policy wonk to offset his lack of depth on domestic issues? Jeb qualifies on that count, too. Oh, yes, libertarians like Jeb because he's a small government guy (unlike his brother George).
It's not that Jeb doesn't like McCain. He once told me that he especially admired McCain's insistence on cutting federal spending. Jeb didn't endorse anyone in the Florida primary last month, but the folks who helped to run his three races for governor worked for Mitt Romney. That should hardly disqualify him from the vice presidential nod - that is, if he were interested.
Absent Bush, names of countless possible veeps are flying around. Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty was in charge of the McCain forces in the Minnesota Republican caucuses on Super Tuesday. He was blown away, however, by the Romney campaign led by former House member Vin Weber. Does McCain's defeat doom Pawlenty's chances? I doubt it. But perhaps McCain should consider Weber.
Any number of prominent social conservatives have been suggested, including Republican senators Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Sam Brownback of Kansas. I suspect a better possibility is Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, a rising star among Republicans.
Supporters of Mike Huckabee shouldn't get their hopes up. True, McCain and Huckabee have become friendly rivals in the presidential race, but it doesn't make sense for McCain to pick someone who's as unpopular with an important segment of the conservative community as | | | |
