All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

Calling all pachyderms! The Republican Party is looking for a few good men and women.

As Politico reported, there's growing concern among some GOP leaders that controversial commentators and far-right conservatives have hijacked the message.

People like Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin appeal to the base - and you certainly need that base to win elections. But in an age when 42 percent of Americans call themselves Independents - you can't win with just the base, either.

Minority Whip Eric Cantor is calling for more voices in the Republican Party. And Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty says the party needs to be all about addition right now - as the number of declared Republicans hits a 26 year low, according to a poll in the Washington Post.

Before the 2010 midterm elections roll around, Republicans need to get the focus back onto the Big Tent where all are welcome and off the sideshows that are popping up along the party's fringe.

That's a page from my notebook.

I'm Katie Couric, CBS News.

Since 2006, Republicans have lost at least a dozen Senate seats, and more than 50 House seats. They've watched as Barack Obama won the presidency with a popular mandate that no Democrat has seen since Lyndon Johnson.

Amazing, there is now not a single Republican senator on the West Coast, not one Republican congressman from New England. The nation's fastest growing minority group - Latinos - is now the Democrats' fastest growing constituency.

Some strategists are predicting a civil war inside the party of Lincoln, but the real question isn't whether to move left or right but how to move forward, and how to win again on the dominant issue of this election: fixing the economic mess.

A great suggestion came from Gov. Bobby Jindal, a rising Republican star in Louisiana: the party should spend more time thinking about "new ideas and solutions" and less time on political tactics.

Maybe that's one thing all Republicans can agree on.

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The Republican convention is over, and surprisingly enough, the most dramatic part of this convention came not from the acceptance speech of the nominee, John McCain, but from his selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

That has energized a reluctant evangelical Republican base, promising that in the fall they might turn out in greater numbers than thought. It has put the change issue more on the side of the Republicans than we had thought. And it has made the prospect of a female vice president a potential appeal to former Clinton supporters.

However, the historical markers still favor the Democrats. People identify themselves as Democrats more than Republicans by 10 points. But, the outcome of this election is still as hard to predict as any.

Just click on the monitor to hear the rest of Jeff Greenfield's thoughts on the convention.

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Sarah Palin's speech at the Republican National Convention drew a lot of praise. But none sounded quite like what Mo Rocca told Katie last night on her Convention Webcast. You'll want to watch the clip below, but in short, he said he's become "obsessed with" the Palin family … and loved when they all appeared on stage "like the cast of 'Alaska 90210.'"

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Sharyl Attkisson is investigative correspondent for CBS News.

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Back in 1972, a Republican convention corporate contributions scandal shook things up. Executives from the International Telephone and Telegraph Corp. had allegedly met secretly with Nixon administration officials – and offered to underwrite the Republican convention. In return, the Justice Department was allegedly urged to "go easy" on ITT in a pending anti-trust lawsuit. ITT ended up with what was widely regarded as a favorable out-of-court settlement.

To eliminate the appearance of tainted funding, election law was changed. The idea was to provide public funds for the conventions and limit corporate contributions. But things haven't really worked out that way. Here's why.

Corporations are still allowed to donate money through convention "host committees" (committees that presumably help promote the locality that's holding the convention). But the "host committee" exemption has become a giant loophole exploited by corporations seeking influence – and politicians eager to provide it. Corporate contributions have soared from just $1 million in 1980 to an estimated $112 million for 2008.

Tonight on the CBS Evening News our Follow the Money story will talk about what some corporate donors "get" in exchange for their generous contributions ...

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We've been busy preparing for the Democratic and Republican National conventions in Denver and St. Paul (don't call it Minneapolis!). And as we at CBSNews.com and CNET.com are partnering to bring you live, exclusive Web coverage of the conventions, we'd like to enlist your help.

Of course, there's something in it for you, too. This is your opportunity to ask Katie and the CBS News Political Team the questions you want answered about the conventions, the candidates ... or anything about the politics of the moment you can dream up.

After the live Webcast of the special on-air coverage from 10 to 11 p.m. EDT, Katie will host a Web-only show where she host a roundtable - armed with your questions.

