Debates -- The Day After

As promised, most candidates took the chance to criticize Clinton last night, as most of today's headlines convey.

Democratic Presidential Debate Targets Clinton

A Pitched Debate: Clinton Hears It From Her Rivals

And of course no one can help but to linger on Dennis Kucinich's UFO comments.

As usual, The New York Times has done a great job of breaking down the debate so we can easily pick and choose which parts we want to read or watch.

Democratic debates tonight in Philly

Democratic presidential candidates will debate tonight in Philadelphia. The big talk right now is whether Barack Obama will come out swinging at Hillary Clinton. He has been threatening to do this lately, and some say by threatening it without actually doing it he is just giving Clinton's camp time to beef up. There is also talk of the candidates just ganging up in general on Clinton, whose poll numbers have risen recently.

New York Times story about candidates criticizing Clinton.

Poll summary going into debate tonight.

"Conservative Republican Christian believers can have as much fun as everyone else."

Just because I think this is funny and everyone should be aware of this fact, Mike Huckabee, presidential hopeful, and his band "Capitol Offense," played a rock concert in Iowa on Friday. Life's good for him -- his campaign raised more than $800,000 and, according to an LA Times report, he just barely surpassed Mitt Romney in the Rasmussen Reports Daily Presidential Tracking Poll.

Huckabee and his band played soft rock songs from the '50s and onward, songs like "Born to the be Wild," "R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A." and "Money."

"He's a conservative but he can bring in wider support," said Adam Freed, 31, a Huckabee fan. "This could also help bring in young people." Still, not counting those in the audience who brought their children with them, Freed was one of the youngest in the crowd.

Okay, so Huckabee's got our parents; let's see if he can get us.

A youtube clip of Huckabee playing guitar while Elvis sings at the 2007 Iowa Republican Party Straw Poll.

Colbert Nation

This is a couple days late, but we'll have some weekend fun with the idea of President Stephen Colbert. An article published in the Los Angeles Times on Friday questions the legitimacy of a poll that found 13 percent of people prefer Colbert over Clinton and Giuliani, but nonetheless wonders how our nation can be so jaded that people prefer that a comedian become president over a senator or the former mayor of New York.

Has America lost its collective mind? Have we so given up on politics that 13% of us would rather a comedian become president than someone who has actually spent some time governing a state or passing laws in Congress?

And we thought we were the only ones computer savvy...

iChat with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards and Ron Paul.

Google and Apple have partnered with the League of Rural Voters to host a national iChat conversation today in an attempt to galvanize rural and inner-city youths (18- to 25-year-olds not attending college) to vote.

The article promoting the weekend event highlighted the fact that college students get a lot of attention from the media, candidates and even celebrities encouraging them to vote (e.g., "Rock the Vote," Ron Paul's MySpace, the amazing television commercial with Kanye West and Mike Meyers), and that it's time the frequently ignored -- those who didn't go to college -- get the attention.

Co-founder and executive director of GenerationEngage Adrian Talbott promoted the idea of having iChat conversations, saying:

“The model of political discourse where candidates raise money for 30-second commercials doesn’t work for young people. Young people aren’t very interested in canned ads and they can’t afford to donate the money that pays for them.”

Each of the candidates will take turns answering questions via video conferencing with people from San Jose, Calif.; Raleigh N.C.; and Ames, Iowa held at Iowa State University to discuss infrastructural disparities between rural and inner-city communities.

If those inner-city and rural kids are as socio-economically deprived as the article implies, I hope the possibility that they may not own Macs doesn't ruin the candidates' admirable intentions of reaching out.

"Fail to plan, plan to fail"

Just as the Mitt Romney profile below heightens the popular accusation that he is a "flip-flopper," a recent New York Times story on Hillary Clinton perpetuates accusations that she is phony on the campaign trail. Hillary is probably not a cold-hearted person, but she may come off that way in public and has to act to compensate. And what could be construed as being cold-hearted is apparently a symptom of her meticulous management style that, while different from her husband's, has apparently worked for her. Although the Times story points out that she is a good boss, giving credit where credit is due, there is never any indication that she is a fun or relaxed boss like her husband was. Among the many sources that gave the Times reporter this picture of the Democratic presidential front runner is Hillary herself, who, the author points out, is terribly methodical and punctual and ended her interview with him right on time. Perhaps the most surprising part of the story is when Hillary is compared to George W. Bush for her tendency to surround herself with longtime loyalists. The difference between her and Bush, though, portrayed in the Times story is that she actually learns from her mistakes and is prepared to get the job done.

