Online Journal of Politics and Foreign Affairs
Ben Smith quotes lawyer A.B. Culvahouse explaining legal obstacles to Joe Lieberman’s having been John McCain’s running mate. “Five states have sore loser statutes … [making] it very difficult for someone who’s not a member of the Republican Party to become the vice presidential nominee if they only switch parties to become a Republican shortly [...]
The editorial board at The Economist (which apparently considers itself a “newspaper” despite coming out weekly in magazine format) praises President Obama for having “already done some commendable things” in the foreign policy arena but charges that, domestically, “His performance has been weaker than those who endorsed his candidacy, including this newspaper, had hoped.” They [...]
In an op-ed in the Washington Post this morning, Sens. John McCain and Joseph Lieberman make the case for pursuing a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan: Loose rhetoric about a minimal commitment in Afghanistan is counterproductive for another reason: It exacerbates suspicions, already widespread in South Asia, that the United States will tire of this war [...]
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 [...]
Within the last couple of days both Sen. John McCain and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger have offered contrasting strategies for Afghanistan. John McCain’s plan was explained in a speech before the American Enterprise Institute and Henry Kissinger’s plan in an op-ed in the Washington Post. There are some points on which the two [...]
Hilary Bok is rather bent out of shape at a Washington Whispers poll which asks “If you had a choice of four daycare centers run separately by Michelle Obama, Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi, which would you choose for your kids?” She suggests some alternative poll questions: If you needed some yard work [...]
Two Politico pieces linked at memeorandum show how quickly one’s relationship with the media can change when going from soon-to-be-president to the Big Cheese. At 6:43 PM EST, Jonathan Martin and Carrie Budoff Brown offer up, “Obama flashes irritation in press room.” President Obama made a surprise visit to the White House press corps Thursday [...]
Barack Obama continues his outreach to the center-right, with dinners on his last night as a private citizen honoring John McCain and Colin Powell. Andrew Malcolm for LAT, under the clever headline “Will-be President Obama lauds would-be president McCain”: [T]onight at a special D.C. dinner, on the eve of becoming the nation’s 44th president at [...]
John McCain famously refused to make the Jeremiah Wright affair an issue in his campaign. ABC News has obtained a copy of an unaired ad, which they ran on yesterday’s Good Morning America: NARRATOR: Long before anyone knew who John McCain or Barack Obama were, one chose to honor his fellow soldiers by refusing to [...]
As widely anticipated, the Supreme Court today declined to hear a frivolous case about Barack Obama’s citizenship status. The Supreme Court has turned down an emergency appeal from a New Jersey man who says President-elect Barack Obama is ineligible to be president because he was a British subject at birth. The court did not comment [...]
While I’m socially conservative on most issues, I’m by no stretch a Social Conservative. Yet I agree with Rod Dreher‘s rebuttal to those who argue that the salvation of the Republican Party will come from expelling the Religious Right: John McCain didn’t get his clock cleaned because of his ardent advocacy for unborn life or [...]
Most of John McCain’s television spots, going back to the primaries, were simply dreadful. Now, Fred Davis III, the “advertising whiz” behind these atrocious ads, is whining to TIME’s Michael Scherer that McCain wouldn’t let him run some particularly clever ones. What if the McCain campaign had run ads using footage of Barack Obama dancing [...]
Kevin Drum seconds my concerns about conservative public intellectuals and offers two example where the Right isn’t offering useful policy alternatives. Conservatives on Global Warming Take global warming. Here’s the rough conservative reaction to it starting in the early 90s: It doesn’t exist. It exists but it isn’t manmade. It’s manmade, but it’s too expensive [...]
Two reports in the British press indicate that Barack Obama has shunted aside key campaign advisors and given the back of his hand to his most ardent supporters in the liberal wing of his party. Leonard Doyle of The Independent reports on the machinations necessary to get Hillary Clinton on board as Secretary of State. [...]
John McCain has won Missouri’s 11 electoral votes, CNN declares. Missouri hasn’t actually made that official yet, mind you. But the election was a mere sixteen days ago. According to the unofficial results, McCain won the state by 3,632 votes . The unofficial count shows McCain with 1,445,812 votes, or 49.4 percent, and Obama with [...]
