Tag: presidency

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Politics Politics Feature

MAD AS HELL: Political U-Turns in New Hampshire, GPS-Style

CREDIT: Cheri DelBrocco

MANCHESTER, N.H. –No doubt, the Global Positioning
System is one of the greatest inventions to come along in a long time. That
voice that tells us to turn left, right, and pull a U-turn is so reassuring.
Last night, I would have been as lost as a little lamb in New Hampshire snow
without it. Driving the highway from Nashua to Manchester seemed less
stressful knowing that a satellite signal in the sky had figured out a way to
keep me from getting lost by keeping me on the right path to my destination.

The double header debate on the campus of St. Anselm
College gave voters a chance to hear the candidates from both parties. It was
cold and snow was piled two feet high, but inside the Dana Center for the
Humanities, the candidates were getting hot. In this state, whose motto is
Live Free or Die, it’s do or die for Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton.

Clearly, not only Governor Romney and Senator Clinton but
all the candidates have become hyper- aware of a new fact since the Iowa
Caucus. A new word, the word, has emerged like a bull’s-eye on the
elective radar: change. Folks in New Hampshire are using a kind of political
GPS to determine which candidate will make the quickest U-turn on the policies
and actions of the last seven years. Most want a change in almost every
policy and aspect of government, both foreign and domestic. Tina, the 20 year
old student/waitress at Chili’s Restaurant in Nashua summed it up this way,
“I’m not sure who I am voting for yet, but I am looking for the one who is
going to pull a fast 180.”

But before the primary, the people here will have to
navigate through something else: a monster spin machine. After the debates
last night, the spinning was so full tilt, it felt like I was watching a
broken down Maytag with too many towels. Every candidate had a spin-doctor and
the stampede of cameras, recorders, mikes, and lights was like the stampeding
buffalo scene in Dances with Wolves.

Elizabeth Edwards entered the room looking energized as
she passionately discussed her husband’s debate performance. She predictably
claimed he had hit a home run and emphasized his “you cannot ‘nice’ people to
death” comment, an obvious jab at the call of both Obama and Richardson for
dialogue with Pakistan’s Musharraf and other leaders in the Middle East.
Assisting her was former Michigan congressman David Bonior, who pointed out
Edwards’ debate commitment to end all combat missions in Iraq and to close all
bases there in the first year of his presidency. Joe Trippi, former manager
of the Howard Dean campaign, was putting additional frosting on the Edwards
cake by claiming Edwards would definitely carry the day on Tuesday.

Senator Obama had his own spin game going through the
medium of campaign strategist David Axelrod, who immediately declared Obama to
be the clear winner and forecast a sunnier outcome in the New Hampshire
primary for this candidate than the win last week in Iowa.

The room was also filled to the rafters with heavy
hitters such as Joe Scarborough, Joe Klein, Bay Buchanan, and Jeff Greenfield,
each trying to out-spin and out-opinionate the other. This went on for well
over an hour, at which time the media fanned out to various networks and local
stations to broadcast their latest chestnuts

In a little over 24 hours, the good people of the Granite
State have got their work cut out for them. The die is cast and the call for a
change in direction is resonating loud and clearly. For now, we can only
speculate on whose voice we might be hearing when the nation turns on its
political Tom Tom in November.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Elective Affinities: Southern Hopefuls Huckabee and Thompson

CREDIT: jb

IN TRANSIT FROM DES MOINES TO MANCHESTER –On their last day of campaigning for the Iowa caucuses and with the New Hampshire and South Carolina tests looming, the
two bona fide Southern hopefuls in the Republican presidential field had
personas that meshed in important particulars and diverged in others.

Ditto with their destinies: Former Arkansas governor Mike
Huckabee famously finished first in GOP ranks, while ex-Tennessee senator Fred
Thompson managed a distant third. That’s the divergence; the mesh is that
neither is out of the woods, but both are still in the game.

