Posted by Parker V on December 16, 2006 under Republican | 
The AP reports that Republican Gov. Mitt Romney, who we all know is weighing a White House bid, dismissed criticism that he has flip-flopped on the issues of gay marriage and abortion and reaffirmed his opposition to both. Democrats are hoping to use the powerful the same accusation of being unprincipaled and not really standing for anything, against Romney, who is suspected to become an instant favorite amung Republicans if he can only assure them on these two key issues.
Romneys explanation is not rocket science: “Like the vast majority of Americans, I’ve opposed same-sex marriage, but I’ve also opposed unjust discrimination against anyone, for racial or religious reasons, or for sexual preference,” Romney said in an interview with the National Review magazine published online Thursday. Indeed, his record on gay rights is unusually strong for a conservative Republican, however that is unlikely to matter to his critics in an age where it is acceptable to be against same sex marraige (like Bill and Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama), but you quickly become a bigot and hater if you support allowing citizens to vote on the matter (like Mitt Romney has recently fought for).
Regarding abortion, Romney said — as he has said previously — that although he campaigned for governor as an abortion-rights supporter, he changed his position several years ago after being briefed on embryonic stem-cell research.
“I’m committed to promoting the culture of life,” the Massachusetts governor told the conservative magazine. “Like Ronald Reagan and Henry Hyde and others who became pro-life, I had this issue wrong in the past.”
The comments were Romney’s first public explanation of his stance on the two key social issues since the publication last week of a 1994 letter — sent in the final weeks of his failed campaign against Sen. Edward M. Kennedy — in which he cited his sensitivity to the concerns of Log Cabin Republicans, the party’s gay group.
“As a result of our discussions and other interactions with gay and lesbian voters across the state, I am more convinced than ever before that as we seek to establish full equality for America’s gays and lesbian citizens, I will provide more effective leadership than my opponent,” Romney wrote in the letter.
The AP also notes however, that during that same campaign, Romney also stated his personal opposition to abortion, but said he would not seek to change state abortion laws. As proof, he cited his mother’s own 1970 candidacy for the U.S. Senate as an abortion rights supporter.
Posted by Parker V on under Democrat, Election 08 |
The Associated Press notes that Al Gore is waging a fierce campaign for recognition and an Oscar statuette for his global warming documentary, while reviving talk that he’s pursuing a bigger prize: the presidency.
Suspicion is arising over his recent itinerary that is making him “high profile” such as making self-deprecating jokes on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” offering ideas on preserving the environment to Oprah Winfrey and her daytime audience (Oprah thanked him for being the country’s “Noah”) and batting questions on Iraq from Matt Lauer on the “Today” show.
Traveling the country to promote the DVD version of Inconvinient Truth — just in time for holiday gift-giving — Gore insists that he’s not planning a return to politics…
“I am not planning to run for president again,” Gore said last week, arguing that his focus is raising public awareness about global warming and its dire effects. Then, he added: “I haven’t completely ruled it out.”
Those words make Gore the 800-pound non-candidate of the Democratic field. The possibility of another presidential bid delights many Democrats still steamed over the disputed 2000 election, in which they argue a few more votes, a state other than Florida and a different Supreme Court could have put Gore, not George W. Bush, in the White House.
New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is the front-runner, but a polarizing one for some Democrats. Illinois Sen. Barack Obama is the electrifying newcomer, but limited in his experience. Gore remains, for many party activists, the Democrat and popular vote-getter done wrong.
“He won the election in 2000 — he just lost the (electoral) count,” former Democratic National Committee Chairman Don Fowler said. “If I were he, I wouldn’t rule out a run. It’s an uncertain field, and he’s a person who is widely respected.”
In many respects, Gore is better positioned for a political comeback than in his previous bids.
Posted by Parker V on December 15, 2006 under Democrat, Election 08 |
The following is a portion of a report by Robert Marus from ABP News:
Following a trend of Democrats becoming more faith-friendly, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) has hired a Baptist “faith guru†for her expected 2008 presidential campaign. Burns Strider, who has been the head of religious outreach for the House Democratic Caucus since 2005, will join Clinton’s campaign staff, according to the Hotline. The online daily is the politics arm of the National Journal, one of Washington’s oldest political publications.