Several folks are picking up on this Strange Maps overlay of cotton production in 1860 and the voting patterns in this month’s presidential contest between Barack Obama and John McCain: While the title “From Pickin’ Cotton to Pickin’ Presidents” is rather amusing, it’s precisely wrong. Indeed, the Strange Maps blogger makes this clear: The link between [...]
John McCain has caught quite a bit of flak for his rather cursory vetting process for his vice presidential selection. Barack Obama is going to the other extreme, requiring applicants for even low level appointments in his administration to fill out a seven page, 63 question document covering every conceivable base. The questionnaire includes 63 [...]
John McCain was on the “Tonight Show” with Jay Leno last night, continuing his graceful exit from a bitter presidential race. In his first interview since conceding the presidential election, John McCain said Tuesday that Sarah Palin did not damage his presidential bid and he dismissed anonymous criticism aimed at her following their crushing defeat. [...]
In the discussion on Obama’s apparent 365-173 Electoral College victory, Rodney Dill asks, “How close is this, historically? The popular vote difference seems like it was pretty big by modern standards, but usually that would result in an even more lopsided electoral vote.” It’s an interesting question. Dave Leip’s Atlas has the results for every [...]
It turns out that, despite a huge rise in voter registrations, actual turnout Tuesday was essentially the same as in 2004. 61 Percent of Eligibles Voted A new report from American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate concludes that voter turnout in Tuesday’s election was the same in percentage terms as it [...]
My office overlooks the Washington Post building and my parking garage is directly across the street from the entrance to the WaPo offices. A curious sight greeted me as I left for home yesterday evening: A large crowd of people lined up to get a copy of the OBAMA MAKES HISTORY commemorative edition of the [...]
Some interesting thoughts from Mark Salter, John McCain’s close aide and co-author, at TIME: The changes to how McCain campaigned were forced by the press, Salter argued. “The fact that we didn’t do the back-of-the-bus stuff is only a function that you guys really wouldn’t let us,” Salter said, referring to the media. “Once the [...]
Quite a few reports came out yesterday buttressing rumors that there were tensions between John McCain and Sarah Palin which caused a feud within the campaign team. It’s only fitting, I suppose, since the selection of Palin has highlighted and exacerbated a growing fissure within the Republican Party itself. Fox New’s Carl Cameron dished last [...]
Newsweek shares several tidbits from their “special election project,” which gave them inside information that they couldn’t publish until after the fact. Palin’s Spending Spree NEWSWEEK has also learned that Palin’s shopping spree at high-end department stores was more extensive than previously reported. While publicly supporting Palin, McCain’s top advisers privately fumed at what they [...]
The top entry pages at OTB over the last hour, by a longshot, are Barack Obama the Socialist, Obama the Antichrist?, and Left Behind Authors Say Obama Is Not the Antichrist. (Also getting a lot of entries, likely through the vagaries of search engine rankings, Primary Popular Vote Totals.) Apparently, neither John McCain’s gracious concession [...]
John McCain’s age hurt him far more than Barack Obama’s race, the exit polls show. Race played less of a role in the presidential election than age, exit polls showed Tuesday. Voters line up to cast their ballots in Henderson, Nevada, on Tuesday morning. While Barack Obama would be the nation’s first black president, John [...]
Barack Obama has won Ohio, CBS radio projects, making it the first Bush state from 2004 to actually switch. This takes out of play any “miracle” scenarios whereby John McCain somehow won Colorado and New Mexico and kept the 2004 caucus together. It’s another 20 Electors for Obama. Fox, I should note, hasn’t called it [...]
MSNBC is projecting that Barack Obama has won Pennsylvania and its 21 Electoral votes. If this holds — and I expect it to, given the preelection polling margins — it’ll be an early night. There’s essentially no way John McCain wins the White House without pulling out a win in the Keystone State. Again, if [...]
The Pittsburgh Steelers’ 23-6 trouncing of the Washington Redskins last night is of some small consolation to fans of the suddenly awful Dallas Cowboys. It’s yet another nail in poor John McCain’s coffin, however. As Dan Steinburg explains, [T]hanks to the research of the Elias Sports Bureau’s Steve Hirdt, we learned in 2000 that when [...]
