Will Hillary Challenge Obama in 2012?

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No. and Hotair explains why:

“Absolutely no interest” in running again, she says, which in fairness is the same answer she gave back in October. Ace is skeptical about her denials, but come on: How exactly is Her Majesty going to reposition herself to Obama’s left in time for 2012? Between her hawkishness and her marriage to the man who Betrayed The Cause by governing from the center after his own health-care implosion, her liberal cred is shot. Remember, the nutroots treated her as more or less a de facto Republican during the primaries. Plus, if she challenged The One, all the nastiness — racial and otherwise — that was dredged up in “Game Change” about her campaign’s tactics would be revisited. And if she lost again, which she almost certainly would, she could be staring at so many burned bridges that a run in 2016 would be impossible. Besides, given the “dark valley” of unemployment that Democrats will be forced to defend in 2012, why would she even want the nomination? Having beaten Obama in the primary by painting herself as the “true liberal” in the race, she’d be a sitting duck in the general when the GOP inevitably ran to the center. It ain’t happening. Although it would be awesome if it did!

Conservatives fire at Fiorina

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RedState.com bashes Cary Fiorina saying:

When Carly Fiorina speaks on the campaign trail here in California, running to be the Republican nominee to unseat Barbara Boxer, she tries to prohibit recording of her speeches. However somebody snuck in an audio recorder to an event yesterday, and these clips seem to show why she would do that. The real, private Carly seems to be a bit different from the public, ‘conservative’ Carly.

Radical feminist and supporter of Jesse Jackson. That’s a two-fer of reasons to doubt her so-called conservative credentials and instead support Chuck DeVore for Senate.

The evidence for this alleged Jackson love and radical feminism however, is…rather lame.


Lou Dobbs for President?

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Could this be a signal that he is running for president?

Lou Dobbs for President? Don’t laugh. After months of telling reporters that he “absolutely” would not consider leaving his highly-rated CNN show in which he crusades against free trade and illegal immigration, Mr. Dobbs posted a commentary on his Web site last week predicting a surprise new presidential candidate in 2008. The mystery candidate is an “independent populist . . . who understands the genius of this country lies in the hearts and minds of its people and not in the prerogatives and power of its elites.”

Friends of Mr. Dobbs say he is seriously contemplating a race for the first time, although it’s still unlikely. They spin a scenario under which the acerbic commentator would parachute into the race if Michael Bloomberg, the New York billionaire and favorite of East Coast elites, enters the field as an independent. With Hillary Clinton continuing to score badly in polls in the categories of honesty and integrity, and with the public’s many doubts about Rudy Giuliani and other GOP contenders, Mr. Bloomberg may well see an opportunity to roil the political waters by entering the race late. If so, Mr. Dobbs then sees a niche for a “fourth-party” candidate who could paint the three other contenders as completely out of touch.

His playbook would be similar to that of Ross Perot in 1992, who didn’t enter the presidential race until the major parties began holding their primaries but quickly shot up to 25% in many polls.

Gavin Newsom drops out of California governor’s race

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The San Francisco mayor makes the decision amid lackluster poll numbers and meager fund-raising receipts. Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown, expected to run, is left with little Democratic primary opposition.

“At the end of the day, he didn’t resonate,” said David Latterman, a San Francisco political consultant who supported Newsom in both his races for mayor but grew critical in recent months. “The issues he was talking about — high-tech, biotech, green this, environment that — are important. But not for a lot of people at a time the state is a disaster zone.”

Much of Newsom’s campaign was predicated on the notion that he could replicate Barack Obama’s success at riding social-media networks to excite young voters and attract other normally inattentive Californians. He worked hard to build the state’s most expansive electronic grass-roots operation. He raised money online. His events were organized via Facebook. He was a regular on Twitter, even from his wife’s bedside immediately after she gave birth.

