Families Off Limits in Presidential Politics?

Taegan Goddard gives Quote of the Day honors to Barack Obama for this: I think families are off limits. I would never consider making Cindy McCain a campaign issue, and if I saw people doing that -- I would speak out against it. And the fact that I haven't seen that from John McCain I think is a deep disappointment. This is ...

This Day in History: Kerry Wins Presidency

Had the 2004 election been held on May 29th, John Kerry would have won handily: Five years later, it's Obama 266, McCain 248, Tie 24. Via Andrew Sullivan, who presumably is trying to illustrate that Obama doesn't have it wrapped up quite yet and needs to keep pushing on, who in turn got it via Ben Smith, who presumably is hoping to ...

Clinton Wins Indiana, Obama Takes North Carolina

While there's still plenty of counting to be done, it looks like today's primaries went as expected: a comfortable Obama win in North Carolina and a solid Clinton win in Indiana. The only surprise, really, is the margin of the victories. Barack Obama swept to victory in the North Carolina primary on Tuesday but fell behind Hillary Rodham Clinton ...

Do McCain’s Medals Matter?

Jake Tapper, notes the contrast between DNC chair Howard Dean's statements about John Kerry's military service in 2004 and McCain's in 2008. Commenting on John McCain's new "The American President that Americans Have Been Waiting For" ad yesterday, Dean said, "While we honor McCain’s military service, the fact is Americans want a real leader who offers real solutions, not a blatant ...

Iowa Caucus Results - Signs and Portents

Mike Huckabee won the Republican vote by a much wider margin than expected and Ron Paul came in a distant fifth place -- but ahead of ostensible national frontrunner Rudy Giuliani. Barack Obama won on the Democratic side but one could argue that it was essentially a three way tie, since he got only one more delegate than ...

Kerry Takes Pickens $1 Million Swift Boat Bet

Famed oilman T. Boone Pickens has offered $1 million to anyone who can disprove claims my by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth against John Kerry -- and John Kerry has taken him up on it. Sen. John Kerry, whose 2004 presidential campaign was torpedoed by critics of his Vietnam War record, said Friday he has personally ...

Economic Class and Voting Behavior

Andrew Gelman posts the familiar Red-Blue map of the 2004 election with a twist: What if only poor people's votes counted? Only the middle class? Only the rich? The results are posted at right. Visually, at least, it's a Republican blowout if the poor are excluded and a Democratic landslide if only the poor vote. Reading inside the ...

Fred Thompson This Year’s Wesley Clark?

Publius draws some parallels between the Fred Thompson's current campaign and Wesley Clark's ill-fated 2004 effort. The Clark and Thompson campaigns have eerily similar pre-histories. Because the party elites and rank-and-file weren’t very happy with the slate of candidates, Clark and Thompson’s names got floated for months. Party members didn’t know much about them, so they projected their desires ...

FEC Fines Kerry-Edwards Campaign $1.3 Million

The Federal Election Commission has fined the Kerry-Edwards campaign over $1.3 million dollars for exceeding federal spending limits by about that much in the 2004 campaign. The Kerry-Edwards team plans to appeal and challenges the FEC's calculations, which are based on some arcane accounting of the value of various donated services. I have no real opinion on the ...

McCain Falling into the Kerry Trap?

John McCain has a new campaign video out, entitled "Service With Honor." It's pretty powerful. As good as it is, I think the letter accompanying it by Marine legend Orson Swindle, who was imprisoned with McCain in the same camp, is even better. (Although the story Swindle tells in the video, about why McCain didn't become a Marine, is ...

James Hamilton on the Great Gasoline Conspiracy

James Hamilton does a pretty good job debunking the Great Gasoline Conspiracy about how the recent decline in gasoline prices is due to a clever Rovian plot. An Econbrowser reader calling himself "Alan Greenspend" calls our attention to a post by Russ Winter detailing how George Bush might be responsible for falling gasoline prices. After long shying away from oil, natural gas, ...

Life in the Alternate Universe

Awww..... it's so cute when politicians play the "history would have been different!" card.U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D- Mass., who was in town Sunday to help Gov. Jennifer Granholm campaign for her re-election bid, took time to take a jab at the Bush administration for its lack of leadership in the Israeli-Lebanon conflict. "If I was president, this wouldn't have happened," ...

White House Implicated in NH Phone Jamming Case

AP reporter Larry Margasak has written a piece headlined "Phone-Jamming Records Point to White House" by YahooNews. Perhaps a better headline would have been "Republican Operatives Call Political Affairs Office." Key figures in a phone-jamming scheme designed to keep New Hampshire Democrats from voting in 2002 had regular contact with the White House and Republican Party as the plan was ...

The Ketchup Heiress

Bombshell disclosure at the Smoking Gun...

Plea Bargains for Election Tire Slashers

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports that four Kerry-Edwards staffers who slashed tires of Republican Party vans that were to take voters to the polls have been allowed to plead guilty to misdemeanor charges. In an unexpected twist in the Election Day tire slashing trial, four former Kerry-Edwards campaign staffers, including the sons of U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Milwaukee) and former Acting Mayor ...