How it works: Caucus begins at 7 p.m. It is non-binding and the delegates selected tonight will advance to district or county conventions, which in turn elect state delegates, which then choose national delegates. To participate "attendees must be eligible to vote in the next general election, live in the precinct, and be in general agreement with the principles of the political party." In the end, 40 delegates will be chosen.
Republican candidates: Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum (all others have dropped out or are polling at less than 1 percent)
Democratic candidates: Barack Obama
Previous performance: In 2008, Romney won the caucus with 41 percent of the vote. Paul finished fourth with 16 percent. Obama won the Democratic caucus with 66 percent of the vote.
PPP: Santorum 33 percent, Romney 24, Gingrich 22, Paul 20
Bottom line: Sparse polling makes this one a bit of a toss-up, but it seems likely that Santorum will stay alive after today and Gingrich could be hurt if he finishes last. A Romney victory could help him appear much stronger and help move him towards the nomination quicker.
State: Missouri
Type of election: Primary
How it works: The primary does not count for delegates toward the Republican convention. The Missouri Republican Party will hold a caucus on March 17th, 2012, which will determine the delegates sent to the convention. In the end, 52 delegates will be chosen.
Republican candidates: Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. Newt Gingrich is not on the ballot. (All others have dropped out or are polling at less than 1 percent)
Democratic candidates: Barack Obama
Previous performance: In 2008, Romney finished third with 29 percent. Paul finished fourth with 4.5 percent. Obama won with 49 percent.
Bottom line: Without Gingrich on the ballot, this one looks to be an easy victory for Santorum as the 'anti-Romney' candidate.
State: Colorado
Type of election: Caucus
How it works: Today's vote is a non-binding straw poll. Delegates will be chosen for county conventions similar to Minnesota. In the end, 36 delegates will be chosen.
Somehow, that bumbling socialist usurper in the White House who has constantly apologized for America -- has the approval of half of the country.
Obama’s overall approval rating stands at 50 percent, the highest in a Post-ABC News poll since a brief run above 50 percent immediately after Osama bin Laden was killed in early May.
But what about all those Real Americans in Real America?
Overall, 55 percent of those who are closely following the campaign say they disapprove of what the GOP candidates have been saying.
But surely, a man who made his $250M outsourcing creating jobs will mop the floor with the Kenyan Marxist, right?
In a general-election test, Obama leads Romney 52 to 43 percent among all Americans; more narrowly, 51 to 45 percent, among registered voters. Among all adults, it’s Obama’s first time topping 50 percent in a head-to-head matchup with Romney since July; it’s his first time ever above that point among registered voters.
For those keeping score at home, the Black Jimmy Carter is currently outperforming the Great Leader who was supposed to usher in a permanent Republican majority. Yes, we've got a long way to go on unemployment -- but as the ad says, "pessimism never created a job."
The wheels are really starting to come off at Newt 2012 Headquarters.
If you un-invite the press corps to travel with you on your campaign, what obligates them to cover you? As outlined in Yahoo News, Gingrich has been crisscrossing the State of Florida campaigning for Tuesday's primary. Ordinarily the reporters covering a candidate (or more likely their bosses) chip in for a chartered bus to follow the candidate's entourage, and when flights are used, the campaign arranges a charter flight and reporters buy a ticket on the arranged charter.
But Gingrich had an outlying dinner that required reporters to go from West Palm Beach to Orlando, but then back again to West Palm to cover one dinner and then immediately off to Tampa after the dinner. Reporters did the math and decided to skip the dinner to save charter flight costs -- but that meant the reporters who DID want to fly to the dinner split more of the cost per seat. They then tried to cancel, and the Gingrich Campaign said no.
Now some of the reporters on the plane cancelled their credit card charge for the flight and now the media has been uninvited from flying with the candidate.
Apart from all this press acrimony, the crazy travel arrangements show a lack of campaign professionalism from those amateur remainders who didn't leave the Gingrich campaign last April. Hopping from one city to do one dinner and then leaving immediately from a dinner, being back in City Number One by the next afternoon? Travel arrangements like that serve no purpose except to exhaust the candidate and irritate the press and the staff. You have to say "no" to some events if you are in charge of a campaign, or at least call the shots so that one dinner does not blow a hole in your travel timeline.
Just days before Florida Republicans go to the polls to choose their nominee, the GOP presidential hopefuls will meet for a final debate hosted by CNN, the Republican Party of Florida and the Hispanic Leadership Network. CNN lead political anchor Wolf Blitzer will moderate the two-hour presidential debate which will take place at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville on Thursday, January 26 at 8 p.m. ET.
So does it help or hurt the candidate at this point if they speak Spanish at this one? Also, two hours of Newt, Mitt, Ron, Rick, and...Wolf Blitzer?
A senior vice-president at NBC (yeah) actually said,
[W]e look forward to hosting a substantive and stimulating forum for the candidates to make their case to the voters in this crucial state and the whole country.
Willard's new ad, which he's started running in South Carolina, is a counterpunch on all the Bain attacks he's taken from his rivals -- and it's very likely to be effective.
Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich have been the hardest on Romney over his record at investment firm Bain Capital. Perry calls it "vulture capitalism." Gingrich has urged Romney to hold a press conference solely to discuss his business dealings.
On Thursday, Perry lost a key South Carolina donor to the Romney campaign over his remarks. Ex-Perry supporter Barry Wynn said Perry's attacks were "like fingernails on the chalkboard."
Republican New York Rep. Michael Grimm also released a statement saying the attacks would have a "negative effect on the party."
"When GOP candidates, especially those who identify themselves as conservatives, use phrases like 'vulture capitalism' or adopt leftist rhetoric, they are jeopardizing the strength and unity of the party," he said.
In addition to never criticizing Ronald Reagan and Rush Limbaugh, a Republican must never say mean things about any corporation. They're people after all -- and they have feelings, too.
Of course, Willard's ad also includes this audio and graphic:
OBAMA: FREE MARKETS ON TRIAL
Yeah.
I suppose Obama is putting "free markets on trial" on the same wingnut planet where he's apologized for America, raised taxes, nationalized the energy industry -- and surrendered to the terrorists.
It is fashionable in political circles today to say that speeches don’t matter much. What’s important isn’t what people say, so this line of thinking goes, but what they do. Presidents and many other politicians break promises — they fail to follow up on strong words — they sometimes start in a certain place but then fold when the going gets tough. With cynicism about politicians justifiably high given what results they have and have not been delivering to the American people, this is an easy thing to believe.
While I have a high degree of skepticism about politicians, and know painfully well how often they fall short of their words, I am of a different view about the importance of speeches. Not most of them: having had a career in politics for more than 30 years, I have heard enough hot air and empty promises to fill up a planet the size of Jupiter. But if you look at American history, there are dozens of examples when a speech quite literally changed the course of our nation’s history. Presidents and senators and candidates, movement leaders and ministers, generals and scholars have all given important speeches that mattered. The speeches from the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and at least three speeches from Lincoln’s presidency — especially the Gettysburg Address — that redefined our nation’s thinking about itself; the great Congressional debates between Webster, Calhoun, and Clay about slavery and the nature of our government; the stunning Frederick Douglass “Power concedes nothing without a demand” speech that has shaped progressive movements’ strategy ever since; the towering “Cross of Gold” speech by William Jennings Bryan that forever changed the course of the Democratic party; Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first inaugural address that restored confidence that our nation would survive those terrible moments of the Great Depression; John F. Kennedy’s amazing inaugural address, which helped inspire a generation to activism; Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech; Jimmy Carter’s disastrous “malaise” speech; Ronald Reagan’s “government is the problem” speech. These are just a few examples of the many speeches that have made a real difference in American history.
Some of the above are presidential speeches. When presidents give an important speech, it matters not only in terms of historical worth, but in shaping the trajectory of what is to come in the rest of their presidency. When a president makes a big, dramatic, attention getting speech in a richly symbolic and historic setting, they are laying down a marker that becomes hard to walk away from, and are giving their presidency a context and definition that matters — especially if the members of their party and the activists to whom the speech is addressed to take up the banner. In fact, in a funny kind of way, it is precisely by taking up the banner of such a speech — praising it, embracing it, repeating its best lines and themes, giving it the maximum attention over a sustained period of time — that allows activists and movements that care about what the president said to hold him accountable. It becomes that much harder for a president to walk away from the ideas and values that inform such a big speech if people keep referencing and highlighting and quoting it.
So it is with yesterday’s superb President Obama speech channeling the great progressive trust-busting President Teddy Roosevelt. By going to Osawatomie, Kansas — where Teddy Roosevelt gave another one of those speeches that changed American history by calling for a new progressive movement and policies that would build the great American middle class in the decades to follow as much of Roosevelt’s vision became law — Obama essentially launched his 2012 re-election campaign by declaring himself a pro-middle class populist progressive in direct confrontational contrast to a Republican Party that has decided it wants to repeal the 20th Century. Progressives should enthusiastically embrace this speech and quote it everywhere we go. The President should be thanked for taking up our banner, and making it his.