No sooner had Huckabee finished off his up-from-nothing
miracle in Iowa than such bell cows of the Christian right as Richard Viguerie
were trying to disown him. Not for doctrinal heresies of the religious sort but
for deviation from the tax-cutting priorities of the Republican Party elite.
Viguerie, who a generation ago assisted greatly in fusing the social and
economic conservatisms of the Reagan era, essentially accused Huckabee – an
economic populist who dares to assail “Wall Street Republicans” — of sawing off
the economic leg of that coalition.

This refrain was promptly parroted by that cockatee of the
airwaves, Rush Limbaugh – prompting a brief back-and-forth between himself and
the candidate, who, unlike so many other name Republicans, doesn’t mind pulling
on such feathers.

Huckabee is a threat to an established order, and, just as
establishment Democrats, assisted by the establishment media, were able to kill
off Howard Dean’s hopes in 2004, so might the GOP hierarchy do likewise to those
of the Republican heresiarch – his first-place finish in Iowa notwithstanding.

As for Thompson, the line on him for several months has
been that the actor/politician from Tennessee had fallen way short of the
enormous ballyhoo of his advance billing and long ago flunked his audition.

Indeed, Thompson has played the role assigned him every way
but right. He has looked haggard, fumbled his lines, and done everything a
starring player shouldn’t. Coming from the same moderate tradition (and stable)
as fellow Tennessee Republicans Howard Baker and Lamar Alexander, he was billed
as a conservative’s conservative – the kind who could put to rest the fears of
Viguerie and Limbaugh and suchlike who see George W. Bush’s house of cards – and
thereby the party’s generational dominance of American affairs – hopelessly
aquiver.

However late in the day, Thompson has seemingly found his
motivation for such a role and learned to play it. That was the conclusion one
could draw from the barn-burner he delivered to a packed room at the West Des
Moines Marriott on Thursday morning, the day of the caucuses. So strong a
showing it was, so animated the reception from his audience that it seemed
obvious that Thompson, like one of those Miss America alternates, was a
potential standby in case of trouble with the GOP frontrunner.

Any frontrunner – be it Huckabee or the resurgent
John McCain or Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani or whoever. All he had to do was
survive by fnishing third in Iowa – which, by the skin of those thespian
pearly-whites, he did.

As if in recognition of their doppelganger status, both men
ended their appeals to voters in Iowa with overlapping thematics: “

Thompson: “This is a country where a country boy or
girl in Tennessee or Iowa or anywhere else can grow up and have a pretty good
chance at the American dream.

Huckabee: “If American can elect me as president, if
means that the dreams of this country can come true for anybody.

Thompson: “I’ve got a 100-percent pro-life voting
record. I’ve always been pro-life. That’s why so many right-to-life
organizations have endorsed me.

Huckabee: “I’m pro-life. It’s not a position that
the pollsters gave me last week. I’ve been saying this all my life. Check me
out. I’m not pro-life because I’m political. I’m political because I’m
pro-life.”

Thompson: “What you see is what you get I don’t
think I’ve ever been accused of flip-flopping or choosing my positions on issues
to win an election.”

Huckabee: “You need to believe that someone is
telling you the truth, who’ll be honest with you We need a president who
believes something and will do what he believes.”

Thompson: “Our best days are still before us.”

Huckabee: “I want the best generation to be then one
that hasn’t been born yet”

Thompson: “We need to unite as Republicans and reach
out and get some independents and Reagan Democrats.”

Huckabee: “We need to have [with us] not just a
Republican Party but we need a country.”

Thompson:Tonight is important…We’ve got to show them Let’s go out and shock
the world.

Huckabee: Tonight we can make a statement heard all
over the world. Your grandchildren will be saying, were you there that
night that guy nobody had ever heard of won the presidency?

And in fact: If Thompson recovers from his long limbo in
the presidential race and becomes his party’s candidate of last resort, he will
indeed shock the world. For that matter, if Huckabee can continue riding
his current star and build on his triumph in Iowa to be the nominee, that outcome,
too, will resound all over the world.

