Conservative South Carolina blogger Will Folks is now saying that his claimed one-time paramour, Nikki Haley, and her campaign staff actually asked him for advice about how to handle the revelation of their affair shortly before he went public on Monday.
As we noted earlier, Carly Fiorina has suddenly leapfrogged into a big lead in the California GOP Senate primary — no doubt leading to corks spontaneously popping out of champagne bottles at the DSCC — apparently because she’s been able to run a big TV ad campaign for the last week or two basically unchallenged by her main opponent former Rep. Tom Campbell. But there was a candidate debate this afternoon where Campbell and conservative favorite Chuck DeVore got to go after Fiorina and try to reclaim the momentum in the race. Most of the attacks seemed to center on Fiorina’s not only being new to politics but actually new to voting too.
We talked to lawyers who love nothing better than a good public corruption case, and none of them saw any serious impropriety — let alone criminality — in the White House’s alleged offer of a federal appointment to Rep. Joe Sestak to entice him to drop his challenge to Sen. Arlen Specter.
First-time candidate Vaughn Ward was on a roll. Until he got caught plagiarizing a speech by President Obama and insisted that Puerto Rico was a foreign country.
There are only a few political affair storylines. Usually when the paramour comes forward, unless they have a lot of skeletons, that’s pretty much it. The pol has to either come clean and resign or more often admit causing the proverbial “pain” in his marriage and then go back to fundraising and dating. I use the male pronoun because that’s almost always the gender dynamic. But we’ve got a affair story down in South Carolina (i.e., the Palmetto Sex Farm) that turns a lot of the norms on their heads.
Start with the fact that the accused pol is female gubernatorial hopeful Nikki Haley. And her accuser isn’t some person in-state folks have never heard of before. He’s a very well-known conservative and insider-politics blogger, Will Folks, who at one point was the spokesman for Appalachian trail hiking Governor Mark Sanford, though well before the affair scandal last year. Read More
Tom Campbell, contender for the GOP senate nomination, has a history of being a pretty so-so fundraiser. And Carly Fiorina, who’s using a decent amount of her own money to finance her campaign, has just had the airwaves to herself for about a week straight. And two new polls suggests it’s paying off for her in a big way. After being behind for months, she’s jumped to a twenty point lead.
Man, this Republican senate primary in Arizona is really getting entertaining. The McCain campaign has now released a web ad calling opponent and former member of Congress J.D. Hayworth “among the dumbest members of Congress” after Hayworth’s ill-fated history lesson which we reported yesterday.
With the news that congressional Dems, the White House and the DOD have reached an agreement that should bring DADT to an end this year, it’s worth remembering how deeply uncontroversial a decision this has become. According to the latest CNN poll, almost 80% of Americans now support allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the US Armed Forces.
And it’s not even a new number. Public support has been at similar levels for the last few years. I confess that as someone who remembers the early 90s battle over this question, those numbers are about as gratifying as they are surprising to me. But there it is.