So a social scientist friend of a colleague here has run some comparisons into the pre-election polls and the actual turnout to see if there were signs of a so-called “black tax” in New Hampshire — the phenomenon familiar to students of the Harvey Gant-Jesse Helms races in North Carolina. He didn’t find any evidence that white …
As the good citizens of New Hampshire turn out in what are expected to be record numbers on this balmy winter’s day, a couple of notes from the end of the trail:
– I was traveling with the McCain campaign yesterday — part of it with the candidate on the Straight Talk Express, the other part on the press bus, which broke down on the …
I saw them both speak today, Clinton in Nashua, Obama in Salem. Each was impressive. Hillary drew a large crowd to the same high school gym where Obama had drawn a horde the day before (I’ll leave it to others to argue over whose crowd was bigger and whose had more actual New Hampshire residents). She spoke well, was pointed at times but …
Those words, spoken by Bill Clinton, sum up the enormous challenge facing Hillary Clinton as she tries to halt Barack Obama’s Iowa momentum in New Hampshire. Five days is a blink of an eye; ten days a languorous stroll by comparison. She needs to change the narrative, give voters in New Hampshire a reason to doubt the wisdom of giving the …
I have a piece on John McCain and the improbable fact that he just might be on the verge of becoming the GOP frontrunner again.
Time‘s Joel Stein brings his L.A. perspective to the Iowa caucuses:
My wife and I play this game called Better, Worse, Same. You see a celebrity in person, you compare her to what she looks like on TV and photographs. For instance: Jenna Elfman: better; Kate Hudson: worse; Will Smith: same.
I saw Mitt Romney speak for the first time,
…
We’ve updated our gallery chronicling, and ranking, the best gaffes of the 2008 campaign cycle. Check it out here.
Richard Viguerie, political direct mail pioneer and gray eminence of the conservative movement, fired a volley today at Roger Ailes and Fox News for barring Ron Paul from the channel’s January 6th presidential debate in New Hampshire. Viguerie has been displeased for some time by the GOP, which he accuses of becoming a party of Big …
Some people, it seems, just don’t appreciate the vital and utterly appropriate role Iowans play in deciding who will lead the United States of America for the next four years. These sourpusses seem to think that there is something deeply wrong about the fact that the collective wisdom of maybe 150,000 people (if turnout is high!) will …
Hillary — with an E.F. Hutton soft-spoken delivery — makes her final pitch to Iowa voters in a two-minute ad. Will it work?
Dennis Kucinich is telling Iowans who caucus for him that their second choice should be Barack Obama (and here). This is a HUGE deal. The Democratic Party rules require that in any precinct where a candidate does not meet a 15% threshold, his or her supporters must organize on behalf of a second-choice candidate who does clear the …
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 …
Peggy Noonan writes beautifully, and quite often sensibly. Most of her latest column fits that description perfectly. But not this bit of feverish hyperbole:
Mrs. Clinton is the most dramatically polarizing, the most instinctively distrusted, political figure of my lifetime. Yes, I include Nixon.
That is simply an absurd statement. Is …
