Except, there is this ad . . . . . . and he sure could make the 2012 electoral map mighty interesting.
How many campaign events has Obama done exclusively for House candidates this year? In conservative-leaning districts that he lost in 2008? In states with no Senate seats or governorships up for grabs? By my count, just this one coming up on the valuable Friday before Election Day: President Obama will campaign for Rep. Tom Perriello [...]
Lots of people are picking up on this memorable statement by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell to National Journal: The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president. Pretty clear, right? But there’s more to it. Later in the same interview (available online for subscribers only), [...]
Last week Swampland’s own Michael Scherer and White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer sat down to discuss President Obama — what he’s been trying to do in these final weeks before the election, how he’ll play the politics going ahead and what the administration wishes they could have done differently during the first half of [...]
A couple weeks back, on a lazy Friday, I heard someone on cable news say something about fine-print warnings on BlackBerrys that tell users not to put the devices within an inch of their bodies. It sounded odd to me, so I did a Google search, and low and behold, there it was. That afternoon [...]
My colleague will be too modest to brag, but a new GQ profile of Robert Gibbs singles out someone on Barack Obama’s reading list with whom Swampland readers may be famililar: Obama does reserve a certain respect for opinion writers such as Tom Friedman and David Brooks of The New York Times, Jerry Seib of [...]
Sadly, Sharron Angle’s latest ad, which Adam links to below, joins a long tradition of down-to-the-wire political advertising that cynically exploits racial fears to win elections. It is worth taking a moment to put this sort of work in historical context. Here is Jesse Helms “Hands” ad from the 1990 North Carolina Senate campaign, which [...]
Days after we learned that the bailout of America’s government-backed mortgage orgy is likely to surpass $150 billion, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is peddling a strikingly counterintuitive idea: fund $20-$30 billion in improvements in public housing by taking out government-guaranteed mortgages on its housing stock. First, some context by the New York [...]
A week before Election Day, both parties are spinning early-voting tallies as a positive omen for their midterm prospects. “Despite national momentum being on the Republican side for months, we are not seeing anything resembling a Republican surge,” New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee Chairman, wrote in a memo out today. [...]