Strider, a native of Mississippi, was raised Southern Baptist. He and his family now attend Metropolitan United Methodist Church in Washington. Clinton, a lifelong Methodist, has become more open in recent years about her faith. She is part of an exclusive women’s prayer group — many of whose members are the wives of prominent conservatives — that she joined while she was First Lady.
She also joined a Senate prayer group after she was elected to the Senate in 2000. Although rarely publicized, generations of Congress members have been involved in several bipartisan prayer and Bible-study groups.
Polls list Clinton as the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. She may have to run against other candidates who emphasize their faith.
Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, who is also mulling a presidential run, has made multiple appearances discussing his Congregationalist faith. He was recently a featured speaker at an AIDS conference convened by Southern Baptist megachurch pastor Rick Warren.
According to The Hill, a newspaper that covers Congress, Obama has also assigned a staffer to faith outreach. In addition, other Democratic and progressive groups have begun to focus staff members on outreach to religious voters — many of whom had abandoned the party in the past 20 years. That trend showed some reversal, however, during the recent midterm congressional elections.
Related: Its OKAY to Mix Religion And Politics -If Your Sen Obama…
Posted by Parker V on under Election 08, Republican |
Conservative magazine Newsmax reports that former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has named Michael DuHaime, political director of the Republican National Committee, to head his presidential exploratory committee.
DuHaime headed political operations for the RNC this year and served as a regional political director for President Bush’s re-election campaign in 2004, the New York Sun reports.
Last week Giuliani hired Sandra Pack, another top official from Bush’s re-election campaign, to become the chief financial officer of his exploratory committee.
Giuliani filed papers with the Federal Election Commission in November to set up his committee, which allows him to raise money and travel the country to gauge support for a presidential bid without formally declaring himself a candidate.
In addition to Giuliani, GOP Senators John McCain of Arizona and Sam Brownback of Kansas have also formed exploratory committees.
The hiring of DuHaime, 33, comes several days after McCain met in New York with dozens of party donors from the former mayor’s backyard, the Sun notes – including some who have contributed to Giuliani in the past.
Posted by Parker V on December 12, 2006 under Democrat, Election 08 |
RollCall points out that regardless of what happens to “The Al Franken Show,†rarely has there been a major event recently for the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, as the Democratic Party is known in Minnesota, without Al Franken making an appearance. The magazine says that Franken will announce his intentions early next year.
“He is not acting like someone who is just trying to help,†said Barry Casselman, a Minnesota-based political analyst. “He’s a much sought-after person for fundraisers and he’s been very helpful to DFL candidates. For over a year now, you see him everywhere.â€
Franken also launched a political action committee, Midwest Values, in 2005. The PAC distributed more than $240,000 to candidates and other committees as of Oct. 18. That, combined with his trips through the political circuit and stint as an emcee for fundraisers, has helped endear him to the party faithful.
“He’s built up a lot of good will within the party,†said one Minnesota Democratic operative who did not want to be named. “He has positioned himself very well if he is going to run.â€
While Franken and other potential candidates continue to deliberate whether to challenge Coleman, Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) has taken herself out of the running.
McCollum is “100 percent committed to the House and a Democratic majority,†according to her spokesman.
Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak (D) is another oft-mentioned potential Senate candidate. The Democratic operative said Rybak has been “spending more time outside of Minneapolis and must be at least considering a run.â€
Other Democrats believed to be mulling bids are: St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman (no relation to the Senator); outgoing state Senate Majority Leader Dean Johnson; state Sen. Becky Lourey; and attorney Mike Ciresi [...]
For the immediate future, Franken, who declined to be interviewed for this story, is focusing on his role as a comedian. He embarks on a United Service Organizations tour this week, his seventh since the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
His tour will take him to Afghanistan and Kuwait as well as to Iraq as he tries to bolster the spirits of U.S. troops during the holiday season.
