What really happened between those Iranian speedboats and the U.S. Navy?
The high quality of the discourse from last night’s GOP debate carried over to today:
It’s bad enough that Rudy’s had to ask his top staff to go without pay so that his campaign can conserve money for the do-or-die (for Rudy) Florida primary on January 29th. Now comes word that Rudy has fallen into a tie with John McCain in New York.
The most recent poll of his do-or-die state of Florida has him running third, six points behind Huckabee and two behind Romney. Seventeen polls have been taken in Florida since September 12th. And before the most recent one, only one of those did not have Rudy in the lead.
Late Update: I’d never thought of this from this angle. But TPM Reader CS makes a good point …
The conventional wisdom on Rudy’s Super Tuesday “strategy” has been universally described as “risky” and occasionally “crazy.”
To me this provides a direct window into his judgement and how he would govern as President and it’s not a flattering picture. Is he the kind of president who would
go with a high risk, high reward strategy all the time? It sure gives me pause.I’m surprised the other candidates have not used this as a way to paint Rudy as a risky or crazy choice for President. It could dovetail
with some of his other judgement problems like Bernie Kerik & dealing with his ex-wives & children.Poor judgement is not just limited to Bernie Kerik. His whole election strategy suffers from poor judgement as well.
As I implied above, I think we’re past the point where anyone really needs to use this against Rudy. But it’s a really good point. This is out there as a really good example of the guy’s judgment. Who sold him on this idea?
Who knew that Mike Huckabee has a state-of-the-art, multi-million call push-polling operation fueling his presidential bid? It is, technically, an independent operation. But one of the premier push-polling operations, Common Sense Issues, who we reported on last year when they were Common Sense Ohio, is going all out for Huckabee in primary states around the country. And they seem to be pulling most or all of their money from existing Huckabee backers.
They made tons of calls in Iowa and New Hampshire. They’re now making calls in Michigan and Florida. And they’ve already made 1 million calls for Huckabee in South Carolina, even though those calls appear to be illegal in the state (the group argues the law should not apply to them).
Bill Clinton: Obama’s candidacy isn’t the “fairy tale”; his Iraq war opposition is.
It is remarkable, or perhaps it’s not so remarkable, how rapidly this punching match over race has escalated between the Clinton and Obama camps. Even calling it that is perhaps controversial in itself.
I’m discussing this with you because it’s quickly become a complicated editorial issue for us to deal with.
It’s genuinely unclear to me how much one side or the other is consciously pushing this, how much it’s escalated based in part on misunderstandings, or whether, in a somewhat related fashion, hyping journalistic accounts has given the engagement a life of its own.
Some of the statements recently attributed to the Clintons have seemed at best awkward in how they’re discussing race and the civil rights movement, others have struck me as unobjectionable statements interpreted in a tendentious fashion.
You can see in our news section we’ve picked up the story just out from The Guardian which quotes some unidentified “Clinton advisor” saying: “If you have a social need, you’re with Hillary. If you want Obama to be your imaginary hip black friend and you’re young and you have no social needs, then he’s cool.”
Now, as I said, I have a bit of a hard time knowing what’s going on here. If this is really the word the Clinton campaign wants its surrogates putting out, they’re really much stupider than I could have imagined. On the other hand, ‘advisor’ is a notoriously slippery phrase that can mean almost anything. Campaigns have hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who in one fashion or another ‘advise’ them. A lot of those people aren’t under any kind of real control. And if a reporter talks to enough of them one of them is bound to say something stupid. On the other hand, you have to rely on the journalist and the news outlet not to send you down the wrong path or give you the sense that this is a Clinton insider rather than just someone spouting off.
Race is an inherently compromising issue in American culture and politics. And some of what I think is happening here is that it is ricocheting in all sorts of directions in this campaign which is about the heart of the Democratic party.
I don’t have any global answer here. This has spiraled pretty far in the last 48 hours. And I’m just now taking stock of it again. Like I said, it’s not completely clear to me the mix of intention, inertia and accident involved. But this is explosive. So we’re going to do the best we can to tell you what’s happening, not to hold anything back but also to be conscious of each step we take as we report on and thus in a real sense relay these increasingly inflammatory statements and reports.
Daniel Gross explains why Mitt is probably going to crash and burn in Michigan.
As you know we keep pretty close tabs on polls here at TPM. And I can report that in our informal reader-email-based poll of readers who think we should come clean with our covert support of Obama and readers who think we should come clear with our secret support of Hillary, the numbers are running at about 50%-50%.