Hillary’s New Hampshire edge
Chris Cillizza has some thoughts on Clinton’s organization in New Hampshire. He’s right, but beware Obamamania.
Free books!
That’s right, I got a batch of new books in, and some slightly less than new ones piled up, and if you want one, just e-mail me. No trivia question to answer, just be the first to request a particular book, and it’s yours. Here they are:
East Wind, Rain, a novel by Caroline Paul
Junior, a novel by Macaulay Culkin (Yes, that Macaulay Culkin)
The Tender Bar, a memoir by J.R. Moehringer
The War Within: One More Step at a Time, a Doonesbury book by Gary Trudeau
A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation, by Catherine Allgor (audio book)
Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and other Parent Substitutes, by Mary Eberstadt
Hostile Takeover: How Big Money & Corruption Conquered Our Government — and How We Take It Back, by David Sirota
Sellevision, a novel by Augusten Burroughs
An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal, by Linda Chavez
Warrant for Terror: The Fatwas of Radical Islam and the Duty to Jihad, by Shmuel Bar
The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets, a novel by Eva Rice
Getting America Right: The True Conservative Values Our Nation Needs Today, by Ed Feulner and Doug Wilson
Tallgrass, a novel by Sandra Dallas (audio book)
The five Jerks you meet on earth (an unauthorized parody), by Ray Zardetto
The Truth (with jokes), by Al Franken
Welcome to the Homeland: A Journey to the Rural Heart of America’s Conservative Revolution, by Brian Mann
Confluence: A River, the Environment, Politics & the Fate of All Humanity, by Nathaniel Tripp (Forward by Howard Dean)
Charter Schools Against the Odds, edited by Paul Hill
The Stamp Act
Today is the anniversary of the 1765 Stamp Act. Another reminder that Rep. Catherine Mulholland’s Candy Tax, which would require tax stamps on all candy sold in New Hampshire, is deserving of swift and overwhelming defeat.
The primary money race
A fascinating article in The Washington Post explains how the presidential campaigns are aggressively raising money at such a pace as to possibly raise more in this quarter than President Bush raised for the entire 2004 election.
FBI investigates Edwards donor
Surprise, a trial lawyer is being investigated for finding a slick way around the law.
Is Richardson really committed to New Hampshire?
Last month Bill Richardson told this newspaper that he was committed to campaigning in New Hampshire and that he was committed to the New Hampshire primary.
Then he released this statement after California moved its primary to Feb. 5:
“I believe that this change is great for the west and a positive development for my campaign. I am confident that my message and strong record of action will resonate with the voters of California. As a western governor I deal every day with issues important to the region, fighting for equal rights, protecting our environment, and promoting aggressive renewable energy policies and energy independence. And like New Mexico, California is a diverse, multicultural state that will help the nominating process become even more inclusive and more reflective of America as it is today and will be in the future.”
Does he think New Hampshire has earned its first primary, or does he think that New Hampshire is too white and we need “a diverse, multicultural state that will help the nominating process become even more inclusive and more reflective of America as it is today and will be in the future”?
Obama in Oakland
Sen. Barack Obama undoubtedly upset a lot of people in Keene when he canceled his Friday town hall meeting there so he could beat the storm and be certain that he made it to Oakland, Calif., for his Saturday fund-raiser/rally. Here is why he made that decision. That’s about 12,000 people, according to the campaign.
Don’t show that picture to Hillary Clinton. Or better yet, do, and make sure you have a tape recorder running.
Hat tip, Ben Smith.
Obama the liberal
I’ve thought for a while now that Barack Obama is in the best position of any Democratic presidential candidate to win the activist left in New Hampshire. He a deeply committed liberal, and it comes through in his speeches, public statements and voting record. For the far left, Obama is more ideologically pure than Sen. Clinton or Gov. Richardson, more convincing than John Edwards, and more electable than Dennis Kucinich. And now, he can prove that he’s more liberal than the others.
National Journal just ranked Obama the most liberal senator running for President. Take that, Hillary. Of course, John Kerry was the most liberal member of the Senate for 2003, and he did win the nomination, but see where that got him.
At senior center, Obama lied about Social Security
At the Earl M. Bourdon Senior Center in Claremont on Friday afternoon, Sen. Barack Obama told the residents, mostly in their 80s, an untruth about President Bush’s proposal for personal Social Security accounts.