The Daily Kos reponded today saying: Coleman won’t survive 2008. The MN GOP spin is that Klobuchar was the strongest Dem in the state, and she already won this year. But fact is that there’s little appetite for Republicans in the state.
Posted by Parker V on under Election 08, Republican |
Of all the GOP presidential contenders who could claim to have benefited from the recent midterm elections, Brownback may be the one for whom it is most true. For years, the social conservatives who brought down Miers have been having a fierce intramural debate on the merits of pragmatism versus purity.
In the run-up to 2000, they resolved that debate in favor of the former, and the movement threw its support behind George W. Bush over conservative long shots like John Ashcroft and Gary Bauer. But, now, conservatives appear to have the worst of both worlds: Six years of disappointments on issues like abortion and gay marriage have resulted in a midterm rout and a lame-duck presidency. Purity is looking more attractive by the day.
All the more so when you consider that the early GOP front-runner is John McCain, a man who still makes some social conservatives sputter with rage. If present trends continue and the Republican establishment embraces McCain, conservatives could choose to rally around a more acceptable alternative–that is, if they can find one. Lame-duck Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has already pulled the plug on his presidential ambitions. As of January, Pennsylvania’s Rick Santorum and Virginia’s George Allen are both ex-senators. And, while Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney may have escaped the midterm fallout, he is Mormon–a religion many evangelical Christians regard as a cult.
Brownback, by contrast, is closing in on a decade as the leading social conservative in the U.S. Senate. He has impeccable credentials on issues like judges, abortion, and gay marriage. (And, for that matter, any combination of the three: He has threatened to hold up the nomination of a Michigan judge because she once attended a lesbian commitment ceremony.) And Brownback’s leadership of the VAT gives him extraordinary day-to-day influence over the Senate’s social conservative agenda.
There are crasser considerations, too. Brownback was an evangelical Christian before he converted to Catholicism. Iowa has large populations of both. Brownback’s home in Topeka is a four-hour drive from Des Moines, giving him as close to a natural foothold in the state as any GOP contender will have. And, as a long-serving state agriculture secretary and former Future Farmers of America official, Brownback is as fluent in the language of ethanol subsidies and biodiesel production as any politician reared outside Iowa. Put this together, and you have a guy who could theoretically take one of the top two spots in the state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses. With the Internet’s track record of making juggernauts out of grassroots icons, even a third-place finish could give Brownback an E-Z Pass lane straight through to the final stages of the race. If everything breaks right, and social conservatives are particularly aggrieved over their party’s standard bearer, Brownback could end up on the national ticket.
Brownback, in other words, is on the brink. He is savvy. He is righteous. He is committed. He would appear to have been born for this moment in politics. But looks can be deceiving, because birth is not at all how Brownback came by his place in the conservative cosmos. As recently as 1994, the year of his first campaign for Congress, Brownback was a member in good standing of the moderate Republican establishment. But, by the time he arrived in Congress that fall, he was emitting so much anti-government zeal he gave Newt Gingrich the willies. Within two years, Brownback had another epiphany, from which he emerged as a crusader for Christian causes.
Which raises a question for conservatives mulling a Brownback candidacy: Has the Kansas senator been finding himself? Or has he been finding himself a way to run for president?
Read the full Article HERE
Posted by Parker V on under Election 08, Republican |
Bloomberg writes up GOP Gov. Mitt Romney’s emergence as the alternative to McCain, noting how Romney has been courting conservatives, has avoided rookie mistakes, conveniently left the country before the Iraq Study Group report came out, and “aims to reconstitute [Bush's] coalition.” He wants to attract “evangelical Christians with his support for a gay-marriage ban, and will try to lure economic conservatives with plans to overhaul health care and the tax system.” He also seems to be trying to set up sharp contrasts with McCain on immigration reform — he “stresses tough border enforcement over a new guest-worker plan” — and possibly on taxes.
Attacks on Romney have emerged with an unusually hard tone for being this early on a candidate who hasn’t even announced his candidacy yet. Recently, the Boston Globe trumped up charges that Romney hired gardeners who themselves hired illegal aliens, implying that Romney should have investigated and uncovered this (a brazen act which no doubt would have been equally if not more criticized) and his aspirations for president would be ruined by this shocking detail (wishful thinking).
