A crowd of 25,000 — mostly college students and young adults — packed Washington Square Park in NYC on the evening of September 27 to cheer for Senator Obama and maybe to make some new friends. Following the after-party, everyone went to change the world.
Sound Bite: “We are sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
At the Democratic debate at Dartmouth College on September 26, Tim Russert asked the candidates if they would pledge that all US troops would be out of Iraq by January 2013. Obama, Clinton and Edwards weren’t going to step into that minefield. But Senator Dodd did.
Barack Obama says if we believe in him and believe in ourselves like he believes, then we can have universal healthcare, end the war in Iraq and, oh yes, change the world. Then we can break for lunch.
After Ralph Stanley II and the Bluegrass Brothers finish up “Man of Constant Sorrrow,” a blue-jeaned John Edwards talks about “economic fairness” at a town meeting in Conway, NH.
Sound Bite: “We should have a national capital fund to make money — capital — available to new businesses that will operate and start in smaller towns and smaller communities. Right now all the capital stays in big cities. We’ve got to get it out into the rural areas.”
John Edwards appeared today on an MTV-MySpace interactive “Presidential Dialogue.” Viewers were able to immediately grade the candidate’s answers — either positively: “Good Ideas,” “Understands Reality,” “Answered Question;” or negatively: “Wrong Ideas,” “Out of Touch,” “Dodged Question.” The aggregate responses were displayed in a pie chart that understandably confused Edwards at first.
In this clip Edwards is asked how he’d pay for his “College for Everyone” program. Why, that’s as easy as Finance 101: He’d “get rid of banks as the intermediary in student loans,” and he’d collect taxes that aren’t currently being paid, particularly taxes on capital gains that those rich folks are avoiding.
Next up: A discussion of his “Straight A’s for Everyone” plan.
A recent CNN/WMUR-TV poll of likely Democratic primary voters in New Hampshire shows Hillary Clinton widening her lead over Barack Obama. The most drastic movement was seen among Independent voters: Obama led Clinton 32% to 30% in the July 7 poll, but he dropped to 20% in the September 7 poll while Clinton rose to 37%. Some analysts say Clinton’s recent TV ad blitz has helped boost her numbers.
In the Republican race, only 6 points separate the top three: Romney, Giuliani and McCain. Independents currently prefer Romney (34%) over Giuliani (17%).
In last night’s Democratic debate at Dartmouth College, Senator Obama says he’s the candidate who can inspire and mobilize the country and bring people from both parties together. Hillary can’t do that, he says.
Sound Bite: [On Hillary Clinton's previous healthcare plan] “If it was lonely for Hillary, part of the reason it was lonely, Hillary, is because you closed the door to a lot of potential allies in that process.”
Barack Obama makes politics a bit too cause-and-effect, in my book.
Sound bite: “One of the things the next president has to do is to stop fanning people’s fears. If we spend all our time feeding the American people fear and conflict and division then they become fearful and conflicted and divided. If we feed them hope and we feed them reason and tolerance then they will become tolerant and reasonable and hopeful.”
Isn’t that essentially insulting? We are politicians’ empty vessels. We are molded by their rhetoric?
The Presidency isn’t a PBS self-improvement show. It’s an executive job.
Sounds like Obama has been hanging out with Oprah too much.
Next he’ll get elected by giving us all free cars.
Gallup notices that Hillary Clinton was bragging on talk shows that she was getting support from the other side.
Sound bite: “I’ve been able to get a lot of Republican and independent support in this campaign,” says Hillary.
Let’s go to the numbers. Gallup found that among independents, in a Hillary v. Rudy match, they “roughly split the vote” at 45 v. 50 percent respectively. But among Republican voters, Hillary’s support falls to 8 percent vs. Rudy’s 90. Look at favorability ratings among Republicans: Hillary doubles that to 15 percent, Rudy gets 83 percent.
I’d think that in the primary phase of the election, with the livid left still gunning for Hillary (but, by my finger to the wind, starting to accept the increasing inevitability of her nomination), it may be dangerous to claim dances with the devils on the other side.
Joe Biden turned in his usual solid performance in last night’s debate at Dartmouth College. (Hey, when you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.) So, if you like Biden sound bites — and who doesn’t — here they are: Biden on Iraq, sanctuary cities, healthcare (check out Clinton’s mug in the reaction shots on this one), social security, the drinking age, MoveOn.org (“It’s not their party.”), torturing a terrorist, his favorite verse from the Bible and Red Sox vs. Yankees.
But first, here’s Biden slapping around Rudy Giuliani:
In last night’s Democratic debate at Dartmouth College, Tim Russert went for a gotcha moment when he pointed out that Hillary Clinton’s position on the use of torture (in a tortured hypothetical scenario) differed from that of her husband’s. Gotcha! Well, not quite. Clinton turned the curveball around and hit it into the seats.
I like the casualness of it: Mike Gravel sits in what looks like a rocking chair and talks at the camera as he just answers questions from voters. Are you electable, Mike? Yes, I am. Are you for concealed weapons? No, I’m not. Why is the media making this campaign about Hillary and Rudy? “These two people are supportive of the military industrial complex. They’re also supportive of the five companies that control our information.” And that, you see, is why the networks won’t give Mike the attention he deserves. And that, in turn, is why Gravel and the outlying candidates are doing more interesting things with YouTube.
Sound bite: “We need to build as many windmills as possible.”
There’s a genre of candidate video created in this election: the montage of happy, popular, friendly moments from campaign appearances, over-edited because they can be. They come from someone on the campaign who discovers iMovie on the Mac and says, “I can be a filmmaker, too.” They edit together a bunch of clips and quotes and put them to music. Voila: the three-minute masterpiece. Problem is, they’re usually cheesy, uninformative, and long, and often embarrassing. I don’t know why they bother. Here’s the latest example, from Joe Biden:
