It is not WHEN he was born that might cause John McCain problems come the general election in November - let's face it, he is pretty vigorous for a child of 1936 - but rather WHERE. We all know that drawing your first breath on United State soil is a must if you ever want to become president. A "natural born citizen" is the precise wording in the US Constitution. Arnie Schwarzenegger could conceivably work harder at erasing his Austrian accent but the path to the White House will always be forbidden to him anyway.
Candidate Clinton has the backing of large parts of the US trade union movement. She speaks proudly of her commitment to workers and as recession grips the US economy both she (and Obama) have been banging the populist drum. What she invariably forgets to mention is that for six years she was a shareholder and board member of Wal-Mart, perhaps the most anti union company in America.
No kidding when they say that the candidates' schedules are tight. This morning we - the travelling press - are rushed from the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Cleveland on buses to the airport in a driving blizzard. Two planes in the livery of ATA Airlines are on an executive jet apron.
One for Obama gets off quickly, though colleagues on board tell us by email that thanks to the weather he is already an hour late for his next event in Columbus. Finally, the de-icer lorries get to us. Maybe because they are rushing they squirt the anti-freeze into the ground generator and the plane suddenly goes dark. If it was a metaphor for the Clinton campaign, it at least wasn't long before the lights came on again.
There are several hundred folks crammed on street corners outside the Wolstein Center at Cleveland Statue University, the site of today's Obama-Clinton debate tonight, screaming their political lungs out to anyone who will listen. Nothing unusual about that - you see them at all the debates waving banners for their favourite candidates as the audience and media arrive. But tonight is different.
Maybe George Bush is feeling a little left out. After all, the guy is still president, and will be for another 11 months, but nobody seems to be paying him much attention as the race for his succession takes up all the oxygen in the room.
Well, not quite all the oxygen. Last night, Bush boldly predicted at a fundraiser that his party would hold on to the White House in November. And why, pray tell?
Barack Obama may be looking forward to the looming showdown with Hillary Clinton in Texas, but he probably won't be calling on the services of the Lone Star State Senator Kirk Watson too much more often. Watson, whose constituents in grungy, studenty, music scene-y Austin - the state capital - are natural Obama supporters, made a complete idiot of himself on the night of the Wisconsin primary when he went on the cable news station MSNBC and proved himself incapable of naming a single legislative achievement he could attribute to the surging Democratic presidential frontrunner.
Again and again, Chris Matthews, the hard-knuckle host of a show
suitably called Hardball, asked him to name something Obama had
actually done in his four years in the Senate. Watson stuttered,
stumbled, tried to change the subject, stuttered some more and just
stared into space, looking bewildered and lost. On the other side of
the split screen, Ohio congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, an ardent
Clinton backer, looked like Christmas had come all over again.
Note to the Clinton team: maybe you should consider challenging the vote tally in Hawaii last night. Correct procedures were not always followed. Hell, it was utter pandemonium at most caucus sites on Tuesday night. Party registration forms ran out. Ballot papers ran out. Good Lord, at some sites, officials were tearing pages out of notebooks bought at corner stores to write out makeshift ballot papers in ballpoint pen. Who could tell if people were voting once or 10 times?
Obama is being accused of committing the cardinal sin of plagiarism by the Clinton campaign. Perhaps the Clinton gang hopes he suffers the same fate as Joe Biden who In 1987 was accused of nicking words from a speech by Neil Kinnock. (It was a bum rap. In previous speeches he had credited the borrowed lines to Kinnock but not on the fateful night the cameras were rolling. Biden though suffered a brain aneurysm and had to drop out of the race. The good news is that he survived to run again 2008 and only recently dropped out.)
Now the Clinton campaign is selling the shameful tale of the plagiarised speech. It began in today's New York Times with the revelation that Obama had borrowed a big chunk of a speech by his friend Deval Patrick who is Governor Massachusetts.
Hillary Clinton may not have quite the human touch and crowd-pleasing oomph of her rival, Barack Obama. Still, she has been busy trying to make friends - if not with live human voters, then with America's cows and, by extension, with the consumers who end up eating those cows.
...It was a creed, snuck into the founding documents that denied the destiny of a nation.
No, you can't.
It was decreed by bankers and landowners as they marched our monopolies westward.
No, you can't.
No you can't stop our power and privilege.
No you can't repeal our tax cuts for the wealthy few.
No you can't heal this nation.
No you can't end the war.
No you can't.
No matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of our power keeping us in power.
Status quo.
Now the hopes of the little girl who goes to a private school in Newport are the same as the dreams of the boy who parties in the clubs of LA.
We are not as divided as our portfolios suggest. We run this nation, and together we will stop this nonsense about writing the next great chapter in the American story with three words that will ring from coast to coast; from sea to shining sea --
No. You. Can't
Obama gets a lot of grief for "peddling hope" and not just from the Clinton or McCain campaigns. It's a favourite in the press as well: Obama Sells Same Old Stuff, Beyond Change: The Obama Mystery are two of the latest. Listen to the last 10 minutes of a speech he gave this weekend in Wisconsin....
