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
* Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), who was always a long shot as far as 2008 was concerned, has reportedly decided not to run<\/a> for president. According to National Journal, he will make a formal announcement this afternoon.<\/p>\n * After a few very close state legislative elections were decided, Dems in Pennsylvania have claimed the majority<\/a> in the State House. In all, Dems won 11 state legislative chambers nationwide in 2006.<\/p>\n * Unfortunately, Victoria Wulsin (D) officially conceded the race against Rep. Jean Schmidt (R) in Ohio’s 2nd, but she may make a soft landing<\/a>. State party leaders are urging Gov.-elect Ted Strickland (D) to hire Wulsin for a high-level job in his administration.<\/p>\n * In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) can’t seek a third term, and is constitutionally prohibited from running for president, but aides close to the governor have another idea: run for the U.S. Senate. The Sacramento Bee’s Dan Walters explained<\/a>, “If Schwarzenegger still has the political bug four years hence, and his own popularity remains relatively high, he’ll almost certainly weigh a challenge to [Sen. Barbara] Boxer [in 2010]. But it could be much easier for him to run for a vacant Senate seat in 2012, when [Sen. Dianne] Feinstein will be 79 years old and perhaps contemplating retirement.”<\/p>\n * Wesley Clark (D) told the AP<\/a> yesterday that, looking back, he waited too long to decide to run for president in 2004, and will avoid making the same mistake in advance of the next campaign. “(There was) an inability to create a staff in a timely fashion,” Clark said. “I didn’t have a campaign manager until the end of November. I had no money. I had no strategy when I started. It was my only faith-based initiative…. It’s one of several mistakes that if I were to run that I would hope I wouldn’t repeat.”<\/p>\n * And in other 2008 news, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) will be the only presidential hopeful to appear at the New Hampshire Democratic Party’s midterm victory celebration<\/a> on Dec. 10. It will be Obama’s first trip to the Granite State. In related news, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) has started an on-line petition asking Obama to enter the presidential race, though Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said an announcement of the senator’s presidential intentions is now “several weeks away<\/a>.”<\/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: * Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), who was always a long shot as far as 2008 was concerned, has reportedly decided not to run for president. According to National Journal, he […]<\/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-9189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9189","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=9189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9189\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}