Petraeus New Hampshire Speech: Presidential Campaign Underway?
Reports that General David Petraeus is giving a speech at Saint Anselm College's New Hampshire Institute of Politics on March 24 is ginning up speculation that he's running for president. Mark Ambinder: News that Gen. David Petraeus is venturing out of his Centcom comfort zone late this month to the state of New Hampshire is catnip for a certain ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 13, 2010 08:45
Ron Paul Wins CPAC Straw Poll
Ron Paul beat out Mitt Romney in the 2010 CPAC straw poll, with Sarah Palin finishing a distant third. Jonathan Martin and Jessica Taylor of Politico note that the reaction to the announcement was less than polite. Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian-leaning Texas Republican who ran a quixotic bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, was the top vote-getter in the ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on February 21, 2010 09:09
Ron Paul at CPAC
ABC's Bret Hovell exclaims that "Ron Paul supporters are taking over CPAC!" Libertarian Texas Congressman Ron Paul – who has a large and occasionally rowdy backing throughout the country – was scheduled to speak here at the Conservative Political Action Conference at 4:30 Friday afternoon. Large conferences being what they are, the schedule is running a little behind. But Paul’s mass of supporters ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on February 20, 2010 08:42
CPAC Straw Poll
Matt Lewis notes that "the Conservative Political Action Conference is coming up this week" (tomorrow, in fact) and declares "As always, it will be interesting to see who wins this year’s coveted CPAC Straw Poll." Apparently, Taegan Goddard agrees in that he's holding a straw poll on the straw poll. I'm not sure why. The straw poll voters couldn't be less ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on February 17, 2010 12:48
Huckabee Leads Obama
Public Policy Polling's latest 2012 presidential poll (I know, I know) has Mike Huckabee leading President Obama and Mitt Romney within the margin of error. Mike Huckabee has a 45-44 advantage over Obama, aided largely by a 44-38 lead with independents. There continues to be no evidence of any negative fallout for Huckabee after murders of police officers committed by an ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on January 23, 2010 06:25
Newt Gingrich for President?
Newt Gingrich, who has seemingly not-quite-been-running for president for more than a decade tells reporters that he's among the hot prospects for 2012. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Wednesday he considers himself among the top Republican prospects for the 2012 presidential election, adding that he believes there will be plenty of GOP options for voters to consider. "I think I'm probably ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on January 14, 2010 10:23
Should Republicans Call Domino’s?
NRO's Jonah Goldberg thinks the Republican Party should take a lesson from Domino's Pizza, which has apparently admitted that their product is awful and is working to fix itself. You may have seen the commercials or the YouTube video touting the iconic pizza-delivery chain’s reinvention. But if you haven’t, Domino’s new campaign can be summed up easily enough: “We blew it.” Focus ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on January 9, 2010 09:32
Obama Leads 2012 Opponents
Taegan Goddard links a Public Policy Polling survey [PDF] showing that President Obama would have beaten the most commonly mentioned Republican hopefuls had the election been held from October 16th to 19th and opened to registered voters. (I hasten to add, it wasn't.) In fact, according to the survey, "Obama leads Mike Huckabee 47-43, Mitt Romney 48-40, Sarah Palin 52-40, and ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 22, 2009 11:58
Mike Huckabee and the GOP
Daniel Larison is a bit too charitable here in assessing Mike Huckabee's finish in last year's presidential primaries: While Huckabee was officially the second-biggest vote-getter in the primaries last year, he achieved this mostly through perseverance and concentrated support from evangelical voters. Had Romney continued to compete and waste his money on what would still have been a losing bid, it ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 17, 2009 09:18
Republican Party Needs More Votes if it is to Win
Bruce Bartlett explains why he's not a Republican anymore using a time-honored refrain: He didn't leave his party; his party left him. While he now considers himself an "independent," he's more than non-partisan; he's "anti-Republican." Why? I still consider myself to be a Reaganite. But I don’t see any others anywhere in the GOP these days, which is why I consider ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 31, 2009 11:58
Romney For Senate
US News blogger Peter Roff speculates that Mitt Romney will run for the late Ted Kennedy's Senate seat. Such an announcement would likely be embraced immediately by the Republicans, who would like almost nothing more than to deny Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada his new, hard-won, 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority. As a self-funding candidate who has already been elected once ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 27, 2009 09:29
Mitt Romney Moving to New Hampshire
Mitt Romney is busy selling off a few of many his mansions and plans to move to his family vacation home in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, Hotline reports. He has also registered his PAC there. This has some people guessing that Romney is contemplating another run for the presidency. "No doubt in my mind that they are doing the necessary maintenance to ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on May 7, 2009 08:03
Greenspan’s Underpants
The economy is not doing well. To be sure, some of you may have already sensed that, what with the bursting of the housing bubble, the bank failures, insurance failures, auto company failures, massive government bailouts, burgeoning unemployment, and whatnot. But now we have something really concrete to go on. HuffPo's Sam Stein reminds us that Alan Greenspan liked to monitor men's ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 9, 2009 06:38
One of These Is Not Like the Other
Timothy Sandefur is embarrassed: So I was watching this insane video of Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie discussing the War on Terrorism with Mos Def. And it’s amusing to laugh at the utterly hapless ignorance of "Mr. Def," as he is repeatedly called—until you stop and wonder. Why is the black community not outraged by this? Bill Maher hosts a talk ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 31, 2009 11:38
Rush Limbaugh: Not That Influential?
Jonathan Last offers a long retort to the notion that Rush Limbaugh is a significant influencer of American politics, much less the de facto leader of the Republican Party. He rejects, for example, the notion that having a large audience necessarily matters: Consider television. From 1998 to 2005, Everybody Loves Raymond was among the top 15 rated shows on TV. For ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on March 6, 2009 06:51