To repeat: There are differences between the men and differences
between the candidacies. That is the very point. Only one of them could have said this on
Thursday: “The big-government, left-wing, high-taxes, weak-on-security
Democratic Party is just salivating about taking the reins and the power just so
they can kinda roll to a welfare state. And we’re not going to let that happen”

That was Thompson the D.A., of course, heaping on the red meat, knowing what
his role is now. Huckabee, the ex-preacher, is smoother, milder, in a curious way genuinely ecumencial. When he jammed with a local rock band in Hennick on his first
day in New Hampshire after the Iowa vote, he ended up playing bass with evident gusto on “Put a
Little Love in Your Heart” and even on the old to-the-barricades stomper from Creedence, “Fortunate Son.”
He, too, knows what his role is.

Watching what happens to either of them from now on is
going to be good theater.

(Flyer political editor Jackson Baker, having followed the presidential-campaign circus out of Iowa, continues his reporting from New Hampshire for the next few days.)

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

American Gladiators: More Notes on the Iowa Caucus Round

DES MOINES — It will be said – all-purpose scofflaw
Christopher Hitchens had already said it on the eve of the caucuses – that the
results in Iowa could not be trusted because they were not the usual kind of
one-man, one-vote suffrage and because the various candidates’ camps had offered
inducements to supporters. Free rides to the caucus sites, modest souvenir
goodies, things like that.

Hitchens should have spent Thursday night in Cedar Falls,
the northeast Iowa sister city to Waterloo, where Leigh Bailey Kroeger
(disclaimer: my niece) presided over Democrats caucusing at Ward 3, Precinct 2.
“It was like a freight train,” she said of the teeming turnout for Barack Obama.
They were the lion’s share of the record 258 caucusers that showed up, and it
was obvious nobody baited the Illinois senator’s adherents to come, and that
nothing could have kept them from coming (though even the weather, clear
and only modestly cold by mid-winter Iowa standards, put up little resistance).

Democratic caucuses in Iowa are famous for the
horse-trading that goes on mid-way when lower-rung candidates fail to get the
necessary 15 percent share of the turnout to remain “viable” and their
supporters are free to join one of the other candidates’ camps.
Normally, there’s a lot of pleading and cajoling. Not so Thursday night. The
Obama people made it clear they didn’t need to get down on bended knee, and the
designated representatives of Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, for their part,
just couldn’t make the sale.

“It was more like an American Gladiator contest than the
usual caucus give-and -take,” said Kroeger.

Hence, there was much less changing sides than usual,
although Kroeger herself, a Biden supporter, organized a modest switch-over to
Hillary Clinton. “She was trailing way behind Edwards, and I like all three of
the top three, so I thought it would be appropriate to keep them as close
together as possible.”

In the end, all that did was give Clinton two delegates to
go with Edwards’ two. Obama had a comfortably disproportionate five.

Talk about a “coalition of the willing!” Obama’s,
incidentally, while youth-oriented to some degree, was made up almost entirely
of white-bread middle-class Iowans – a rebuke in advance to any notion that his
candidacy depends on – or is even appreciably predicated on – a black, urban
constituency.

Most of the pundits and the established media seem to grasp
that – though they haven’t escaped their census-takers’ mentality nearly so well
in the case of Republican winner Mike Huckabee. Only Pat Buchanan, of the
talking heads on TV Thursday night, seemed to understand the obvious – that much
of Huckabee’s vote came measurably from his message of economic populism, aimed
at the country’s worker bees and those familiar, as he once said, with “the grub
of the earth on their hands.”