Now a Boston-based gay newspaper has revived comments Romney “made during his 1994 Senate bid, in which he said the gay and lesbian community ‘needs more support from the Republican Party,’” per, again, the Boston Globe. In a 1994 interview with that paper, “Romney said it should be up to states to decide whether to allow same-sex marriage and he criticized Republican ‘extremists’ who imposed their positions on the party” even though he also he personally opposed gay marriage. Critics are charging this as a shift in position, hoping that readers will not notice that no actual shift has taken place.
The punchline is that twelve years later, in a recent interview with the DC Examiner, Romney “accused McCain of being ‘disingenuous’ on same-sex marriage, because McCain says he’s against [a constitutional ban of gay marriage] but believes states should decide the issue.” The criticism on Romney, in case you missed it, is that he appears to be criticizing Mccain for not falling in line with what he himself called “extremist” behavior by Republicans. This attempt at a criticism of course relies on the shallow memory of the reader, who, in order to believe this is a disingenuous line on Romney’s part must forget that 12 years ago “gay marriage” was not even heard of as an issue. Indeed, 12 years ago, anyone overly concerned about gays getting married would have been a kook in a time where there was no mass demand for it, no legal controversies over it and a liberal Democrat president named Bill Clinton had signed the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy (which kept gays in the military closeted) and was on his way to sign DOMA (the Defense Of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman).
Since those 12 years when Romney wrote that letter, same-sex marriage has been forced onto the public by unelected judges in defiance of the people’s will, turning an issue that the majority of the country didn’t care about 12 years ago into an issue that 87% of the country feels strongly about. In 2004 for instance, voters in 11 states approved constitutional amendments codifying marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. The amendments won in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio, Utah and even heavily blue-state Oregon, the one state where gay rights activists had hoped to prevail. The amendments passed with a 3-to-1 margin in Kentucky, Georgia and Arkansas, 3-to-2 in Ohio and 6-to-1 in Mississippi. Bans passed by narrower margins in Oregon, about 57 percent, and Michigan, about 59 percent.
Although Mitt Romney supports gay rights, as he did 12 years ago, he does not support the re-defining of what marriage is, as he didn’t 12 years ago. While Governor of Massachusetts, Romney had no friction with gay activists until his last months in office when the legislature violated the Massachusetts Constitution by refusing to vote on an amendment that would allow the state’s citizens to vote on the definition of marriage.
So far the two major attacks on Romney (that he vicariously hired illegal immigrants, and that he supports allowing the citizens to vote on matters important to them) appear to have only helped energize support for him. Perhaps these failures will move 08 criticism in the direction of actual challenges on the wisdom or merit of ones beliefs instead of cheap “gotcha” games… and perhaps Governor Pataki will win in a landslide *snicker…
Posted by Parker V on under Election 08, Republican |
MSNBC’s Huma Zaidi blogs that the Los Angeles Times front-pages the “frenzied competition” among Republican presidential candidates over which of them will inherit “a fundraising and vote-getting machine built by the [Bushes] over the years into one of the most valuable assets in modern politics.” More: “Adding to the drama, a sibling divide appears to be emerging” as some key members of Gov. Jeb Bush’s “tight-knit inner circle have signed up to help Romney while several of President Bush’s senior strategists have gone to McCain.” ,
The New York Daily News covers McCain’s tough speech on Iran to a pro-Israel crowd in Manhattan, Rudy Giuliani’s home turf. “Although he called war with Iran a last resort, he added, ‘There is only one thing worse than a military solution, and that, my friends, is a nuclear-armed Iran.’â€
Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, who has ties to imprisoned lobbyist Jack Abramoff, is telling reporters that “‘envoys’ for Sen. John McCain (R) have reached out to him several times in the past year to reach a detente in advance of the Arizonan’s likely presidential campaign,” which McCain’s top political adviser dismisses as “delusional,” Roll Call reports.
Outgoing New York Gov. George Pataki (R) says he will decide at the beginning of next year whether he’ll run for president, the New York Times says.