Her background as a boss, powerful spouse and advocate could signal Mrs. Clinton’s approach to the job for which she is now applying. She is credited with hiring capable, loyal staff members, though her top aides have also been called insular and needlessly defensive at times. Friends and advisers say Mrs. Clinton has been a diligent student of her own mistakes, and her style has evolved over the years from a tendency to micromanage to a greater willingness to delegate; from a bent toward perfectionism to one closer to pragmatism; from a go-for-broke mentality to one more willing to compromise.

"If you were elected president, how many first ladies could we expect?"

The New Yorker has a profile of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in the Oct. 29 issue. New Yorker profiles of Republican politicians tend to be rather relentless, and this is no exception. It makes Romney, who is a very smart man, appear to be a foolish victim of his training as both a businessman and a Mormon; the two things have undoubtedly contributed to his success, but the author undercuts him repeatedly by showing how he sometimes acts foolishly with constituents based on strategies that really work better in business management than in politics. The article, of course, addresses the flip-flop issue, highlighting Romney's over-zealous advocacy of positions to which he is a recent convert, a quality, the author suggests at the end, that might be his downfall.

(The following excerpt isn't from the end of the article, but it paints a good picture of Romney. Also, the title of this post is a quote from a someone who questioned Romney at a forum -- it's just too funny to leave out.)

Politicians tend to pander, especially during the primary season. Romney’s chief opponent, Rudy Giuliani, also has a history as a pro-gun-control, pro-gay-rights Republican. But while Giuliani simply downplays his record on those issues, Romney sells himself as a true convert. He not only shifts positions; he often claims to be the most passionate advocate of his new stances. It’s one of the reasons that his metamorphosis from liberal Republican to committed right-winger seems so jarring. In 1994, in his race for the Senate, he didn’t simply argue that he was a defender of gay rights; he claimed to be a stronger advocate than his opponent, Edward Kennedy. Today, he’s not just a faithful conservative but the only Republican candidate who represents “the Republican wing of the Republican Party.” He brings a salesman’s bravado and certainty to issues. At a debate in May, when asked how he would respond to a hypothetical situation involving the interrogation of a terrorist at Guantánamo Bay, he said, “Some people have said we ought to close Guantánamo. My view is that we ought to double Guantánamo.” Elected as a pro-choice governor in 2002—YouTube is flooded with his passionate advocacy of abortion rights—he now presents himself as the most resolute anti-abortion candidate in the Republican field. A Mormon, he sometimes adopts the religious language of Evangelicals when he is addressing conservative Christian groups. To economic conservatives, he pitches himself as the candidate most strongly committed to slashing spending and taxes. (He’s the only major G.O.P. candidate to have signed a formal anti-tax pledge, the sort of move that his spokesman dismissed as “government by gimmickry” in Romney’s 2002 gubernatorial campaign.) To national-security conservatives, he is the most hawkish. (He says often that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, of Iran, should be indicted under the Genocide Convention, and his campaign has named the former C.I.A. counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, the vice-chairman of Blackwater, as an adviser.) But, while giving customers exactly what they want may be normal in the corporate world, it can be costly in politics.

Iowa and New Hampshire polls: the only ones that matter?

While people put so much clout in national polls leading up to primaries, that logic really makes little sense since there is no national primary. The states with the earliest primaries (Iowa and New Hampshire) are arguably the only ones that really matter, because that is what sets the tone for the rest of the states. After all this talk of national polls, here is an AP poll that we can actually use -- a poll of New Hampshire voters.

The Numbers - Democrats
Hillary Rodham Clinton Barack Obama John Edwards Bill Richardson	43 percent 22 percent 14 percent 6 percent
The Numbers - Republicans
Mitt Ronmey Rudy Giuliani John McCain Ron Paul Mike Huckabee Fred Thompson	32 percent 22 percent 15 percent 7 percent 6 percent 5 percent

Giuliani teaming up with neoconservatives

Giuliani, who has no national or international governing experience, has assembled a foreign policy team primarily composed of neoconservatives. (NY Times)

Mr. Giuliani’s team includes Norman Podhoretz, a prominent neoconservative who advocates bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible”; Daniel Pipes, the director of the Middle East Forum, who has called for profiling Muslims at airports and scrutinizing American Muslims in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps; and Michael Rubin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written in favor of revoking the United States’ ban on assassination.

Mr. World War 4 gets interviewed by the New York Observer.

Podhoretz wrote a piece for Commentary in June.