New Hampshire has its share of those as well, its different urban-Eastern
demographics and its straight-out primary system notwithstanding, and Huckabee
has at least a fair chance of holding up his end there, too, against rivals Mitt
Romney, John McCain, and Fred Thompson. Rudy Giuliani is still AWOL, and anti-war
libertarian Ron Paul is a wild card. As for Obama the freight train – the trick
for Clinton and Edwards is just to stay close enough to keep the game in play –
lest the game simplify itself too quickly to American Gladiator. Singular.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Smashing Victories by “Unorthodox” Candidates Obama and Huckabee

CREDIT: jb

DES MOINES, IA –“They’re all a bunch of goops,” said the
check-out lady at QuikTrip [sic], the Interstate 80 truck stop that doubles as a
passing-good deli. Meaning politicians. And someone suggested to her that this
was exactly why Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mike Huckabee had just won
their party’s caucuses in Iowa so handily.

Neither is the same old goop. A mixed-marriage
son of Kenya and Kansas on the one hand. A Baptist preacher with a yen for
populist economics on the other. Each articulate to a preternatural degree.
Each appealing, both overtly and by their very beings, to the political
crossover vote. Each defeating his main opponent by the margin of 9 percent.

Each an example of the improbable proving
inevitable, in victor Obama’s phrase.

“We are one nation. We are one people. And our
time for change has come,” the Democratic victor said, in a speech that touched
so many bases and was said so well that it put to shame his 2004 convention
speech – the one that put the then new senator from Illinois on the map.

Yes, Obama won the “youth” vote
— .57 percent of the under-30’s – and Huckabee got the evangelicals – 45
percent of a base that, in Iowa, amounted to 60 percent of caucus-goers overall.
But both are – how to say it? – bigger than that. And each made a point of
talking up inclusiveness as the foundation of their Iowa victories and of the
election to come and the political era that comes after it.

To be sure, Hillary Clinton has
too deep a war chest and too deep a bench, organizationally, to bow out. One
remembers longtime Clinton retainer James Carville’s cry when the Monica
Lewinsky scandal threatened to overwhelm Bill Clinton’s presidency: “This is wah!”
he shouted out in full South Loos-iana Cajunese. Whereupon he – and the Clintons – fetched up the ordnance to win
that war.

Hillary will try again. But,
beyond the fact that she’s up against a man who could be a generational
phenomenon, she has also to contend with the second-place finisher in the
Democratic race, former senator John Edwards, who has so unabashedly talked about “corporate greed” and promised
what Republicans like to call “class war.”

“On to New Hampshire,” vowed
Edwards to a turnaway crowd at the Renaissance-Savery Hotel in downtown Des
Moines. And what that meant was spelled out afterward by the candidate’s chief
economic-policy advisor, Leo Hindery: “We beat the Clinton machine. And we’ll
beat it again,” he said. No mention of Obama.

And Huckabee had left no doubt in
the last few days of campaigning, nor in his speech to his throng Thursday
night, that his pending triumph over former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney
was a victory of ordinary folks over the elite, of truth over dissembling, and
of will over money. He never tired of pointing out that Romney out-spent him
“20-to-one,” and it was obviously his former fellow governor – and onetime
moderate turned conservative exemplar — that he meant when he used words like
“phony” and “pretender” on the stump.

Speaking of exemplars, the
apparent third-place finisher among Republicans, former Tennessee senator Fred
Thompson, materialized as something of a conservative firebrand Thursday
morning in a barn-burning speech to a packed room at a West Des Moines hotel.
For a change this campaign year, he was focused, intense, and capable of a sense
of humor (he was seen so frequently in the movies, he said, because “they
need[ed] somebody who was big and worked cheap”).

Both Thompson and his longtime
friend John McCain, the given-up-for-dead onetime frontrunner who has surged
again, finished in a virtual dead heat for third place in Iowa, and each has
thereby won a ticket to New Hampshire. McCain, a possible winner there, has
gotten most of the attention, but Thompson is a legitimate substitute either for
Huckabee, should he falter, or for McCain, if the Republican establishment
proves unreceptive to the maverick hero again, as it did in 2000.

