Entries for April 24, 2007

Senior Editor Dan Gilgoff reports:

An adviser to Barack Obama's presidential campaign says the Democratic senator from Illinois is increasingly looking to South Carolina as his best shot at guaranteeing a victory in next year's early primary states.

The Obama campaign, according to the adviser, believes whichever candidate hopes to win next year's Democratic nomination will need to score a number of second-place finishes in the early primary caucus states--which are expected to include Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, in that order and all in January--and at least one first-place finish in those states.

The campaign believes it has an especially strong shot in South Carolina because Obama, who would be the nation's first African-American president, stands to appeal to blacks, who may constitute up to half of voters in the state's Democratic primary. Obama and Democratic rival Hillary Clinton have both stepped up their African-American outreach efforts in recent weeks.

A troika of major political websites--Yahoo News, Slate, and the Huffington Post--announced yesterday that they will jointly sponsor a pair of online presidential debates for the Democratic and Republican nominees. PBS host Charlie Rose will moderate.

In an interview with the Houston Chronicle, Yahoo's news and information services chief, Scott Moore, wasted no time comparing this innovation to how television transformed the presidential debates in the 1960 election, when a more sprightly, attractive John F. Kennedy took advantage of the media in his debates with Richard M. Nixon.

But as we have previously written here, the real penetration of the Internet remains unproved, despite the legions of evangelists for the "Netroots" movement. High-speed Internet connection adoption is still low in many rural areas, and, though it is growing quickly, the medium is still far less widespread than television. (TVs outnumbered humans in the United States in the latest Nielsen study.)

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has set up a meeting with Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas, who has accused Gonzales of lying to him about plans to replace a U.S. attorney in his state.

At last Thursday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the controversial firings of eight U.S. attorneys, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham urged Gonzales to reach out to his colleague to assuage Pryor's anger. Pryor has accused Gonzales of lying about whether the attorney general was committed to submitting for Senate confirmation a replacement U.S. attorney for Arkansas.

Pryor's communications director, Michael Teague, told U.S. News that Gonzales's office called Pryor late Monday and scheduled a meeting for Wednesday morning. Teague says he is not sure whether that will make any dent in Pryor's views that Gonzales should resign as attorney general.

--Chitra Ragavan

The brother of slain soldier Pat Tillman told a congressional committee today that he believes the U.S. military deliberately tried to conceal the fact that the former football player was killed by friendly fire.

See U.S. News & World Report's original piece on Tillman's death here.

Video: Tillman's Brother Charges Military

Whispers Editor Paul Bedard brings us this item:

There are at least four new battleground states emerging to challenge Ohio and Florida for that title in the upcoming presidential election, according to Democratic Party sources.

Key among the new four: Virginia, which elected a Democratic senator and governor recently and which is quickly becoming less of a red state and more of a purple one. The other states on the Democratic list: Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico.

In fact, the emergence of the Mountain States region was a factor in the party's choosing to hold its presidential nominating convention in Denver next summer. Party officials said they expect to expand operations in those four states and to have an extensive get-out-the-vote organization ready in time for the party's presidential nominee to tap.

This morning's top stories:

• A suicide bomber struck a military patrol base northeast of Baghdad today, killing nine U.S. servicemen and wounding 20 more.
• A congressional committee begins hearings today into possible coverup of the events surrounding the friendly-fire death of soldier and former National Football League star Pat Tillman.
• In case you missed it: As we reported yesterday afternoon, Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor, a Democrat, has yet to receive a call from embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, even though Gonzales promised to do so at last Thursday's congressional hearing.
• Geologists exploring a coal mine in Illinois have discovered a trove of fossil data from an ancient rain forest.
• After nine Palestinians died in fighting with Israel over the weekend, Hamas militants have fired several rockets into Israel today in a sign that the fragile cease-fire could be endangered.