All Blog Posts from Horserace

[Arden Farhi of the CBS News digital team sat down with Craig Robinson, the head basketball coach for Oregon State University and brother to incoming First Lady Michelle Obama to talk about the 2008 presidential campaign. Here’s his report:]

When first-term senator Barack Obama announced his campaign for the presidency of the United States way back in February of 2007, critics called him green; that he wasn't ready for a grueling campaign or the Oval Office.

One of those critics was his wife, says Craig Robinson, the President-Elect's brother in law.

"When I first heard about Barack running for president, I might have been one of the few people in my family that was all for it," says Robinson.

"My sister and my mom were against it," Robinson says, referring to Michelle Obama and their mom Marian Robinson. "Barack asked me to talk to my sister and my mom because there was no way he could undertake something of this magnitude without having both of them on board."

Robinson has spent much of the last year campaigning on behalf of his sister's husband, holding events in Oregon, speaking at the Democratic National Convention and appearing on stage at the Obama victory rally in Chicago on election night.

The campaign was a family affair, says Robinson. "We all agreed to help out with this, we just didn't realize he would win."

Last week I sat down with Robinson at a hotel in Washington, DC. Robinson is in his first year as head men's basketball coach at Oregon State University and takes over a team that did not win a single game in its conference last year.

There’s a new controversy surrounding Al Franken in Minnesota, the front-runner for the Democratic Senate nomination to take on Republican Sen. Norm Coleman in the fall. The comedian and Saturday Night Live alumnus is taking heat for an article entitled "Porn-O-Rama!" that he wrote in Playboy magazine eight years ago.

Democratic Rep. Betty McCollum, who supported Franken’s rival until he dropped out of the race, said in an interview with the Associated Press that she was shocked by the article and that she was worried about other Democrats on the ballot with a candidate "who has pornographic writings that are indefensible."

"As a parent and an aunt, and talking to other parents, people are very concerned about the type of Internet use that's out there, and how it has a potentially harmful effect on children," McCollum said. "Sexually explicit material is one of the things that parents are very concerned about, and want to make sure that they're steering their children away from."

Democratic Reps. Keith Ellison and Tim Walz also expressed concerns about the article, but none of them so far have called on Franken to step aside.

At the state GOP convention on Friday, Coleman also took a swipe at Franken. According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Coleman said that "eight years ago I was making the streets of St. Paul safer and he was writing porn."

Franken’s spokesman responded to the uproar: "Al understands, and the people of Minnesota understand, the difference between what a satirist does and what a senator does.”

Idaho Senate: Voters in Idaho on Tuesday picked nominees to battle for the seat being vacated by retiring Republican Sen. Larry Craig -- famous for an incident in a airport bathroom last summer that led to him announcing his resignation (and then withdrawing that resignation a few weeks later before it took affect). On the Republican side, Lt. Gov. Jim Risch defeated several lesser known challengers with 65 percent of the vote. He will face off against former Democratic Rep. Larry LaRocco, who won with 72 of the vote. Risch has defeated LaRocco twice before, including the 2006 election for lieutenant governor. He is favored again this time in the rematch.

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Senator Larry Craig may not do well in pressure situations but he’s certainly learned the art of stubbornness. When arrested for allegedly soliciting sex from a police office in a Minneapolis airport bathroom, Craig pleaded guilty because, he said, of the pressure he felt to keep the incident quiet. When the incident became public last month and instantly became a national punchline, Craig announced that he “intended” to resign at the end of September. Now that his legal challenge to the guilty plea has been turned down by a judge, Craig insists he will stay through the end of his term.

Yesterday’s rebuff of Craig’s bid to have his guilty plea reversed had been seen as the trigger for his resignation. But it may have gained him the extra time he needs to fight on, as he alluded to in his post-ruling statement. If his plea would have been revoked and reversed, Craig would then be exposed to a trial that would rehash the entire incident. Now, he can continue to “explore” his “additional legal options” while his fellow Republicans are put into a position of ratcheting up the pressure with public ethics hearings or letting Craig continue on.

A resignation is what GOP leaders sought to put the incident behind them. Now that it appears unlikely, they’ll have to calculate the potential further damage that may be incurred by the spectacle of going after one of their own. Perhaps Craig decided to call the bluff. In many ways, the damage has been done. The bathroom humor, pardon the pun, would remain whether Craig does or not. Do Republicans want to keep the story on front-pages with public hearings?


Wearing The Flag: CBSNews.com’s David Miller looks at the latest flag flap: On Thursday the AP noted that Barack Obama doesn't wear the American flag lapel pin that became a must-have accessory in Washington after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. According to the report, Obama told KCRG-TV in Cedar Rapids, Iowa that he prefers to express his patriotism through his ideas rather than through a pin.

Is Obama taking a risky stand? Maybe not so much.

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