“You have done what the cynics said we couldn’t
do. You have done what New Hampshire can do in five days,” said Obama Thursday
night, looking ahead. As for Huckabee, he’ll hope to score well in New
Hampshire, but it’s more likely that he’ll be looking at South Carolina later in
January, to finish off Romney – and whomever else is still out there, including
McCain, with whom he, too, like Thompson, still has a mutual-admiration-society
relationship.

One way in which pundits are still
underestimating Huckabee is in concentrating so totally on his evangelical
persuasion and skimming over, or ignoring altogether, his populism. “Republicans
have economic concerns,” Huckabee stressed Thursday night, and he didn’t mean
the high-bracket tax-cut crowd. He talked instead about working families
struggling to pay for gasoline at the pump.

As Obama said, “People are looking for someone
who is willing to say the unorthodox – and [for] authenticity.” Or, as a
still-game Edwards put it, “One thing is clear from the results tonight. The
status quo lost and change won.”

Indeed so. And there is more to come.

(Flyer political editor Jackson Baker will be
reporting regularly from Iowa and New Hampshire for the next few days.)

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

GOP Candidates Slam Huckabee on Sunday Talk Shows

The Washington Post does a weekly roundup of the Sunday morning political talkshows. This week, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee was getting hit from all sides. Tennessee’s Fred Thompson fired a salvo, and so did Mitt Romney.

From the Post: Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, surging in the polls for the GOP presidential nomination, faced criticism by two rivals yesterday.

Fred D. Thompson, a former senator from Tennessee, said, “Liberal is the only word that comes to mind, when he was governor.”

On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Thompson criticized Huckabee for his positions on illegal immigration, tax policy and Cuba, and for his belief that the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should be shut down.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney criticized Huckabee for a recent Foreign Affairs article in which he called the Bush administration’s foreign policy “arrogant.”

“Mike Huckabee owes the president an apology,” Romney said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“I think he needs to read the article. It would really help if he would do that. Because if he did, he would see that there’s no apology necessary to the president,” Huckabee responded on CNN’s “Late Edition.”

For more, see the Post‘s website.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Here’s the thing about our friend Tim Sampson, who fills this space most weeks: He knows what he’s talking about. He reads all about the politicians, forms detailed opinions, then writes his columns secure in the knowledge that he is well informed. You’d think that’s a good thing, but the problem is so many of the rest of us are completely uninformed and therefore don’t fully understand what he’s talking about. Although I have figured out that he stays pretty pissed off.

Yes, I am one of the deliberately unaware. There may have been a time when the whole politics thing seemed groovy to me and I kept up to date, but those days ended sometime around President Clinton’s Hummer-Gate. All of those old white guys getting squeamish while trying to make political hay made me find other ways to keep entertained. I’ve been very busy deciphering the instructions to my new cappuccino-maker. Hours of my life have been filled laboring to teach my cats tricks. This is important work, people.

Still, I try to read Tim’s column because he’s an old friend. In fact, the dissolute misanthrope was once my boss. (Wrap your head around what that was like.) Now, I open the Flyer and wade my way through his screed, often baffled at who the players are and what their agenda may be. Tim knows his local politics, and there, I’ve got nothing. There are a whole lot of Fords, and they seem to get folks awfully riled up, but I don’t like getting riled up. We’ve had the same mayor for a really long time, and whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing isn’t for me to say.

On the national front, as far as I can determine, the Republicans are apparently going to run Fred Thompson, Rudolph Giuliani, or the Mormon guy who doesn’t want to always be referred to as the Mormon guy. I understand his wishes on this, but the only name I have for him is the Mormon guy. I will give him this: He has majestic hair. If we elected presidents solely on their sartorial splendor, he’d already be measuring for drapes. Or one of his wives would be. (It’s a joke, son.)