“The idea was, we don’t need a Social Security system,” he said, adding that the plan was to “privatize” Social Security and tell Americans “you’re on your own” when it comes to retirement savings.
But that was not at all what Bush’s plan did. It kept the Social Security system in place. It did not privatize the system. It merely allowed individuals to take a maximum of 4 percentage points of their payroll taxes and invest that money themselves instead of letting the government spend it, which is what happens now.
There are only two possibilities here:
1. Obama did not know even the general outline of the Republican plan for letting people choose to invest a tiny fraction of their payroll taxes. That would be astounding, as he was in the U.S. Senate when Bush unveiled his plan and he made national news opposing it. Did he not even read the executive summary? Possible, but highly unlikely.
2. Obama is deliberately distoring the plan. This I find much more probable. Looks like he’s setting up a straw man — Social Security will disappear and you’ll be left to fend for yourself in retirement — so he can easily knock it down and score some cheap political points. At the Bourdon center, it worked.
Al Hinton meets Barack Obama
So, I drove up to Claremont to see Sen. Barack Obama talk to residents of the Earl M. Bourdon Senior Center, and I met a wonderfully charming man, Al Hinton. Al, originally from Newport, Vt., is 86. For more than an hour, he sat in his wheelchair in the crowded dining room waiting for Obama to arrive. (Obama was half an hour late, prompting one resident to note that “well, the snow was on time.”) I started chatting with Al and quickly learned that he’s an Army veteran who survived the Pearl Harbor attack. His story, condensed, is this:
He was asleep in his bunk when a bomb hit the mess hall (the barracks and mess hall were on opposite ends of the same building). “The concussion blew me out of my bunk,” he said. The men who’d already risen to have breakfast in the mess hall were killed, he said, and he and his fellow soldiers in the barracks grabbed their M-1s and bolted out the door. They saw the zeroes dive-bombing, and Al and his companions just started shooting at the bombers with their rifles. And Al got one. “He is credited with a kill,” his wife, Rosemary, quickly interjected, evidently seeing the astonishment on my face. Al said he waited for the plane to hit the trough of the dive, “then it’s dead,” he said, and he shot the pilot, killing him instantly and bringing the plane down.
We chatted for a while, and he said he loved Hawaii and “would still be there if they didn’t ship us back.” (I didn’t think to tell him that Obama grew up in Hawaii.) He returned to Vermont and lived some in Canada, and now he and Rosemary are living in Claremont. This is his second presidential primary. He said he’s an independent. “I just vote for who I think is the best man.” He hasn’t picked a candidate at this point, “I’m hoping to talk to one of them,” he said. I noticed that everyone in the room was white — and old — and I asked what he thought about a race for President in which a woman, a black man and a Hispanic man were running, and he said “it never occurred to me. Doesn’t matter to me.” I asked a few others, and got the same response. Nobody cared.
I asked Al what he’d ask a candidate if he got the chance, and he said, “I’d wait and see what he had to say to me.” As it happens, after the event, Al got to meet Obama and talk with him. He asked him a question, but Al’s voice is very soft and in the din of the event it wasn’t clear that Obama really understood the question. He asked what Obama would do about China, which Al considers a very real threat to the United States. I couldn’t hear Obama’s answer; and when I caught Al afterward I asked if he was satisfied with the answer, he confessed that he didn’t really get an answer, but it was obvious that he was extremely pleased just to have met and spent a one-on-one moment with Obama. (I have a picture of the two of them together, which I’ll post on Monday.)
I asked Al if Obama had won him over, and he said no, he still wanted to see the other candidates. But to my surprise, Al was the only person to whom I posed that question who gave a negative answer. Everyone else — people who told me before the event that they were uncommitted — said they were going to vote for Obama. Of course, the primary is next year, and they could change their minds. But this was the only primary campaign event I’ve attended in which more people told me afterward that they were voting for the candidate than told me they were still undecided. And that includes some events only days before the 2004 primary. I wonder if that had anything to do with the fact that Al was the only man I interviewed, all the rest were women (there were far more women than men there, as would be expected). The ladies looooved Obama.
I saw Al off, and he left in great spirits. The snow caused Obama’s campaign to cancel its Keene town hall meeting, which means that Obama flew to NH to meet with some state senators at Sen. Sylvia Larsen’s home in Concord and to speak at the Bourdon Center. Whatever the value to a candidate of a stop at the Bourdon Center, it is clearly of great value to the residents. They all left happy, and it was a joy to see Al wheel out with a big smile on his face.
