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
* Increasing the Democrats’ chances of picking up another Senate seat in 2008, former New Hampshire Gov. Jeanne Shaheen (D) is poised to announce that she will take on<\/a> incumbent Sen. John Sununu (R) next year. Several polls already show Shaheen with a double-digit lead over Sununu in hypothetical match-ups, and the DSCC all but begged Shaheen to give up her post at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and enter the race. It will be a rematch of the 2002 race in which the state Republican Party broke several laws<\/a> cheating on Sununu’s behalf.<\/p>\n * Fred Thompson already took some heat for chickening out of the last debate for the Republican presidential candidates, but that won’t stop him from ducking the next two<\/a>. Next week, in Ft. Lauderdale, there will be a “Values Voters” debate sponsored by religious right groups, and Thompson has already turned down the invitation. Moreover, Thompson said yesterday that he’ll also probably skip a PBS-sponsored debate at Morgan State University in Baltimore on September 27th. The next debate on the GOP calendar in October 9.<\/p>\n * Speaking of Thompson, the actor\/lobbyist\/politician picked up his first Senate endorsement from outside Tennessee yesterday, when Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi threw his support<\/a> behind the former senator.<\/p>\n * Rudy Giuliani’s former campaign manager, Fran Reiter, has decided to support<\/a> Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Reiter, who ran Giuliani’s 1997 mayoral campaign, and also served as a deputy mayor in the Giuliani administration, said this week that the former mayor has “backed away from” the values he embraced while in office. (If Giuliani and Clinton win their respective parties nominations, this would make for a fun ad. “I’m Rudy Giuliani’s former campaign manager, and I’m supporting Hillary Clinton…”)<\/p>\n