We knew it wouldn't last. Now after staying quiet for a while Bill
Clinton is back on the attack. He says Obama would "deny (Americans) universal health care" for "the
first time".
"Her opponent excites more Americans ... but would in fact
deny us universal health-care coverage for the first time," the former
president said. "She represents the solution business."...
"It would be truly tragic if the Democratic Party walked away from
universal health care for the first time in 60 years when we finally
got the business community and the medical community in line behind
us," Clinton said, drawing applause.
The Health care argument is a bit rich coming from either Clinton. Recall that it was Hillary who made a monumental mess of his administration's attempt to get health
care for the uninsured in the 1990s.
Mark McKinnon is as close to the heart of the Republican political machine as it gets. He's a friend of George Bush's, worked as a media adviser to propel Bush into the White House the first time in 2000 and, via his media consultancy company, raked in a stunning $170m of Bush's re-election campaign chest in 2004. (It was money well spent: one of Bush's McKinnon-crafted adverts zeroed in on John Kerry windsurfing and successfully painted the Democratic challenger as an elitist, out-of-touch liberal.)
Now, though, he's balking at the idea of working for John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee who he has supported through both thick and a lot of thin these past couple of years. How come? Well, if the Democratic nominee this time is Barack Obama, McKinnon wants no part of the Republican attack machine.
The knives are out between Clinton and Obama over the issue of 'super delegates', essentially 800 party hacks who could swing the nomination either way. Have a look at the weekly Talking Points Media briefing for an interesting take:
Obama's position on the the Iraq war - he was against it from the get go - has been relentlessly attacked by the Clinton campaign. If he is the nominee, expect more of the same from John McCain, as McCain's bid for the presidency is almost exclusively about fighting America's enemies, wherever they are.
Here The New Republic's Michael Crowley examines Obama's record on the war. He reveals that there was nothing opportunistic about it as the Clinton's like to pretend. The talkback section has a fascinating section on both Clinton and Obama's legislative records in the Senate.
As Bill Clinton campaigned for Hillary at the Greater Mount Nebo Church in Maryland, Terance Hare, who gave the altar prayer, dozes off. A few weeks ago, Bill was caught nodding off while listening an endless Martin Luther King day speech in Georgia.
Could a small Caribbean island decide the fate of the next president of the US? Puerto Ricans get to pick delegates but bizarrely cannot vote in the general election. Yet they could be the one who decide the Democratic nomination by virtue of a 63 delegate bloc and a position at the end of the primary run on 7 June? Some even believe that the primary on the island could could even put Hillary Clinton over the top given her good relations with Hispanics. Shame she had to bid adios to her campaign manager and top link to the Latinos, Patti Solis Doyle...
Some of the best places to catch up with the election are the late night comedy shows. Bill Maher, host of Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO is easily the sharpest; it's well informed, outrageous and funny.
The New York Times columnist Gail Collins reminds us that the departure of Mitt Romney from the race has denied her the pleasure of ever again referring to the fact that Romney once drove to
Canada with the family dog, Seamus, strapped to the roof of the car. Gail is being only a bit unfair to Mitt.
According to the Boston Globe, it was the summer of 1983 and the Romney's white Chevy station wagon with the wood paneling "was overstuffed with suitcases, supplies, and five sons when Mitt Romney climbed behind the wheel to begin the annual 12-hour family trek from Boston to Ontario."
Today Barack Obama is off on a pilgrimage to North Carolina to try and persuade John Edwards to endorse him and hand over his two dozen or so pledged delegates…. But the top story remains the Trouble in Hillaryland: She held a secret meeting with Edwards last week, she lost her manager Pati Solis Doyle - her main amigo for the Hispanic Community, she lost Maine by a massive 18 points as well as New Orleans, Washington State, the US Virgin islands and Nebraska. And finally Bill Clinton lost out to Obama who took the Best Spoken Word Album Grammy Award on Sunday.
After the weekend with four state landslides Obama has all the momentum going into the "Chesapeake primaries," of Virginia, Maryland and DC. He was in top form in Alexandria last night as he took questions from the audience – something he rarely does.
After doing so much to wreck his wife’s presidential bid, Bill Clinton is still playing the victim while accepting that his race baiting remarks about Barack Obama in New Hampshire, Las Vegas and South Carolina were to blame for the setbacks to her campaign. "The mistake that I made is to think that I was a spouse like any other spouse, who could defend his candidate," he said. "I think I can promote Hillary but not defend her, because I was president. I have to let her defend herself or have someone else defend her...... "I don't want to be the story."
John McCain, the Naval airman who happily bombed Hanoi and then spent five years imprisoned in North Vietnam needs to think about a running mate for his attempt on the Presidency. There was just a hint today that he might plump for Mike Huckabee, the guitar-playing, bible-bashing former governor of Arkansas. Huck could prove useful protecting McCain’s flanks from the loony wing of the Republican Party. He is also a popular guest on the late night comedy talk show circuit and if there’s something the Republicans need right now its someone prepared to soften up their public image.
