Terry McAuliffe, Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, was all over the cable news channels last night claiming Clinton's 2-to-1 win in West Virginia is proof that she and only she can win the White House for the Democratic Party in November--because of her support from white, working-class voters. More...
An atrocious string of thoroughly unnecessary and completely man-made (or man-caused) equine deaths lengthened this weekend with the Saturday death of a horse named Tigger Too in New Jersey at the Jersey Fresh horse trials. More...
A Barack Obama presidency would cost America's entrepreneurial class dearly. Obama has pledged to lift the current cap on Social Security taxes if he becomes president. He'd get support in that venture from a Democratic-controlled Congress. According to the Social Security Administration's website, this means an additional 15.3 percent tax for self-employed people making more than $102,000 annually. More...
The original Super Tuesday, in the 1988 cycle, was engineered by southern and moderate Democrats with the intention of securing the nomination for a moderate southern candidate in a flurry of southern primaries. It worked that year, but for the other party: George H. W. Bush, after his defining victory in South Carolina (scheduled for the Saturday before Super Tuesday by Lee Atwater), swept the South and won the Republican nomination, while on the Democratic side, Al Gore's five primary wins in the South were matched by Jesse Jackson's five, and Michael Dukakis, winning Florida and Texas, went on to win the party's nomination. More...
The May 6 primaries might go down in history as the deciding factor in why America failed to nominate its first female major-party presidential candidate in 2008. It's hard to see after Tuesday's election results how Sen. Hillary Clinton makes the case that she should be the Democratic nominee. More...
Lost in the turmoil and media coverage of the Democratic race for president is the protest vote being cast against Sen. John McCain in the Republican primaries despite his lock on the nomination. More...
First the press counts her out, then the voters in North Carolina and almost Indiana last night and now Georgetown's fashion set are rejecting Sen. Hillary Clinton, too. We've been following the vote at Ann Hand's Georgetown jewelry store and it appears in the picture above that purchases of the Hillary 2008 pin have flattened at 204, while those for Sen. Barack Obama have surged to 1,015 and also to 462 for Sen. John McCain. No wonder then that the talk of Washington today is not just when Clinton will bow out of the primary campaign but also how bad it will be for the party this fall and maybe even in 2010 if the election fight continues on. More...
The official results show what Friday's papers were predicting: Conservative Boris Johnson has unseated Labor Mayor Ken Livingstone in London. In the multiparty election, Johnson led in first-choice votes 43 percent to 37 percent. Under the rules, the second-choice votes of those who did not vote for either of the first two candidates are added to their totals. This slightly reduced Johnson's margin: Expressed as a percentage of total first- and second-choice votes for the top two candidates, Johnson won 53 percent to 47 percent. By way of comparison, Livingstone led Conservative Steven Norris by 36 percent to 28 percent in first-choice votes in 2004. This map shows the results in each of London's 14 assembly districts. Conservatives elected Assembly members in eight districts, Labor in six. More...
"There is nothing better for the inside of a man than the outside of a horse" is a quote by Winston Churchill often erroneously attributed to Ronald Reagan. But after this weekend's Kentucky Derby, it could be said, "There's nothing worse for the inside or outside of a horse than life on the track." More...
Well, it's not quite a trend. But the victory of center-right candidate Gianni Alemanno in Rome last weekend has apparently been followed up by a victory for Conservative Party candidate Boris Johnson in London. Rome had been governed by center-left mayors since 1993; London has had an elected mayor for only eight years, and until this year no Conservative candidate was a serious contender. The London results are not in as I write, but you can find them at this website. More...
Will Barack Obama's longtime connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright continue to hurt him? Evidence that it will comes from pollster Scott Rasmussen, who finds that only 30 percent of likely voters say Obama denounced Wright because he was outraged, while 58 percent believe he denounced him for political convenience. Only 33 percent believe Obama was surprised by Wright's statements at the National Press Club, while 52 percent say he was not surprised. Some 26 percent say it's very likely that Obama "shares some of Pastor Wright's controversial views about the United States" and 56 percent say it's somewhat likely he does. Only 7 percent of voters and 12 percent of black voters say they share those views. Ouch! These results are more adverse than I would have expected. More...
If you're a political junkie (as am I) you ought to know about or if not, check out this website. It tracks the superdelegate count in the Democratic presidential nomination race. Since the nomination race is over on the GOP side, it's the only "race" in town for numbers addicts. More...
