Obviously, it’s early March. We’re nowhere near knowing who the Democratic nominee is going to be, and the candidates have barely begun trying to destroy one another. The Republican Attack Machine is still sharpening its fangs. The Republican nominee is just now starting to consolidate his party’s various factions. But with all of those caveats […]
Today’s edition of quick hits. * Following up on a point raised by my friend Sarabeth, NBC News crunched the Dems’ popular vote numbers after yesterday’s contests. In DNC-sanctioned contests (sans Florida and Michigan), Obama still leads Clinton by 600,000 votes, 12.9 million to 12.3 million. Even with Florida in the mix, Obama is ahead […]
We’ve all been hearing talk since this morning that, given yesterday’s primary results, Barack Obama will have no choice but to start going negative (or, in the vernacular, “drawing sharper contrasts”) against Hillary Clinton. But what, exactly, does that mean? There’s a qualitative difference between going negative (hardball) and going hard-negative (dirtyball). What’s Obama prepared […]
A couple of weeks ago, as most of the political world knows by now, “Saturday Night Live” did a skit mocking the perception that news outlets were tougher on Hillary Clinton than Barack Obama. The Clinton campaign loved the skit, promoted it heavily, and Clinton began referencing it frequently, including in a nationally televised debate. […]
John McCain and George W. Bush have always had a relatively awkward relationship, especially given the Bush team’s willingness to smear McCain during their 2000 primary fight. (They got along far better in 2004.) But this afternoon at the White House, with Bush formally endorsing McCain, the relationship took yet another turn. In a press […]
We talked earlier about Hillary Clinton benefiting from a “kitchen-sink” strategy, but of all the things the Clinton campaign threw at Obama over the last week or so, few criticisms were as annoying as the charge that John McCain’s background is preferable to Obama’s. If you’re just joining us, at a press conference on Monday […]
Last night, in a speech to supporters in which he effectively claimed the Republican nomination, John McCain immediately mocked Democrats on one of their strongest issues: “I will leave it to my [Democratic] opponent to propose returning to the failed, big-government mandates of the ’60s and ’70s to address problems such as the lack of […]
As I understand it, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are regularly asked about whether they’d consider running together on the Democratic ticket. Both have become quite adept at giving non-committal answers. It’s why Clinton raised a few eyebrows this morning on CBS’s “The Early Show” when she gave an answer that was outside the […]
Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn’t generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers: * How’s that delegate race shaping up? According to an MSNBC analysis aired this morning, Clinton “could net anywhere from seven to a bit over 10 delegates. This, obviously, is hardly major progress, […]
Hillary Clinton, you’ve just won the Ohio, Texas, and Rhode Island primaries. What are you going to do now? “I’m going to Wyoming!” Sure, the political world was eyeing the March 4 contests for weeks, but those contests are so yesterday’s news. What’s next? We have two contests in the next six days — the […]