Judging from the emails we’ve been getting today from readers in South Carolina, those anti-Hillary phone calls we reported on yesterday are widespread down there.
At first the calls appeared to be the work of a lone Hillary hater named Robert Morrow, who drags up all the worst of the old right-wing smears of the Clintons. How many calls can one guy make, right? But he wouldn’t tell us how much the calls had cost or who had done them for him and unless he has somehow figured out how to target TPM readers (there is no such list, believe me), this guy isn’t working alone.
New Miami Herald poll: McCain 25%, Romney 23%, Giuliani 15%.
Before you write in and ask me about Huckabee and Paul, I couldn’t actually find the complete poll statistics. But these numbers were in this article about the collapse of Rudy’s campaign.
But there are some great quotes. This one’s from the pollster: “Giuliani for all intents and purposes has virtually no chance to win in Florida.”
Then there’s Rudy’s campaign motto: “Tested. Ready. Now.”
I confess I’ve mainly confined my ridicule of Rudy to the foreign policy and shag fund fronts as well as on Rudy’s megalomania. So I’d never really taken a moment to focus on this motto. But as Ann Friedman points out at Feministing.com, in an age of STDs and coming from a playah like Rudy, it sounds less like a campaign slogan than a free-form haiku Rudy might extemporize when trying to get one of his latest conquests into the sack.
Thanks to one of our most eagle-eyed readers I’ve now got the full numbers for that new Florida poll put out by the Miami-Herald and a couple other Florida papers. Another poll out this afternoon from Public Policy Polling showed Romney vaulting ahead of McCain (28% to 25%) in the aftermath of Fred Thompson’s withdrawal from the race.
This latest one has McCain 25%, Romney 23%, Giuliani 15%, Huckabee 15%, Undecided 13%, Fred Thompson 4%, Ron Paul 3%.
This poll, like the PPP poll, was taken after Fred’s departure, though it’s worth keeping in mind that he will still be on the ballot. So perhaps he’ll draw some small number of votes.
What catches my eye here is that there is a very real chance that Rudy will come in fourth in Florida. On the positive side for Rudy, he’s beating Undecided, Ron Paul and Fred Thompson, though Thompson’s no longer being in the race and Undecided’s not being a candidate puts them both at a serious disadvantage.
TPM Reader SM explains …
Now, I’ve enjoyed watching the Giuliani campaign trainwreck go over the cliff and explode in a fiery mess of failure — in slow-motion — as much as the next guy. But I think you may be taking the Schadenfreude a little too far.
Amidst all your mockery of Rudy’s staggering ineptitude and one-note 9/11 concertos, you seem to have forgotten that the collapse of the Giuliani campaign will have real consequences for real people, who will no doubt suffer greatly once America’s Mayor has slinked off the trail.
Who will Chris Matthews fantasize about punching out Ahmadinejad on the flight deck of the USS Charles Bronson?
What will Pat Robertson do while he waits for God to tell him which candidate he really wants to endorse?
Into whose ear will Norman Podhoretz whisper sweet songs about tactical nukes leveling terrorist huts outside Riyadh?
When you see the sad faces of men who’ve had their man-crushes crushed, their God-chosen candidate forsaken, and their hopes for never-ending war razed, you’ll realize that even when mocking an incomparable twit like Rudy Giuliani, it is possible to go too far…
Fun factoid of the day:
Of the 100 sitting senators, 16 have run for president. Since John F. Kennedy won the presidency in 1960, becoming only the second person elected from the Senate to the White House, 47 senators have unsuccessfully sought residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
The first number is what surprised me. Sixteen current senators have run for president? I had to enlist TPM’s walking encyclopedia of politics, Eric Kleefeld, to help me independently compile the list of 16.
I put the list on a separate page for those who want to test their skills without a cheat sheet.
The first testimonial trainwreck of 2008 may be about to happen.
EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson goes before the Senate environment committee at 10 ET–right about now–to explain why he denied California a waiver to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles.
This could be fun. Paul Kiel provides the background in Today’s Must Read and will have ongoing coverage of the hearing at TPMmuckraker.
It seems the House Dems are giving way for the passage of a stimulus bill which will be a big piece of crap.
Yet another poll is showing Fred Thompson’s departure vaulting Mitt Romney into the lead in Florida. The latest Mason-Dixon poll has Romney 30%, McCain 26%, Giuliani 18%, Huckabee 13% and Paul 3%.
The connection between Thompson’s withdrawal and Romney’s rise is an inference. But I think it’s a pretty solid one.
Tuesday is the big showdown in Florida between John McCain and Mitt Romney. And only one of them is going to come out of the state (politically) alive. Join us as we feel the Mittmentum and preview Tuesday’s primary and tonight’s blow-out, last-chance-for-Rudy debate …