Famously irascible McCain is a ferocious neo-con on foreign policy issues. Quick to anger he would launch attacks on Iran in the blink of an eye and he says he will be happy to have American forces in Iraq for "another 100 years". But his liberal views on immigration, his desire to ban all torture by the CIA and shut down Guantanamo mean he is a deeply suspect figure for the hard right of the party.
Hillary Clinton lent her own campaign $5m before this week’s
Super Tuesday primaries, a further sign that the air is going out of her tyres. Clinton can well afford to lend the money - she's worth some $40m. This comes as she has been asking her supporters to to raise her $3m in three days.
It was another night of confusion for the Democrats in one of the most complicated nights in recent election history. The clarity they so desperately sought escaped them and both candidates were busy claiming victory – but for radically different reasons.
Projections for the Democratic nomination show Barack Obama winning his home state of Illinois, Delaware, Georgia and Alabama, with Hillary Clinton taking New York, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Massachusetts and Arkansas. In the race for the Republican nomination, John McCain is predicted to win Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey and Delaware, with Massachusetts going to Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee winning Arkansas.
Much more significant in the Georgia vote were the number of white men who turned out to support
Obama. Twenty four per cent of white voters voted for him in South Carolina. Tonight he doubled that amount - 54% of 18-29 year old white voters backed him. Black voters backed him by 91%. An astonishing result.
Barack Obama has just claimed a convincing scalp in the Georgia Democratic primary, the first state to go his way in what promises to be a long night. How significant this trouncing of Clinton turns out to be will not be known for several hours when results from 21 other states come in the long night ahead. Black voters in Georgia supported Obama by more than six-to-one, far exceeding his impressive victory in neighbouring South Carolina on 26 January where black voters backed him four-to-one over Clinton. The Georgia result was widely expected, but not the scale.
What better place to hold your Super Tuesday election night party than New York City, the fast-beating heart of the media world? That is Hillary's boast tonight and here we are on the seventh floor of the Manhattan Center Studios waiting for the first returns and - eventually - for her to take the stage.
The longer it takes to get a clear winner in the nomination process the more excited the sex industry becomes. So says The Rocky Mountain News.
Apparently the Democratic Convention in Denver this August is expected to be “a
boom in business” for “the sex and adult entertainment industries”. One
veteran sex-worker interviewed by The Rocky Mountain News
complained that the Republican Convention, taking place in Minneapolis, was going to be “a lot better for the sex workers".
Mike Huckabee has taken a majority of the votes in the second round of balloting in West Virginia, winning him 18 potentially crucial Republican delegates on what is predicted to be a tough night for the former Arkansas governor.
I was sitting in my recording studio watching the debates... Torn between the candidates I was never really big on politics... and actually I'm still not big on politics... but 4 years ago, me and the black eyed peas supported Kerry... And we supported Kerry with all our might... We performed and performed and performed for the DNC... doing all we could do to get the youth involved...
The outcome of the last 2 elections has saddened me... on how unfair, backwards, upside down, unbalanced, untruthful, corrupt, and just simply, how wrong the world and "politics" are...
So this year i wanted to get involved and do all i could early...
Whoever wins, or claims they won Super Tuesday, this phase of the election campaign may be remembered best for this short YouTube video which Will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas has made of Obama’s "Yes We Can" or "Si, Se Puede!" speech.
Stunning. Unbelievable. In a campaign full of extraordinary twists and turns, this was a moment nobody could have predicted: the wife of California's Republican governor showing up at a Barack Obama rally and offering her endorsement. Or something very close to an endorsement.
Maria Shriver (pictured), a member of the Kennedy clan who has never given up her Democratic Party registration despite being Arnold Schwarzenegger's First Lady, sent an already ecstatic crowd at the UCLA basketball arena into paroxysms of delight as she showed up as an unannounced final speaker - following on from her cousin Caroline Kennedy, Oprah Winfrey, Stevie Wonder and the candidate's wife, Michelle Obama.
Hillary Clinton just got endorsed by the most unlikely of figures - the hate-spewing, factually-challenged, best-selling, ultra-conservative, rabble-rousing talking head Ann Coulter (pictured). Coulter, whose latest book is called, typically, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans, left her favourite conservative host on Fox News utterly gobsmacked as she told him she'd not only vote for Hillary over John McCain, the most likely Republican nominee at this point - she'd even campaign for her.
"If he's our candidate," she said, "then Hillary is going to be our girl..., because she's more conservative than he is... I think she would be stronger on the war on terrorism."
Americans this weekend can be forgiven for being in a super mood. Only those in solitary confinement without television privileges cannot be feeling at least a twinge of adrenalin ahead of the national match-up just around the corner between - wait for it - the New England Patriots and the New York Giants.
Yes, this is not political sport they are looking forward to but American Football. The Super Bowl is this Sunday and more than half the nation is expected to watch it.
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