If Wright Were White
Leonce Gaiter believes that ,"If Reverend Jeremiah Wright and his former disciple, Barack Obama were white, this would not be a story." He contends that, "White pastors have been spewing hateful bile and filth for generations. But it's white bile, and that makes all the difference." Ezra Klein disagrees slightly, arguing, "Americans recoil from the Chomskyite critique, and any ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on May 1, 2008 12:01
Republicans Love Barack Obama – For Now
George Will closes a subpar (by his standards, at least) column on the silly populism of Mike Huckabee and John Edwards with this praise for Barack Obama: Barack Obama, who might be mercifully closing the Clinton parenthesis in presidential history, is refreshingly cerebral amid this recrudescence of the paranoid style in American politics. He is the un-Edwards and un-Huckabee -- ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on January 6, 2008 08:11
Ron Paul: Mission Accomplished
John Cole wins Headline of the Day honors for his headline/lede couplet, Maybe Patrick Ruffini is a Libertarian Because I think he is smoking pot It's a pithy summary of Ruffini's much-discussed blog post over at Hugh Hewitt's place, "Ron Paul Has Won." He won’t win the nomination. He won’t win any primaries. But for Ron Paul’s quixotic bid for the White House, ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 26, 2007 16:02
Huckabee and the Decline of the Religious Right
Two pieces today give insights into the longshot presidential bid of Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and the role of evangelical leaders in the Republican Party. Michael Gerson notes Huckabee's irritation that demonstrably less conservative opponents are garnering endorsements that should rightly be his. When I asked former pastor and current presidential candidate Mike Huckabee his response to Pat Robertson's ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 9, 2007 16:48
God Endorses Guiliani
Josh Marshall, somewhat obliquely, makes an excellent point about today's endorsement of Rudy Giuliani's presidential bid by televangelist Pat Robertson. Giuliani's claim to the presidency is based on his service as mayor during and immediately after 9/11. What stops him from being a shoo-in for the nomination is his track record supporting abortion rights and gay rights. ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 7, 2007 14:15
Brownback to Endorse McCain
Sam Brownback is set to endorse John McCain for president. Sam Brownback, a Kansas conservative and favorite of evangelical Christians, will endorse his former Republican presidential rival John McCain, GOP officials said Wednesday. The nod could provide a much-needed boost, particularly in Iowa, for the Arizona senator and one-time presumed GOP front-runner whose bid faltered and who now is looking ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 7, 2007 09:51
Christian Conservatives May Bolt GOP
Some influential leaders of the Religious Right are threatening to leave the Republican party and support a third party candidate if Rudy Giuliani gets the nomination, David Kirkpatrick reports. The group making the threat, which came together Saturday in Salt Lake City during a break-away gathering during a meeting of the secretive Council for National Policy, includes Dr. James Dobson of ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 1, 2007 07:38
Blogger Files FEC Complaint against Thompson
A liberal blogger charges that Fred Thompson is breaking the law by raising so much money and still not formally declaring himself a candidate. Lane Hudson, a left-wing blogger, filed a complaint against former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) on Monday, accusing the likely presidential candidate of breaking the law by violating the Federal Election Commission’s (FEC) “testing the waters” clause. Hudson, ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 21, 2007 08:24
Ron Paul Wins Alabama Straw Poll
Despite all the attention paid to the meaningless Ames, Iowa straw poll, there has been almost zero coverage of the fact that Ron Paul dominated the Alabama straw poll Saturday, absolutely demolishing the competition: Paul 216 Romney 14 Hunter 10 Thompson 9 Giuliani 7 Huckabee 6 McCain 2 Brownback 2 Tancredo 0 Cox 0 This is a stunning setback for Mike Huckabee, who is not only the only southerner in the ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 20, 2007 08:53
Did Karl Rove Lose a Generation of Republicans?
James Carville has an editorial in the Financial Times, of all places, explaining "How Karl Rove lost a generation of Republicans." He's generous in noting that, "If we concluded our analysis in 2007 and confined our judgment merely to Mr Rove’s immediate electoral record, we would have no choice but to judge him a spectacular success. There is no doubt that ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on August 15, 2007 10:49
Is John McCain the Next Ronald Reagan?
Patrick Hynes, who I'm relieved to see isn't one of the McCain staffers let go yesterday, sends along a David Brody piece entitled, "Is John McCain the Next Ronald Reagan?" He cites a 1979 AP story about Reagan's fundraising woes and a 1980 WaPo piece noting that "Reagan had to overcome doubts about his age and ability, an ill-advised ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on July 3, 2007 12:19
Why We Can’t Ignore the Kooks
David Adesnik wonders, To what extent does criticism, no matter how harsh or how justified, only build [Michael] Moore up into a bigger celebrity? If one wanted to completely marginalize a public figure, how would one go about it? The answer is not that if you ignore him, he'll go away. Rather, I think the challenge is to ensure that ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on June 28, 2007 08:53
Can Republicans Win California Again?
Marc Ambinder has two pieces in Hotline on Call today that strike me as interrelated. This morning, he wrote about a memo from Brent Seaborn, Rudy Giuliani's strategy director, arguing that his candidate can win California in 2008, a feat no Republican has accomplished in the twenty years since George H.W. Bush beat Mike Dukakis. The memo is ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on May 3, 2007 15:21
Anti-Elite Hackery and the Bush Administration
One of the latest examples adduced of President Bush's tendency to appoint ideologically agreeable hacks rather than traditionally-qualified people to the administration has been the revelation that 150 graduates of Pat Robertson's Regent University are among their ranks, with Monica Goodling the most (in)famous. While Paul Krugman and other reliable anti-Bush pundits have been leading the charge, even Jonah Goldberg ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 16, 2007 14:55
Fundies Rise Quickly Bush’s Justice Department
Via Radley Balko is this story of about how people were appointed to fairly high positions in the Justice Department based on little more than their religious views. A 1995 graduate of Messiah College, an evangelical Christian school, and a 1999 graduate of Pat Robertson's Regent University Law School, Goodling is an improbable character for a political scandal. Her chief claim ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on April 10, 2007 10:19
