Over the weekend, I noticed a funny little corner in downtown Des Moines where the Huckabee and Paul campaigns have set up their headquarters side by side. I was sort of intrigued by how the most socially conservative candidate’s campaign is getting along with the libertarian’s in such close quarters, so I dropped by and [...]
Des Moines Just when you think the Republican presidential race can’t get weirder…Mike Huckabee holds a press conference here to announce that he’d just made a last minute decision not to air a negative TV ad slamming Romney. And then he airs the ad (Video courtesy of Mark Halperin who was setting in the row [...]
It is hard to pigeon-hole Mike Huckabee. The former Baptist minister doesn’t believe in evolution but he does believe in giving criminals redemptive second-chances through the many clemencies he granted as governor of Arkansas. He’s a Christian conversative, but also a populist who raised taxes to expand child health care and sought to reform his [...]
Thanks to a last-minute temporary understanding with its writers, SwampCast is proud to be among the first shows to return from the writers’ strike… though this show, completed during the hiatus, was actually the product of suggestions solicited from various journalists and staffers on what to pack for Iowa. Enjoy.
Tearing myself away from Iowa for a moment…. New York Mayor Bloomberg’s idea for a summit meeting of aging moderate poobahs to discuss an independent third party seems a bit moldy to me. Not that I’m opposed to centrism–as regular readers of Swampland know very well, I’m sort of an aging moderate not-quite-poobah myself. But [...]
• This is why I like covering campaigns that have charters. [Jetlagged, via Boing-Boing] • If you read one poll today, make it this one. Then make it the Des Moines Register’s. [Pollster.com] • Least shocking news of 2008: CIA tapes destroyed because of “worry about how its conduct might be perceived.” [NYT] • It’s [...]
Des Moines One of the secrets of the Iowa caucuses has always been that there are no convention delegates chosen at them. That will happen many weeks from now, at county conventions and the state convention. And they are a unquely undemocratic exercise, particularly on the Democratic side, where the process demands that voters devote [...]
Des Moines Coupla thoughts, off the top–I’ve seen Huckabee and Romney; Obama, Clinton and Edwards in the past 48 hours and it just startling how different the quality is between the Democratic and Republican campaigns this year. The Republicans are total amateur hour, tiny crowds, half-crazed bickering among the candidates. No political tradecraft in evidence. [...]
Speaking of left-field pop culture references….
Some say the surest sign that McCain is a front-runner again is that his events are so crowded that they have to be pooled. Some say that it’s that “it feels like 2000 again.” I say it’s that people are jumping all over his quirky sense of humor and unexpected set of cultural references. Today, [...]