Belarus, a country frequently referred to as the last dictatorship in Europe, says a number of American diplomats have been declared persona non grata and must leave the country. More...
GALILEE REGION, ISRAEL--On May 8, Israel's 60th Independence Day, 80 percent of the country's population--the Jewish citizens--will be celebrating or at least identifying with the holiday. More...
A controversy over a barely controversial issue--Pentagon briefings for military TV pundits--may have landed Defense Secretary Robert Gates in hot water. Word on Capitol Hill is that GOP leadership officials are going to ask that he reinstate the briefings ended after the New York Times blew the whistle on them. More...
Not everybody was pleased with our item yesterday about Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer's belief that the government was spending enough money to unlock the mystery of the honeybee crisis. More...
On Monday, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright spoke at the National Press Club in Washington, with nationwide reverberations. On Tuesday, Barack Obama denounced Wright and his statements. Judging from the talk I've been hearing from Democratic insiders since Wright's Monday speech, Obama did what he had to do. But the problem remains. Obama has now taken two positions on Wright. March 13: No, I cannot disown him. April 29: Yes, I can. Left still unanswered is the question: How can the man we heard deliver that speech in July 2004 about what unites us--in which his strongest line was "in the blue states we worship an awesome God"--how could that Barack Obama have attended the church of that Rev. Jeremiah Wright for 20 years? And not just attended: He and his wife contributed more than $20,000 to the church. It just doesn't add up. It undercuts Obama's very appealing theme of bridging divisions in our society. More...
Sen. Barack Obama's response to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's incendiary appearance on Monday at the National Press Club is not just a day late and a dollar short: It's a month and a half late and a few million dollars short. More...
Here are the Pennsylvania primary results by congressional district. Barack Obama carried two districts, the Philadelphia-based First and Second, by wide margins and three others?the suburban Sixth, the Lancaster-based 16th, and the central Pittsburgh 14th?by narrow margins. Hillary Clinton carried the other 14 districts. More...
Reihan Salam, formerly Ross Douthat's partner on the late theamericanscene.com, takes off from the Democratic primary results and posits the existence (or emergence) of an Anglo-Latino working class. For nearly four decades, enlightened opinion has seen Latinos as "people of color," who will respond to American politics much as blacks have done. All recent experience (and my own The New Americans: How the Melting Pot Can Work Again) suggest this is not so. More...
Here is an excellent post on the exit polls by the estimable Mark Blumenthal of pollster.com. This year the exit polls have been pretty close to the mark in the Republican primaries but have tended to overstate Barack Obama's support in the Democratic primaries. More...
I have been assuming that Indiana's demographics are similar to those of Ohio and Pennsylvania. But I have noted that Barack Obama has been doing better in polls there than he was in those two states, and I have read that Indiana has a younger population. So I decided to compare the 2000 Census Bureau demographics for Indiana with those for Ohio and Pennsylvania. It turns out I was wrong. Here's a table showing, rounded off to the nearest percentage, my calculation of the percentage of 18-and-over residents in the 55 and over, 35--54, and 18--34 age groups in each of these states. More...
The less things change, the more they stay the same. Earlier this month in this space, I wrote about a March "eventing" competition in Florida at a course called Red Hills. At that event, two horses died and one high-level event rider was critically injured because of the artificial difficulty of the course the horses were forced to complete. More...
My recent post noting that Clinton is currently ahead in popular vote (with Michigan and Florida included) has inspired many comments in which many reasonable arguments have been advanced on all sides. One criticism that I should note is that the realclearpolitics.com compilation of the popular vote doesn't credit Obama with the votes cast for "Uncommitted" in Michigan, and that if he is credited with those votes Clinton's current popular vote margin disappears. Probably most, though certainly not all, of the votes cast for "Uncommitted" were intended for Obama (John Edwards was still a live candidate when Michigan voted); reasonable people can argue about how many should be attributed to him. More...
This week, the North Carolina Republican Party posted a controversial ad on its website that linked the state's two Democratic gubernatorial candidates with Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama. Both North Carolina Democrats have endorsed Obama, but the ad extended their connections to Obama's controversial former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. More...
Pats Coach On Cheating Claims(3:12) Head New England Patriots Coach Bill Belichick is breaking his silence over recent claims that this popular NFL team has in fact been video taping rival teams' coaches. Armen Keteyian investigates.
Exclusive: Belichick Talks On Spy-Gate
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