Despite significant internal and external objections, the North Carolina GOP still plans to run a controversial ad next week that includes the comments of Jeremiah Wright. Both John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, and Mike Duncan, the national party chairman, have called for the ad to be pulled.
On Thursday afternoon, a …
Per McCain’s senior adviser, Charlie Black, who was just now reading through his BlackBerry. “The ad has been pulled,” he said. “I don’t think it ever ran, except on the web.”
UPDATE: The North Carolina GOP says that Black’s report is not true. “I don’t know where that’s coming from, but it’s not the case,” says the committee …
Candidate John McCain officially has no view of whether an extended Democratic primary battle is good or bad for his chances in November. At a press conference Tuesday in Ohio, he would not touch the hot potato. “I have stayed absolutely neutral,” he said. “I have never stated whether I wanted this election to stretch out or not. That’s …
The morning began with news that the North Carolina Republican Party was planning to run an ad that will reference “controversial figures from Obama’s past.” Ever since, both the McCain campaign and the Republican National Committee have been trying to distance themselves from the effort.
On a landing strip near Inez, Ky., RNC Chairman …
This afternoon, Bill Burton, the Obama campaign’s spokesman, sent this statement out response to the new conservative independent expenditure campaign attacking Obama as weak on crime. The anti-Obama effort, which has not yet announced its budget, is being led by Floyd Brown, who created the Willie Horton ad in 1988.
Floyd Brown and the
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The man who brought us Willie Horton is back. Floyd Brown, who created the 1988 political ad, has announced the beginnings of a multi-pronged, long-range independent expenditure campaign against Barack Obama. He has started four organizations to serve as front groups, plans to blast out a fundraising email to between 3 and 7 million …
Day two and the Democratic debate fallout continues. Turns out the lady who asked Obama the question about the Flag Pin, in a prerecorded tape made by ABC, had already told the New York Times that she could not support Barack Obama–because of his sometimes aversion to wearing flag pins. So, it wasn’t really a question from an undecided …
Jay Newton-Small and I have a story in the next paper-product TIME, since digitized for the Interwebbing here, about the considerable disadvantage the McCain campaign has right now online.
Republicans, who once were far ahead of Democrats in whizbang TV technology, let their party fall behind the nerd curve as Howard Dean and later John
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Are out, for 2006 and 2007. As expected, his income amounts to his Senate salary, some (relatively) modest book royalties, Social Security and his Navy Pension. He donates his book royalties to charity. His very wealthy wife, however, is another story all together. The new McCain tax info is here.
Since I posted Hillary Clinton’s attack on Barack Obama last night, I figured it only fair to post Obama’s response, which takes the surprising route of replaying Clinton’s initial attack to defuse it.
We see Clinton attack Obama, get jeered for it, and then we are told she is just more of “the same old Washington politics.” Obama …
Premise 1: Hillary Clinton is willing to do what she says she is going to do–take her campaign to a convention fight.
Premise 2: To win at the convention she has to effectively destroy Barack Obama’s perceived electability among superdelegates.
Premise 3: Clinton is still in it to win it.
Conclusion A: The Democratic race is about to …
The advent of the Internet and reported blogs has brought a raft of “fact-checking” journalism, the sort where reporters like me try to explain exactly why Surrogate X or Party Leader Y is misrepresenting the record of Candidate Z. And this is all well and good. As I have often argued on this blog, it is important for democracies to …
I have a new story up at Time.com about John McCain’s position on waterboarding and other harsh interrogation politics. One interesting thing I turned up: A 2005 proposal from McCain’s staff that took the same position on applying the Army Field Manual to the CIA that he now opposes in the Senate. To wit:
In the spring of 2005,
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