Giuliani seems pretty cool to me. What I love is that at one point while he was mayor of New York City, he was living in the mayor’s residence with both his soon-to-be ex-wife and his mistress. That’s not bad for a squirrelly guy with a bad comb-over.

I’ve met Fred Thompson, and he was very actorly. When you meet someone who is actorly, you know it. They’re very well spoken, have a practiced conspiratorial wink, and know how to wear makeup. Unfortunately, I can’t shake the fact that I know lot of actors and they’re, um, not that smart. They can memorize words really, really well, but you don’t want one doing your taxes.

On the Democrat side, they seem destined to run Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, or Barack Obama. There’s also that crazy little elf, Dennis Kucinich, but this country will never elect a President Dennis. Damn it.

John Edwards seems like a genuinely nice guy, but it’s hard to get past the whole fighting for the poor while having a house the size of an airport thing. Obama is a very charismatic guy. The few times I’ve seen him on TV, he’s come across as totally prepared to be president. You know who also seems totally prepared to be president? Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. Yeah, that’s not going to happen either.

Hillary. If you noticed that I saved her for last, it’s mainly because I’m afraid of her. We can quibble about whether her eight years of icily smiling at her husband while she was first lady qualifies as “experience” or whether it even makes sense that she’s a senator from a state she had never lived in before, but the truth is, most every American is scared of the woman. I don’t mean that we fear that she’ll do something crazy as president. I mean we’re afraid that if she got angry at one of us, she would personally kick our ass.

Between now and whenever we’re supposed to vote — which I think is probably sometime next fall — I’ll do some actual research. Or I’ll just keep reading Tim’s column. And do the exact opposite of whatever that lunatic advises. Like I said, I know the guy.

Dennis Phillippi is a Memphis writer, comedian, and radio host.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Who Is This Huckabee Mug Anyhow, and Why Is He Stealing Fred Thompson’s Thunder?

Earlier in the year local Republicans, like their
counterparts elsewhere in Tennessee, were jumping ship from other presidential
campaigns to make known their allegiance to former Senator Fred Thompson. That
was back when Law and Order star Thompson, presumably on the strength of
his Nielsen ratings, was considered the answer to GOP prayers.

The lanky, rawboned actor/lawyer/lobbyist, a native of
Lawrenceburg in Middle Tennessee and a University of Memphis graduate, had ample
cachet. A protégé of former Senator Howard Baker, who in 1973 had made him
minority counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee, Thompson had by 2007 been
in the public eye for a full generation.

His acting career in the movies as well as on TV, plus
eight years in the Senate, had made him a familiar figure enough to be a
formidable trump card. But when he got turned up on the table – or, more to the
point, when he began standing side by side with his GOP rivals on the debate
stage – something seemed to be missing.

Maybe it was age (some thought Thompson looked unexpectedly
thin and ravaged), maybe it was conviction (what was his role supposed to be?
moderate? arch-conservative? Bushite? critic?), or maybe it was the candidate’s
well-known laissez-faire attitude toward exertion. Whatever the case, The
Thompson boom went from bang to whimper in record time.

It is not just that his finances are hurting or that the
national media is beginning to write him off or that his numbers have dwindled
to single digits in Iowa, whose caucuses are coming up within a month’s time.

The real problem is a rival area candidate who has been
auditioning well on the road. That’s Mike Huckabee, the former governor of
Arkansas and, as has been pointed out ad infinitum, a native of Hope, home town
of two-term former Democratic president Bill Clinton, another up-from-nowhere
sort.

By now, Huckabee has actually taken the lead among
Republicans in Iowa. His dramatic arrow up parallels Thompson’s going down. And,
whereas Thompson had never quite defined his character in the ongoing campaign
drama, the folksy but articulate Huckabee has his down pat: He’s an unabashed
pro-life social conservative but an economic populist who raised taxes for
social programs as governor and who regularly denounces “Wall Street” in the
manner of a latter-day FDR.