Want to be part of the action? Head over to the DNC and RNC Convention Cast pages to submit your questions. You can also watch Katie explain this all a bit more below:

The GOP candidates were at it again last night. Vaughn Ververs has a blow by blow analysis:

Tuesday night's feisty debate saw several sharp exchanges as veiled criticisms replaced by direct language, and motives questioned, as well as several sharp exchanges. And while there were no clear-cut winners, there were memorable moments and perhaps one loser, at least in the eyes of many in the audience.

Read on to find out who that was, and what made the debate so "feisty."

Anybody see the debate?

Our own Vaughn Ververs did, and offers some Friday morning quarter-backing right here. Vaughn opines:

As with the Democratic debate last week, almost all of the lesser-known candidates proved up to the task but none were able to break out of the pack. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee sounded eloquent when discussing the issue of life.

“When hikers on Mt. Hood get lost, we move heaven and Earth to go find them. When coal miners in West Virginia are trapped in a mine, we go after them because we celebrate life. This life issue is not insignificant.”

Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, a fierce abortion opponent, allowed that his party could support a nominee who differs on the issue, saying, “I believe in the Ronald Reagan principle, that somebody that's with you 80 percent of the time is not your enemy, that's your friend and that's your ally."

It was that kind of evening for the most part. Even candidates who were thought to have taken indirect shots at their colleagues suddenly clammed up, claiming they had been speaking in generalities. This was an opening sparring session, featuring a few light jabs bit no hard hooks.

Meantime, elsewhere in the blogosphere, this gal thinks it's all too much, too soon, and is a little (okay, a lot) irked at one of the questions, about Bill Clinton:

“This is the question you ask? Okay, well, perhaps…considering President Clinton took very little aggressive action throughout the 1990’s - say, from the first WTC bombing in 1993, to the attack on the USS COLE in 2000 - to curtail the growth and activities of OBL and Al Qaeda, and since President Clinton was the man who, in 1998, told us - along with his entire administration - that Saddam Hussein had WMD and would certainly someday use them…perhaps it’s finally time to let go of Bill Clinton, and look ahead instead of back?

Surf around. Everybody, it seems, has an opinion.

The Republican candidates for president are meeting in Los Angeles for their first debate tonight -- 18 months before the election.

But this might be a good opportunity to tune in, not tune out.

Click the monitor to find out why.

Last week, it was the Democrats in South Carolina; this week, it's the Republicans in California.

The 10 GOP contenders for president -- yes, there are 10 of them -- will be debating tonight at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley. Reagan, like Hamlet's father, will be lurking nearby -- casting a considerable shadow.

Lately, the library has been in the news for other reasons: a small treasure trove of diaries kept by the late president are finally being published. They offer a glimpse into his thinking, and his relationships with cabinet members (not always cordial) and family members(much like his relationships with cabinet members.)

Yesterday, the Washington Post offered some tantalizing tidbits, culled from a Vanity Fair article:

The earnest entries are marked by a spare writing style in which Reagan reduced complicated matters to their essence. In 1982, when he accepted Haig's resignation from the Cabinet and Haig said they had had disagreements over foreign policy, Reagan wrote: "Actually the only disagreement was over whether I made policy or the Sec. of State did."

A 1981 entry on Cuban leader Fidel Castro said: "Intelligence reports say he Castro is very worried about me. I'm very worried that we can't come up with something to justify his worrying."

The former actor was well aware of his public image, and tweaked the Fourth Estate after he deliberately reversed the order of the opening sentences of his welcome at the 1984 Olympics: "The press having a copy of the lines as written are gleefully tagging me with senility & inability to learn my lines."

When his former chief of staff, Donald Regan, disclosed that Nancy Reagan had consulted an astrologer for advice on her husband's travel schedule, the president remained in denial:

"The press have a new one thanks to Don Regan's book. We make decisions on the basis of going to Astrologers. The media are behaving like kids with a new toy -- never mind that there is no truth to it."

As the 10 GOP candidates line up for their moment in the spotlight tonight, most would like to inherit the Reagan mantle. Or at least be deemed "Reaganesque." If anyone still wonders what exactly that means, I suspect those diaries explain it better than anyone else could.