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
* Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) was surprisingly cagey about his future plans, including a possible presidential campaign, on Meet the Press yesterday. Hagel said<\/a> he doesn’t “intend” to leave the GOP to run as an independent, but that leaves him a lot of wiggle room. Asked if he’s ruling such an effort out, Hagel said, “For right now I am. And what the world looks like next year, I don’t know. But I have no plans to change parties or run for president as an independent.”<\/p>\n * John Edwards is following up on his work on poverty next week with a three-day swing<\/a> through poverty-stricken communities in New Orleans, Memphis, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and eight other cities and eight states. The visits begin on July 16.<\/p>\n * Remember all of those campaign staffers that John McCain was forced to fire? It looks like they’re making the jump<\/a> to Fred Thompson’s campaign, which is just starting to staff up.<\/p>\n * Rudy Giuliani received a surprisingly hostile reception<\/a> at the University of North Florida over the weekend, when he said he opposes the elimination of the federal income tax. Pushed on whether he’d consider a consumption-based tax, Giuliani said, “I have to study it some more. I don’t think a fair tax is realistic change for America.” The comments drew quite a few boos.<\/p>\n * Barack Obama’s campaign office in Davenport, Iowa, was burglarized<\/a> Friday night, and two laptop computers were stolen. “It doesn’t appear that it was anything sensitive or irreplaceable,” a spokesperson said.<\/p>\n * And George Stephanopoulos interviewed Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) yesterday, discussing Paul’s presidential platform. Towards the end, Stephanopoulos asked, “What’s success for you in this campaign.” When Paul said “winning” would be a sign of success, Stephanopoulos said, “That’s not going to happen<\/a>.” Paul asked Stephanopoulos if he would wager his “every cent” in his pocket that Paul would not be president, to which the host said, “Yes.” It was kind of rude, but kind of amusing, too.<\/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: * Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) was surprisingly cagey about his future plans, including a possible presidential campaign, on Meet the Press yesterday. Hagel said he doesn’t “intend” to leave the GOP to run […]<\/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-11382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11382","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=11382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11382\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}