Obama Plunges in Newsweek Poll!
Newsweek has released a new poll and is excited by the huge change: "Glow Fading? The latest NEWSWEEK Poll shows Barack Obama leading John McCain by only 3 points. What a difference a few weeks can make." This is quite amusing in that pretty much everyone agreed that the June 20th Newsweek poll was an outlier. No matter. In ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 12, 2008 06:56
Supreme Court as a Voting Issue
Dahlia Lithwick takes to the pages of FireDogLake to explain why, in her view, liberals are much less excited about the Supreme Court than conservatives: My own impression, having covered the past two presidential elections is that most liberals simply don’t vote with the composition of the Supreme Court in mind at all, or that it ranks somewhere in their top ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 7, 2008 16:00
Jesse Helms’ Foreign Policy Legacy
Christopher Hitchens joins the legions dancing on Jesse Helms' grave. Rather than piling on about the racism of a Southern politician whose career began sixty-odd years ago, he instead focuses on Helms' foreign policy: His chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was a period of national embarrassment and, sometimes, disgrace. The Helms-Burton Act of 1996, imposing additional economic sanctions on ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 7, 2008 12:57
McCain Veepstakes: A Woman?
David Paul Kuhn argues that John McCain should strongly consider choosing a woman as his vice presidential running mate in order to woo angry Hillary Clinton supporters. That premise strikes me as absurd, in that no Republican woman is going to be a suitable substitute for Clinton in the minds of her supporters. Still, reaching out to ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on June 23, 2008 09:04
Ireland Rejects Treaty of Lisbon
It's received precious little notice here in the States but Irish voters have rejected the Treaty of Lisbon, the EU's latest move towards reform and greater consolidation of power in Brussels: DUBLIN, Ireland - Ireland's voters have rejected the European Union reform treaty, a blueprint for modernizing the 27-nation bloc that cannot become law without Irish approval, electoral officials said Friday. In ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on June 13, 2008 15:56
Going to War with the Ideology You Have
Kevin Drum, responding to Jonah Goldberg's argument that George Packer's "The Fall of Conservatism" erroneously conflates conservatism with the Republican Party, retorts: No political ideology lives in isolation. We judge communism by how Mao and Stalin implemented it, we judge 60s-era liberalism by how LBJ and the Democratic Party implemented it, and we judge social democracy by how Western Europe has ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on May 23, 2008 07:50
McCain’s Vice Presidential Candidates
John McCain is vetting potential vice presidential candidates over the holiday weekend, Adam Nagourney reports for the NYT. Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and a one-time rival for the Republican nomination, have all accepted invitations to visit with Mr. McCain at his ranch in Sedona, these Republicans said. This ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on May 22, 2008 08:48
Payback Time for Clinton
The sense that Hillary Clinton's nomination was inevitable gave her a huge advantage coming into this campaign, making it very risky for big Democratic donors not to pony up and for superdelegates to endorse her opponent. Now that her eventual loss seems certain, though, the long knives are coming out, Susan Milligan reports. [T]he reality of the Clintons' relationship with ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on May 19, 2008 07:06
Sweetie-gate
Barack Obama has a "bad habit" of addressing "all kinds of people" as "Sweetie" in casual conversation, although he's trying to quit. Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama has apologized to WXYZ reporter Peggy Agar for calling her "sweetie" during a campaign stop Wednesday in Sterling Heights. Obama apologized in a voicemail he left on Agar's cell phone at 3:16 p.m: "Hi Peggy. ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on May 15, 2008 08:04
Still The Least Dangerous Branch
Anna Quindlen argues that Supreme Court appointments are the most important choices presidents make. Congress chips away at legislation, then sends some lowest-common-denominator version to the White House, to be signed or vetoed or later redesigned by the next president to take up temporary residence in Washington. But the work of the high court has had vast systemic influence over the ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on May 9, 2008 09:53
