Over at the New Republic, Norm Ornstein, Eve Fairbanks and Michelle Cottle have a lively debate going on: “So Why Have the Democrats Struggled?” One of the issues they are dealing with, near and dear to Swampland and its commenters, is the filibuster–and, specifically, why Harry Reid doesn’t just call the Republicans’ bluff.
Ornstein …
As I Twittered earlier, the rah-rah-cars-and-America-and-apple-pie speech that Mitt Romney gave before the Detroit Economic Club was a risk the size of Dennis Kucinich. The questions that followed were written on paper, and screened, and generally asked Romney just how much good would he do the Michigan economy. But when someone asked …
By tradition and expertise, presidential candidates tend to avoid offering advice on the best way through the gates of heaven. But Mike Huckabee is more than just a political candidate. He is also a Southern Baptist pastor, and his presidential campaign has not stopped him from ministering to primary state voters as he travels the …
And if anyone can explain this extended metaphor that Mitt Romney used a high school assembly this morning, please do so in the comments. (On the bus, we were puzzled by how, in life, “you can know what’s behind the curtain.” Does anyone ever know exactly how their choices will turn out?)
You know when I was in elementary school and
…
This is the season of political whoppers–apparent falsehoods told in the public sphere with a straight face. The pols and their assassin surrogates twist and turn the truth to the breaking point. They aim for the kneecaps while pretending to reach for the stars. There are gradations of awfulness, but as a rule, no campaign is above the …
The good news is that Romney attracted at crowd of almost 3,000 here today, about twice the size of McCain’s largest recent rally. The bad news: they were mostly under the age of eighteen.
The ratio of potential voters to teenagers was, by a rough estimate, about 30 to one one to thirty. As a reporter sitting next to me said, “He’d have …
Michigan’s primary tomorrow is not getting the same lavish attention as other primary states’ contests have, but that doesn’t mean it’s not being just as hard fought. Mitt Romney, in fact, is in a fight for his life, blanketing the state in ads and criss-crossing the palm of the mitten in charter jets. Michigan’s sluggish economy has …
How do you spend your Sunday if you are a political writer? The Obama campaign has a few ideas:
TODAY: OBAMA CAMPAIGN TO ANNOUNCE MAJOR MISSOURI ENDORSEMENT
Senator Barack Obama and Special Guest to Hold Conference CallCHICAGO, IL- Senator Barack Obama will host a conference call with the media to announce a major Missouri
…
On Friday, John McCain told reporters on his campaign bus that he had issued a clear directive to his people about negative campaigning: “Don’t.”
His chief ally in the state, Sen. Lindsey Graham, elaborated. “You don’t need to tear anybody else down to get the votes for John McCain,” he said, as the bus approached Mt. Pleasant, S.C. …
A stray moment from my notebook: Yesterday on the bus with John McCain the talk turned to the evangelical Christian vote in South Carolina.
“The greatest fear of evangelicals is radical Islamic extremism,” McCain told us, focusing on his own national security strengths. Then he corrected himself. “That is their greatest–not fear. That …
So that’s why all the Mitt house parties smelled like Yankee Candle Company factories:
Similarly, another experiment used a cookie-scented candle to further gauge whether appetitive stimulus affects consumer behavior. Female study participants in a room with a hidden chocolate-chip cookie scented candle were much more likely to make an
…
In the ArenaUncategorized
Noam Scheiber raises a really important point about the danger to Barack Obama’s campaign of the current racial skirmishing. A good part of Obama’s appeal–in fact, as Shelby Steele has argued–a good part of the subconscious exhilaration of white voters has been the post-racial nature of Obama’s campaign. The color of his skin became an …
