1st Republican Debate of 2008 - Video, Transcripts, Reax
I caught perhaps half an hour of last night's so-called debate between Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and eight other guys. I don't feel deprived at not having seen the rest. The format was awful and the not unreasonable decision to include people whose candidacy has no shot (Tom Tancredo and Ron Paul, at a minimum) made the time to ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on May 4, 2007 07:59
Fred Thompson the Great Conservative Hope?
There has long been frustration among the party's social conservative wing that there were no "real conservatives" in the race, despite guys like Tom Tancredo, Mike Huckabee, Jim Gilmore, and Duncan Hunter being in the race. I guess they mean "real conservatives who have a snowball's chance in hell of winning." Enter Fred Thompson. The former Tennessee Senator and ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on March 28, 2007 08:27
Obama More Liberal Than Kucinich (UPDATE: Maybe Not)
Steven Thomma of McClatchy Newspapers has gone through the National Journal 2006 Congressional Vote Ratings and discovered that, "The most liberal member of Congress running for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination isn't Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio. It's Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois." The lifetime liberal scores (maximum 99) for the Democrats: -Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, 84.3 -Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on March 20, 2007 08:09
Does ‘Experience’ Matter for Presidential Candidates?
Ryan Lizza has a rather confusing column in today's NYT entitled "Nowadays, a Candidate Can Seem Too Experienced." I say "confusing" because Lizza offers changing definitions of the word "experience" and many contradictory bits of information. For example, he denigrates Rudy Giuliani's background: “Now they’ve elevated mayor of New York into an incredibly useful experience,” marvels Stephen Hess, a scholar at ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on March 18, 2007 13:21
Chuck Hagel’s Bid for the Republican Nomination
The Politico's Jonathan Martin assesses the presidential chances of Senator Chuck Hagel, who is expected to announce his candidacy today. Essentially, the question is whether a guy with a "lifetime American Conservative Union rating north of 85" but who has little money in the bank and is his party's most vociferous critic of its president on the most controversial ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on March 12, 2007 09:11
Hagel: Bush Might be Impeached ‘Before This is Over’
Charles Pierce dressed up as Zorro every Halloween until his freshman year in college. And he loves Chuck Hagel. But there are no places in Hagel for metaphor. His face is too meaty for poetics, its tectonics shaped by old football injuries and one horrible day in the Mekong Delta when the flesh of it bubbled and ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on March 7, 2007 06:32
Republican Candidates Almost Invisible on the Web
Via Kevin Drum, I see that Micah Sifry has done some comparative analysis and found that the Republicans mentioned as leading contenders for the 2008 presidential race are "almost invisible on the web." To give you just one example, if you add up all the friends all the Republican candidates have on their MySpace pages, and compare it to all the ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on January 26, 2007 14:30
Senate Foreign Relations Panel Votes Against Iraq Surge
The Bush "surge" took a big hit early today with a non-binding vote in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Democratic-controlled Senate Foreign Relations Committee dismissed President Bush's plans to increase troops strength in Iraq on Wednesday as "not in the national interest," an unusual wartime repudiation of the commander in chief. The vote on the nonbinding measure was 12-9 ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on January 24, 2007 14:48
People Who Won’t Get Elected President
While good pundits, especially those with multiple degrees in political science, are supposed to qualify all predictions about elections nearly two years into the future with some sort of disclaimer, I will eschew that convention and predict that the following people will not be elected president in 2008 or thereafter: Dennis Kucinich Christopher Dodd Ron Paul Mike Huckabee Sam Brownback Tommy Thompson Chuck Hagel Duncan Hunter Tom Tancredo Jim ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on January 12, 2007 10:02
Republicans’ Uphill Fight to Regain the Senate in 2008
In my morning-after election analysis, I noted that it would be very difficult for the Republicans to take the House back in 2008 but that the Senate was well within grasp if the GOP got their act together. I wrote that without actually breaking down the races, though. Chris Cillizza has and it does not bode well: A cursory ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on November 18, 2006 07:23
