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A couple of hours after Donald Trump endorsed Mitt Romney for President, the Obama campaign sent out an “In case you missed it” tweet with a link, not to a new DNC attack ad mocking the endorsement, but to video published by the Associated Press documenting the event. The message was clear: Any way you sliced it, the Trump endorsement was bad news for Romney.
Some Obama opponents are struggling to find a cloud in the silver lining of January’s jobs numbers, which estimated that there was a 243,000-job boost and a big drop in the unemployment rate, from 8.5% to 8.3%, last month. Their biggest gripe focuses on the size of the labor force: As the unemployment rate has trended down over the last few months, anti-Obama commentators have argued that the official percentage for those without jobs is deceptive because the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t count those who have stopped looking for work. In Friday’s report, they found a sharp increase in that group: More than 1.2 million people joined the non-job seeking pool of working-age Americans last month.
Whether or not Newt Gingrich can carry on a real campaign against Mitt Romney for several more weeks or even months depends in large measure on his political guardian angel, the Las Vegas casino billionaire and fierce Israel hawk Sheldon Adelson. Adelson’s camp won’t say whether the mogul will donate any money beyond the $10 million that he and his wife have already given to the pro-Newt Super PAC Winning Our Future, whose advertising has provided a kind of life support for Gingrich’s poorly-funded campaign. One thing we know is that Adelson still has a lot of money to give. By my math, that $10 million represents about .046% of Adelson’s $21.5 billion fortune as estimated by Forbes.
With social network giant Facebook officially gearing up for its initial public offering, the company’s top executives and largest investors are poised for a historic windfall. But far from Silicon Valley or Wall Street, there is another group of folks positioned to prosper from what is expected to be the biggest tech IPO ever — Democratic and Republican candidates for office.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s statement Wednesday that the U.S. plans to hand off all combat missions in Afghanistan sometime in 2013 has triggered howls from hawks who maintain it’s a step down a slippery slope headed to defeat. They may have a point. Nonetheless, the Obama Administration has plainly decided that its goals are better served by a calendar-driven pullout from Afghanistan.
Mitt Romney has crossed a small but significant threshold today, and no, it has nothing to do with setting a new land-speed record for rich-guy gaffes in a presidential campaign. For the first time, according to this Nevada poll, Romney (45%) has more support going into a primary contest than his two traditional rivals, Gingrich (25%) and Santorum (11%), put together. This puts something of a crimp in the conservative united-we-prevail fantasy. But that’s not what people are talking about today. It’s his latest rich-guy gaffe.
Newt Gingrich ended his campaign against Mitt Romney in Florida with the same message strategy that Romney’s senior advisers had used in another Republican primary two years earlier: Attack Goldman Sachs. There was a good reason.
