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:<\/p>\n
* Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson disclosed yesterday that he was diagnosed with lymphoma<\/a> in 2004, but he is in remission. “I have had no illness from it, or even any symptoms,” Thompson said in a statement. “My life expectancy should not be affected.” The political implications were fairly obvious<\/a> — “Thompson described the announcement as one item on a checklist of issues he must deal with before deciding whether to run for president.”<\/p>\n * I’m generally avoiding national polls in the presidential race at this point — their reliability is dubious at this point — but I was very surprised by the new LA Times\/Bloomberg poll, which shows John McCain slipping to third<\/a> nationally among Republicans. Rudy Giuliani leads with 29% support, followed by senator-turned-actor Fred Thompson with 15% and McCain with 12%. Mitt Romney isn’t too far behind with 8%.<\/p>\n * Speaking of McCain’s troubles, the senator started firing<\/a> some non-senior staff positions yesterday and cutting some consultants’ contracts. The campaign characterized the moves as “minor adjustments.” Said Brian Jones, a campaign spokesman, “A campaign is a dynamic organization like a business, and we have to take the necessary steps to ensure it’s as efficient and effective as possible.” That’s not a bad spin, but at this point in the campaign, aren’t the leading candidates supposed to be hiring<\/i> staffers, not firing them?<\/p>\n * Hillary Clinton told USA Today<\/a> that she realizes that her conservative critics go after her with a vengeance, but she’s not fazed by the attacks. “So what, people are going to say something bad about me?” Clinton said, laughing. “I mean really. I mean look. I understand how contentious American politics is. And why? Because there are big things at stake.”<\/p>\n * And finally, I’m not in a position to criticize others’ typos, but this one really is bad: In Rep. Duncan Hunter’s (R-Calif.) formal Federal Election Commission filing making his bid official, Hunter misspelled “president,” mangling the name of his committee as “Hunter for Prseident Inc.” As Roll Call noted<\/a>, “On the bright side, although the field of candidates for the presidency is a bit crowded, Hunter is uncontested to be prseident.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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: * Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson disclosed yesterday that he was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2004, but he is in remission. “I have had no illness from it, or even any symptoms,” Thompson […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10490\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}