As such, Huckabee performs the improbable feat of yoking
together two points of view that have been politically sundered for well over a
generation. In some ways, he’s a throwback to the old Southern Democratic model.
He’s a former Baptist preacher who can also play a mean bass guitar on “Free
Bird” – a feat he performed alongside current Shelby GOP chairman Bill
Giannini’s lead guitar at the local Republican “Master Meal” last year.

Huckabee’s plain-spoken oratory was also a huge hit at that event, and there’s
no doubt that the seeds for a mass following have been planted in these parts.

Tracy Dewitt of the northeast Shelby Republican Club is a
dedicated supporter, as is Paul Shanklin, the local businessman and successful
impressionist who does all those politician’s voice for Rush Limbaugh. The
Arkansan’s national campaign manager, moreover, is Chip Saltzman, an ex-Memphian
and a graduate of Christian Brothers University.

When the East Shelby Republican Club, one of the GOP’s
local bedrocks, had an informal straw vote poll at its regular monthly meeting
last week, Fred Thompson still had the residual strength to come out well ahead.
Huckabee was down among such relative also-rans as New York’s Rudy Giuliani and
Massachusett’s Mitt Romney.

But that, as club president Bill Wood acknowledges, was
then. Now is something else. “That was before Huckabee got a front-page article
in USA Today and all this other recognition.” If the same straw vote were
held today? “Oh he’d go up like a bullet. There were already a lot of people
here who liked him. Now they’re starting to see how he’s doing in the rest of
the nation.”

Indeed, it is probable that, if Huckabee should hold his present numbers and win
Iowa, you couldn’t build a big enough bandwagon to accommodate his supporters
locally.

One caveat: Thompson could still come back. There are many
political observers who remember his lackadaisical start in 1994 against
Democratic Senate opponent Jim Cooper, whom he trailed at one point by 20 points
in the polls – the same number he would eventually win by against Cooper.

But for the time being, the man from Hope has center stage.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Chuck Norris Hearts Huckabee

From The New York Times Politics Blog: Just when Mike Huckabee was starting to be taken seriously, he brought back Chuck Norris.

Mr. Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas who, according to polls, last week ascended to the number-two spot in Iowa, will begin running his first television ad there today ­– starring Mr. Norris, the tough-guy action hero who has been actively campaigning for Mr. Huckabee.

The ad opens with a black screen and white block letters, reading, “An Important Policy Message from Governor Mike Huckabee.”

Then Mr. Huckabee appears, looking somberly into the camera. “My plan to secure the borders?” he says, as the camera zooms out to reveal Mr. Norris seated next to Mr. Huckabee. “Two words. Chuck Norris.”

Read the rest here. And check out the video.

Categories
News

Ole Miss to Host Presidential Debate

Mark September 26, 2008 on your calendar. The non-partisan Commission on Presidential Debates announced today that the first presidential debate will take place in Oxford, Mississippi, at Ole Miss’ 1,200-seat Gertrude Ford Center for the Performing Arts.

The other debates are scheduled for Nashville’s Belmont College, where Fred Thompson could enjoy a home-podium advantage, and Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York.

No word yet on whether or not locals and Ole Miss alumni plan to tailgate in the Grove prior to the debate.

Participants in the debate to be announced later.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

CBS News: Huckabee is Gaining Ground

CBS News online takes a look at former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee’s campaign. An excerpt:

[Huckabee] would seem to be a natural to attract the support of social conservatives in the Republican presidential contest.

But the Baptist minister who wows audiences with a mix of down-home folksiness and traditional values has spent most of the year struggling to gain a foothold in the race for the GOP nomination.

Lately, however, there are signs that Huckabee may be catching on.

In the latest Iowa poll by the American Research Group, Huckabee is within striking distance of Mitt Romney, whom he trails 27 percent to 19 percent. Other polls in Iowa, host of the first statewide nominating contests on Jan. 3, also show Huckabee gaining ground …

Read it all at CBSNews.com.