Today’s shorter-than-usual 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
* The AP noted<\/a> today that Rudy Giuliani prefers restaurants to town-hall meetings: “The diner tour lets Giuliani play to his popularity and celebrity. It also lets him avoid tough questions in favor of sandwiches, omelets and fried fare. Giuliani’s restaurant drop-bys are designed largely to get his much-recognized face on local television, especially in early voting states such as Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.”<\/p>\n * Paul Krugman discovered<\/a> that, during the debate over Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the sweeping corporate governance legislation passed a few years ago, Ron Paul took a firm stand — against accountability. A section of the legislation “requires companies and their auditors to assess the companies’ internal controls, which are the practices or systems for keeping records and preventing abuse or fraud.” Paul targeted the measure, saying accountability controls have “raised the costs of doing business.” Paul is a friend of corporate fraud?<\/p>\n * Mitt Romney’s investment in New Hampshire advertising remains staggering<\/a>: “Mitt was spending $100,000 a week through October, and he’s now upped the ante to $200,000 a week, according to a report from GraniteProf that the Romney camp has not disputed. He notes that this level of spending translates into some 200 ads per week. It’s yet more confirmation of the extent to which the Romney camp is putting all its chips on big wins in New Hampshire (where he’s widening his lead) and in Iowa (where the race is rapidly tightening) in advance of Rudy’s predicted success on super-primary day, Feb. 5.”<\/p>\n * Despite having led in Iowa consistently for the last six months<\/a>, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign sounds like it’s trying to lower expectations<\/a>. “Our definition of success doesn’t necessarily mean coming in first,” explains Clinton spokesman Mark Daley. “As long as we have a strong showing on caucus night.” He added that Barack Obama has an added advantage in Iowa because he ran for the Senate in 2004 in a “neighboring state who shares media markets with the state.” Hmm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today’s shorter-than-usual installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn’t generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers: * The AP noted today that Rudy Giuliani prefers restaurants to town-hall meetings: “The diner tour lets Giuliani play to his popularity and celebrity. It also lets him avoid tough questions in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13693","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=13693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13693\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}