I know this runs counter to the thinking of many of my friends in the progressive movement. They argue that Obama has not been the bold progressive Teddy (or his cousin Franklin) were. They point out that rather than being a Teddy Roosevelt trustbuster, his administration has not moved to break up the big banks, has not moved aggressively to prosecute any Wall Street bankers even though there is plenty of evidence for doing so, and has compromised too often with the extremist right-wing Republicans in Congress. They say he hasn’t always pursued progressive policies he has advocated in past speeches with enough aggressiveness. These are fair points which I won’t argue with here. But they miss the importance of yesterday’s speech, and the fundamental way progressives should approach this moment.
Having switched gears from an ideologically neutered “Win the Future” message to being a full-throated fighter for the 99 percent (Obama used the phrase middle class 25 times yesterday compared to zero times in his last State of the Union speech), if progressives embrace this speech and make it the most famous and oft-quoted speech of the next year, Obama will need on a policy front to be a fighter for, as he put it, for “the middle class, and all those fighting to get into the middle class.” If this becomes the defining speech for the Obama campaign in 2012, it makes it a lot harder for administration officials sympathetic to Wall Street to cut sweetheart deals on their behalf. It makes the administration’s choice on an issue like the banking settlement talks a lot more likely to go the way of middle-class homeowners instead of Bank of America’s way. It makes it easier for unions to get the administration to issue executive orders that improve pay and benefits. It makes it easier for progressives to keep bad deals on extending the Bush tax cuts for the top 1 percent from being agreed to. It makes it easier to get the President and the broader Democratic Party to come out clearly in favor of legislation like the Harkin-DeFazio financial speculation tax or the Schakowsky jobs bill.
If progressives keep praising and quoting from this speech, it will become the defining speech of the Obama Presidency. And if that means the President keeps channeling the ultimate challenger of the big corporate and financial trusts of the last Gilded Age, which works by me. When Teddy Roosevelt pushed for a national park system, food safety laws, a minimum wage, universal health care, and busting up the big corporate trusts a century ago, he was being a bold progressive thinker, and his leadership changed America and helped create the most prosperous middle class the world has ever seen. If that is who President Obama wants to emulate, I am happy to help.
Here in a nutshell is the state of play in the 2012 Republican presidential sweepstakes: alleged serial sexual harasser Herman Cain is being surpassed by confirmed serial adulterer Newt Gingrich. With Mitt Romney stalled and Cain hemorrhaging support from women voters, polls last week from CBS and Marist showed the former House Speaker had surged into a virtual three-way tie at the top. By Monday, new surveys from CNN and PPP showed Newt vaulting past the fading pizza maker. Nevertheless, that development should be a discomforting prospect for a Republican Party which lost the women's vote by 13 points in 2008. As his public statements and personal life show, the thrice-married Gingrich is hardly a champion for American women.
That starts with Newt Gingrich's belief that marriage is an institution between one man and three women in rapid succession.
In 1980, Newt was separated from his first wife and former high school geometry teacher, Jackie Battley. As she lay incoherent in her hospital bed following surgery for a reoccurrence of uterine cancer, Gingrich paid her a visit to announce he wanted a divorce. As Lee Howell, a Gingrich friend and associate at whose wedding Newt was best man, described it:
"Newt came up there with his yellow legal pad, and he had a list of things on how the divorce was going to be handled. He wanted her to sign it. She was still recovering from surgery, still sort of out of it, and he comes in with a yellow sheet of paper, handwritten, and wants her to sign it.
Newt can handle political problems, but when it comes to personal problems, he's a disaster. He handled the divorce like he did any other political decision: You've got to be tough in this business, you've got to be hard. Once you make the decision you've got to act on it. Cut your losses and move on."
He moved on to wife number two, Marianne Ginther. But Marianne fared little better, getting dumped for Congressional staffer Callista Bisek after a six year affair even as Newt was leading the inquisition of Bill Clinton. As Vanity Fair summed it up last year:
According to Salon, Gingrich and the former Hill staffer (23 years his junior, mind you) would frequently dine in the Supreme Court cafeteria--an unsuspectingly sordid detail. (In 1995, Vanity Fair referred to Bisek as Gingrich's "frequent breakfast companion.") Gingrich stepped down from Congress in 1998 following an ethics scandal, among other things. The two were married two years later.