In the most lopsided election since George Washington’s retirement, John McCain carried every state save Barack Obama’s home state of Illinois and birthplace of Hawaii and the Why Bother Having Elections, We Know How it’s Going to Come Out District of Columbia, giving him a whopping 510 Electoral College votes to Obama’s mere 28. That, [...]
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. wipes a tear as he talks about his grandmother, Madelyn Payne Dunham, at a rally in Charlotte, N.C., Monday, Nov. 3, 2008. Obama Madelyn Payne Dunham, Barack Obama’s maternal grandmother, died Sunday, the campaign announced earlier this evening. She was 86. Obama announced the news from the campaign [...]
Steve Benen strongly rejects the caution by Doug Schoen that “This election is not a mandate for Democratic policies. Rather, it is a wholesale rejection of the policies of George W. Bush, Republicans, and to a lesser extent, John McCain.” I suspect Obama, given what we know of his style and temperament, would make good-faith [...]
Ross Perot famously had a crazy aunt in the basement. Barack Obama, it seems, has an illegal one in living in the Boston projects. Barack Obama did not know a relative was living in the United States illegally for the past nearly four years prior to today’s Associated Press report, “but obviously believes that any [...]
John McCain did his turn on “Saturday Night Live” last night and he was pretty good. McCain, who is trailing Democrat Barack Obama in most battleground state polls, also appeared during the show’s “Weekend Update” newscast to announce he would pursue a new campaign strategy in the closing days of the campaign. “I thought I [...]
Matt Yglesias presents this Gallup poll as evidence that Barack Obama is on the right side of the redistributionist issue while John McCain and Joe the Plumber are in the minority: Says Matt, “What you see here is that traditionally a large majority of Americans have favored spreading the wealth around.” Well, no. What you [...]
A new poll claims that a whopping 14 percent of likely voters think they may still change their minds in the five days remaining before the election. One in seven, or 14 percent, can’t decide or back a candidate but might switch, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo! News poll of likely voters released Friday. Who [...]
Marc Ambinder breaks down the early voting numbers, and things aren’t looking good for McCain. Gallup and Pew data show that Democrats are leading in the early vote. The equally reliable Annenberg National Election Survey’s data shows that, across the country, Democrats are tied with Republicans in the early vote. Obviously, early voting matters by [...]
Patrick Ruffini takes up where Jon Henke and John Hawkins leave off, offering a lament that conservative bloggers don’t engage in activism to the extent that their lefty counterparts do, thus leading to the demise of Western Civilization as we know it. Righty Pundits vs. Lefty Activists Ruffini thinks the rightosphere is mired in 2003 [...]
A new Rasmussen poll finds that voters trust John McCain more than Barack Obama on taxes (47%to 45%) and on “economic issues” more generally (48% to 47%). These numbers are, of course, within the margin of error. They do, however, represent a reversal of a trend and may indicate that the “Joe the Plumber” and [...]
Bill McInturff, John McCain’s chief pollster, released a memo last night saying the campaign has made “significant progress” in the last week and that “All signs say we are headed to an election that may easily be too close to call by next Tuesday.” Disclaimer up front: As I’ve noted numerous times before, my wife [...]
NBA Hall of Famer and TV sensation Charles Barkley is getting much attention for his pledge to run for governor of his home state of Alabama in 2014. When asked if he was serious, the former Philadelphia 76er said, “I am, I can’t screw up Alabama.” He added that his native state could only improve. [...]
A new Pew poll shows a continuing decline for John McCain: Barack Obama leads John McCain by a 52% to 36% margin in Pew’s latest nationwide survey of 1,325 registered voters. This is the fourth consecutive survey that has found support for the Republican candidate edging down. In contrast, since early October weekly Pew surveys [...]
Megan McArdle and Mark Kleiman go round and round on recent National Journal and NYT reports that the Obama campaign was routinely accepting credit card donations from fake donors while the McCain campaign was rejecting them automatically using simple software applications. Kleiman points out that the reporters in question were technically committing wire fraud, Megan’s [...]