Ultimately, however, none of that translated into broad success or financial support for the first-time statewide candidate. A Field Poll released earlier this month showed Newsom far behind Brown, who, at least publicly, all but ignored his challenger. The attorney general had the support of 47% of Democratic voters, compared with just 26% for Newsom. The only voters among whom the mayor was leading were those 18 to 39 — some of the least likely to turn out. With them he had a 9% advantage.

More important, Newsom trailed badly in the money chase. He had $1.2 million in the bank at the end of the last reporting period in June and had raised only $709,000 since. Brown had $7.4 million on June 30 and has raised $1.3 million more since.

Earlier this month, Newsom brought in former President Clinton, an old Brown nemesis, for an endorsement and fund-raising event. But the returns, at least as indicated by partial financial reports, were disappointing.

How the Obama campaign reacted to the Palin pick

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Time has some interesting revelations about the choice for Vice President when Tim Kaine was considered but ultimately passed over:

There was no great way to explain putting someone with no foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency. If we chose him, we would need to rely on some of the same language we had used on this issue as it related to Obama — judgment vs. Washington experience, a new foreign policy vision vs. the status quo — but doubling down would make it twice as tough for us to roll this boulder uphill.

Later that night, we held a conference call with Obama to brief him on our day. “Well, it sounds like you both are for Biden, but barely,” he said. “I really haven’t settled this yet in my own mind. It’s a coin toss now between Bayh and Biden, but Kaine is still a distinct possibility. I know the experience attack people will make if we pick him. But if that really concerned me, I wouldn’t have run in the first place. My sense is — and you tell me if the research backs this up — that Barack Hussein Obama is change enough for people. I don’t have to convince people with my VP selection that I am serious about change.” (Read “Obama and Biden’s Chemistry Test.”)

But the money quotes are all about Sarah Palin:

We always knew this day was going to be a pain in the ass. Coming right off the exhaustion and exhilaration of our convention week and VP pick, we would have to jump right in and deal with theirs. But [Sarah] Palin was a bolt of lightning, a true surprise. She was such a long shot, I didn’t even have her research file on my computer, as I did for the likely McCain picks. I started Googling her, refreshing my memory while I waited for our research to be sent.

…

But here she was, joining our real-life drama. And given her life story, coupled with the surprise nature of her selection, her entrance to the race would be nothing short of a phenomenon. But I also thought it was a downright bizarre, ill-considered and deeply puzzling choice. The one thing every voter knew about John McCain’s campaign at this point was that it had been shouting from the rooftops that Barack Obama lacked the experience to be President.

Summoning the wisdom from “the philosopher she turns to most”, besides Mother Theresa, then campaign adviser Anita Dunn offered advice on Palin, whom she had worked against unsuccessfully in Alaska’s 2006 governor’s race:

…warned us that she was a formidable political talent — clearly not up to this moment, she assured us, but bound to be a compelling player and a real headliner in the weeks ahead. (Read about where Sarah Palin is going next.)

“All of you on this call should watch video of her debates and speeches,” Dunn counseled. “The substance is thin, but she’s a very able performer. And her story is out of Hollywood. She’ll be a phenomenon for a while.”

The Obama campaign was mostly annoyed that McCain had chosen a VP nominee that, they claim, had less experience than Obama:

Our strategy with the other potential picks would’ve been to start by saying that choice X subscribed to the same failed George Bush policies as John McCain; all they were doing was doubling down on the same out-of-touch economic policies that had hurt American families. We should have gone the same way with Palin. But McCain had been haranguing us for months about experience, and we were incredulous that he had picked someone with zero foreign policy experience who had been a governor for less time than Obama had been a Senator. Galled by the hypocrisy, we moved in a more aggressive direction.

We decided to call McCain on the experience card directly. The value was in making him look political — essentially, calling him full of shit — and we sent out a release making that clear. “Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency,” it read. “Governor Palin shares John McCain’s commitment to overturning Roe v. Wade, the agenda of Big Oil and continuing George Bush’s failed economic policies — that’s not the change we need; it’s just more of the same.”