"There's no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate. And what I can tell you is that when I did things that were wrong, I wasn't trapped in situation ethics, I was doing things that were wrong, and yet, I was doing them."
Of course, the things Newt Gingrich was saying to American women weren't any better.
As the New York Times recounted 16 years ago, Newt suggested menstruation should keep women out of essential roles in the American military:
"If combat means living in a ditch, females have biological problems staying in a ditch for 30 days because they get infections, and they don't have upper-body strength. I mean, some do, but they're relatively rare. On the other hand, men are basically little piglets -- you drop them in the ditch, they roll around in it, doesn't matter, you know."
And for Gingrich, the biggest "infection" of them all - liberalism - caused a young mother to murder her children.
The Massachusetts State GOP released its first attack ad against consumer advocate and U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren Wednesday. The Web ad comically attempts to use selective quoting and distorting camera effects to make Warren look anti-business, or violent, or like an inarticulate speaker, or… something. They are clearly trying to make her seem like a very scary class warrior. Republicans don’t like the fact that she has pointed out that wealthy businesspeople did not make it on their own, and that the entire society played a role in their success by building roads and educating workers and paying cops and firefighters they rely on. These points seem pretty obvious to me, but to Scott Brown and the Republican Party this is frightening, violent rhetoric.
This video makes a few other things clear. Brown and the Republicans are obviously going to try to tie Warren to Harvard at every chance, even though polling suggests voters couldn’t care less about where Warren teaches. And other than sexism and empty and tired claims of “class warfare,” Brown really doesn’t have much to work with in his fight for reelection.
Having done some polling on the class warfare stuff, and knowing it doesn’t work for the Republicans, my guess is that this ad isn’t really aimed at voters at all, but at their corporate donors. The campaign clearly wants to scare the wealthy corporate special interests that support Brown, so they will drop even more money in his lap.
Check the ad out, and contrast it with the actual remarks in full Warren made on this topic:
It is good to see the President and Vice President saying positive things about the Occupy Wall Street movement. The big question now is what happens when the rubber really meets the road.
Occupy Wall Street is speaking to the same dynamic I have been warning Democratic politicians about for a long time now, something that grows with every month of economic stress and political dysfunction: there is a growing divide between progressive activists/outsiders and the Democratic Party leadership. As long as there is the sense that the big banks on Wall Street and other big corporate special interests keep making massive amounts of money while the middle-class is getting crushed, the unemployed have no prospects, and young and poor people have no ladder to climb into the middle class, people are going to be angry. And if they don’t feel like the Democrats are actually fighting for them on these core economic issues, instead of helping the Democrats win elections, people like the folks in Occupy Wall Street will take to the streets and denounce both political parties and the entire political establishment.
My Democratic friends will argue that this isn’t fair, that they have a far better track record than the Republicans on helping people, and that they are trying really hard. I’m sympathetic to some of them, because there are a lot of good Democratic politicians who really do care about making things better for most people (the 99 percent, as Occupy Wall Street calls us). But they need to do some tangible things that will show people whose side they are on.
I believe there are three things that will really matter in determining whether most disaffected progressives and Democrats will go into the 2012 elections reasonably united.
The first is whether the President gives into the hostage taking Republicans on more big issues. He has improved his position dramatically with progressives in the last month because he has shown some real fighting spirit, and is not backing down or leaning backward to show how even-handed he is. He seems like he is actually fighting for us. He is showing strength and principled leadership, and it is winning him lots of points. But that all goes away in a hurry if he backs down again on something big.
The second factor is whether he takes some concrete actions of executive power to show he is fighting for people. President Obama can’t simply ask for Congress for things, and then show disappointment when it doesn’t happen, because doing only that and nothing else makes him look weak. Like strong Presidents in the past, he needs to use not just the bully pulpit but executive branch authority. The President can issue executive orders on a wide range of subjects that help the middle class, such as changing the federal government’s contracting and procurement procedures to make sure companies getting government business are giving their workers decent jobs. The Treasury Department and Federal Housing Administration can issue regulations making it far tougher for banks to foreclose on homeowners. The Justice Department can be far more aggressive in its anti-trust enforcement, and in going after banking fraud and other corporate fraud. Agency after agency can issue more regulations that push big business to treat their workers and customers and local communities right. The middle class, and those trying to make their way into it, shouldn’t have to wait until a better Congress comes along to get help from the executive branch.