Friday Book Corner
At the Democratic Party’s 100 Club Dinner last Saturday night I had the good fortune of sitting beside one of Washington’s top political reporters, Walter Shapiro, Washington bureau chief of Salon.com. (You can read his excellent column on Hillary Clinton’s swing through New Hampshire last weekend here.)
Walter probably knows more about the New Hampshire primary and presidential politics than most people alive. (If you want to read some excellent coverage of the Presidential race this year, catch his dispatches at Salon.com.) As I suspected, he is an avid reader. This week he was kind enough to share his current reading list, with commentary:
“Even though I have begun covering my eighth New Hampshire primary (I first came here with a fellow named Bush after he won the 1980 Iowa caucuses), my idea of fun is not curling up with Hillary Clinton’s ‘It Takes a Village’ or even Barack Obama’s well-written first book, “Dreams from My Father,’” he writes. “My reading is much more of an escape from politics and the workaday world than it is a search for innovative policy analysis or gotcha anecdotes about the candidates. So these are the recent books that have or are gracing my bedside table:”
Sacred Games, by Vikram Chandra. “A sprawling and riveting 900-page novel about a Sikh policeman and a Hindu crime lord in modern Mumbai (Bombay), which still haunts me three weeks after I finished it. It is the perfect book for those whose imagery about India is still stuck in the ‘Jewel in the Crown’ era or who are looking for an Indian novelist from the post-Salmon Rushdie generation. I read it on a pre-campaign vacation in India, where I went to see if they were outsourcing the jobs of political columnists.”
Body of Lies, by David Ignatius. “I have been reading this in galley proofs, since this Middle Eastern thriller by a Washington Post columnist will not be published until next month. Since Ignatius is a close friend, I am thrilled that the novel is as suspenseful and insightful as I hoped it would be.”
Fantasyland: A Season on Baseball’s Lunatic Fringe, by Sam Walker. “Somehow between keeping my Thompsons who are running for the Republican nomination straight (Fred was the senator from Tennessee and Tommy was the Wisconsin governor) and swapping rumors about how much the candidates will raise in the first quarter, I also have to prepare for my rotisserie baseball draft in two weeks. Which brings us to this laugh-out-loud-funny chronicle of his adventures in fantasy baseball by a sportswriter for, yes, the Wall Street Journal.”
Among real-life political books, the best one that I read in the last few months is Positively American: Winning Back the Middle-Class Majority One Family at a Time, by Sen. Chuck Schumer, which combines some honest campaign narratives by the New York senator (especially how he beat Republican Al D’Amato in 1998) with centrist policy proposals for the Democratic Party. And this weekend, since I am heading to Iowa with John Edwards, I will also reread his 2004 courtroom memoir, Four Trials.
Anyone who rereads “Four Trials” just so he can better cover John Edwards in Iowa deserves a raise. And if you want a good book on the last Democratic primary, you can pick up Walter’s One-Car Caravan: On the Road with the 2004 Democrats Before America Tunes In.
Shoddy anti-Romney hit
So, this anti-Romney person called Soren Dayton, running an anti-Romney site called eyeon08.com, has attempted to discredit the new Franklin Pierce College poll that shows Romney in a solid third place with 22 percent of respondents saying they favor him for President.
The hit job consists of a link to a 2004 Washington Post story questioning the polling techniques used in New Hampshire and a baseless accusation that Romney NH consultant Rich Killion somehow rigged the poll.
First, Dayton assumes that FPC polls are conducted the same now as they were then. They are not. FPC polls are conducted by Kelly Myers of RKM Research and Communications of Portsmouth. This week’s polls were RKM’s first for FPC, and the methodology used is different than what was used in FPC polling in 2004. The Post criticizes the way FPC students would interview whoever answered the phone. Myers does not do that when conducting his polls. Also, Myers used no FPC students in this poll, but will use them in future polls.
I happen to know that Rich Killian has nothing to do with the Franklin Pierce polling, but I asked Myers anyway. “I’ve never heard that name,” he said.
So much for Romney’s guy skewing the poll results (pdf), which by the way were essentially duplicated by a Suffolk University poll the week before. Dayton claims that the Suffolk poll is tainted because Suffolk University is in Boston. You know, Romney lived and worked in Boston as governor of Massachusetts, so, obviously, no polling from Boston can be trusted. Wonder if he says New York Times polls on Giuliani can’t be trusted. I doubt it.
