-
Will Palin Stand Up to Scrutiny?
Tweet Share on Facebook August 29, 2008 Comment (132)DENVER—James Carville told reporters last week that his advice for potential presidents is to pick a vice presidential candidate who will make the opposition strategists retch with worry. Well, he said it more pungently than that, but you get the idea.
Sarah Palin fulfills that criterion. The poor Obama folk—they had about 12 hours to enjoy and rest, after putting on a successful and historic convention, and they get up this morning to this stomach-churning bit of news.
-
Obama's Advisers Before the Big Speech
Tweet Share on Facebook August 29, 2008 Comment (1)DENVER—Obama's campaign aides seemed tense and weary in the hours before his speech, but expressed confidence that they had done as best they could in Denver, given the list of tasks they faced: to introduce Obama and his family to the country, to get Bill and Hillary Clinton on board in a show of Democratic unity, to highlight the contrast between the two candidates and to convey a compelling message of change.
-
Peggy on the Convention
Tweet Share on Facebook August 28, 2008 Comment (3)DENVER—It is not too much of a simplification to say that, politically speaking, if you grew up as an ethnic Catholic kid in New York and its suburbs in the Fifties and the Sixties, you were destined to end up one of two ways.
-
Democrats and Labor: A Beautiful Friendship
Tweet Share on Facebook August 28, 2008 Comment (4)DENVER—The cash-strapped convention here got an eleventh hour bailout from the American Federation of Teachers and AFSCME, the national public employees union.
The news reinforced Republican talking points (that the Democrats are tools of parasitic government workers, you know) but also served as a reminder of historic events from 100 years ago.
It was at a Democratic convention, in Denver in 1908, that the American Federation of Labor broke with precedent and endorsed a presidential candidate: William Jennings Bryan.
-
Barack Obama's Mission: Show Some Heart
Tweet Share on Facebook August 28, 2008 Comment (2)The candidate of cool has a cardinal mission when he accepts the Democratic Party's nomination for president before a cheering stadium crowd tonight.
Barack Obama has completed his arduous conquest of Democratic hearts; now he needs to reveal his own.
That's what I'm reporting in The Denver Post in the morning.
As Obama prepares to take the stage, Americans are telling pollsters two things. They are ready for change, but unsure of the course he wants to steer. They don't know what moves him, and they don't know that he understands and cares about their lives.
-
The Hillary Clinton Effect
Tweet Share on Facebook August 27, 2008 Comment (4)DENVER—I just filed my analysis for the morning's Denver Post, in which I note that "there is no denying that the "handling" of Bill and Hillary has been a significant distraction for the Obama team at this convention."
But will it matter in November?
-
The Democrats' Real Opportunity in the West
Tweet Share on Facebook August 26, 2008 Comment (2)DENVER—We're here in Colorado because Howard Dean chose to stage his convention in a Western city to expand the electoral map, by sending a signal to the region's voters that Democrats want their support.
Will it work?
Dean's lasting legacy as Democratic chairman will surely be his "50-state strategy"—a once-controversial tactic of spending money to put Democratic boots on the ground all across the country, even in red states like Indiana, North Carolina, or Alaska, so that the party could capitalize on unforeseen opportunities.
The Obama team seems to share his thinking. Obama stole a march on Hillary Clinton by winning delegates in virtually uncontested caucus states like Idaho and Colorado, while her campaign focused on titans like Ohio.
And now, as they face John McCain in the general election, the Obama campaign seems intent on growing the number of battleground states.
-
Obama Moves Past McCain on Leadership—A Polling Glitch or Genuine Trend
Tweet Share on Facebook August 26, 2008 Comment (41)Polling anomaly or unnoted harbinger? One intriguing result from Sunday's Washington Post/ABC poll (which showed Barack Obama maintaining a narrow, 4 percent lead among likely voters) was the Democratic candidate's vault over John McCain on the question of leadership.
For the first time all spring and summer, when voters answered the question "Who is the stronger leader?" Obama beat his Republican foe.
The reversal is pretty dramatic. In March, those surveyed chose McCain as the stronger leader by a 53-40 margin. In June, McCain had a 47-44 lead. But in the August poll, Obama beats McCain by five points, 49-44. That is an 18-point switch in four months.
-
White Voters and the Fall of the Democratic Party
Tweet Share on Facebook August 25, 2008 Comment (8)DENVER—The Democrats, once the party of the common man, have forfeited that status in recent years. These days, the party is too often seen as a voice for elitists who undermine American families with confiscatory taxes, social engineering, loose moral discipline, overregulation, and timidity abroad.
In a 20-page special section in the Denver Post on Sunday, I traced the course of the Democratic Party's rise and fall as champion of the little guy, and its hopes to recapture that mantle in the future.
-
Why I Love John McCain But May Not Vote for Him
Tweet Share on Facebook August 25, 2008 Comment (24)I first met John McCain in the early 1990s, when he joined with John Kerry and other Vietnam veterans in Congress in a successful effort to extinguish the POW-MIA myth, which was exploiting military families with the false hope that the Vietnamese were secretly holding their loved ones captive in the Southeast Asian jungles.
