POLITICAL WIRE’S HEADLINES – 8/14
Jindal Way Ahead in Louisiana
“A new statewide poll in the Louisiana governor’s race shows Republican candidate Bobby Jindal with a strong lead over his competitors, including one question that listed New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin in the lineup of candidates,” reports theNew Orleans Times-Picayune.
Jindal leads with 63%, followed by state Sen. Walter Boasso (D) with 14.3%, Foster Campbell (D) with 4.4% and John Georges (R) with 1.3%. If Nagin, who has not announced his candidacy, is included, Jindal is ahead with 60.3%, followed by Nagin at 10.5%, Boasso at 10%, Campbell at 3.3%, and Georges at 1.5%.
Huckabee’s Under-the-Radar Organization
This morning’s newspapers cited Mike Huckabee’s affable personality and socially conservative credentials in his strong performance at the Ames Straw Poll. But despite his being outspent and out-organized, Marc Ambinder reports Huckabee had a strong under-the-radar organization.
First, Huckabee enjoyed unofficial support from FairTax.org — a group promoting the Fair Tax, “which would replace the income tax and most of the tax code with a national retail sales tax” — who claim to have brought 20 to 30 buses to Ames.
Second, a group of organized home-schoolers felt at most at home with the Southern Baptist preacher. “A campaign tells me that national home school advocate Michael Farris helped to organize a train of car poolers for Iowa homeschools and points out that Huckabee had two breakfast meetings on Saturday morning with some of his more ardent home-school-parent supporters.”
Electorate Shifts Towards Democrats
In a new strategy memo, Stan Greenberg looks at four months of polling data and sees “big changes that have an enduring quality” that will shape the 2008 presidential race.
Key takeaways:
- The “opinion elite” in the country — those with a college education and earning more than $75,000 — support a Democratic presidential candidate by an 11 point margin.
- Independents have defected from Republican candidates and now support a Democrat for president by 19 points.
- Young voters are breaking to Democrats with landslide margins.
- Married women — a key swing vote — are breaking marginally for the Democrats this year after swinging strongly for the Republicans in 2004.
- Unmarried women — a key bloc of “base” voters for Democrats — pick the Democratic candidate by two to one margin.
Bonus Quote of the Day
“George was at a different phase in his life.”
– Mitt Romney, when asked by Matthew Cooper of Condé Nast Portfolio, if it’s fair to compare him and his Harvard Business School classmate, George W. Bush.
Democrats Fear Clinton Drag on Down-Ticket Races
The AP reports that some key Democrats are very worried over the negative impact of Hillary Clinton leading the party’s ticket in 2008. “In more than 40 interviews, Democratic candidates, consultants and party chairs from every region pointed to internal polls that give Clinton strikingly high unfavorable ratings in places with key congressional and state races.”
Pollster Mark Penn explains: “There is a phenomena with Hillary, because she is the front-runner and because she’s been battling Republicans for so long, her unfavorability (rating) looks higher than what they will eventually be after the nomination and through the general election.”
A footnote: Penn was eventually fired by Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000 after he challenged the concept of “Clinton fatigue” dragging down Democrats. A good account of the incident is found in No Excuses by Robert Shrum.
T.R. Rises Again
The 2008 presidential candidates are regularly quoting Theodore Roosevelt on the campaign trail, the AP observes. “Democrats and Republicans alike are frequently invoking the words of the nation’s 26th president and renowned political maverick as they project a take-no-prisoners image in a time of protracted war and continuing terrorist threats.”
For the definitive biography on Roosevelt, see The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris.
Explaining Ames’ Low GOP Turnout
Talking Points Memo points out that only 14,000 voters turned out for this weekend’s Ames Straw Poll — a steep drop-off from participation in its last competitive races. Most analysts attributed the decline to Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and Sen. John McCain not taking part, or to a lack of enthusiasm in the GOP. But First Read credits the decline to a stricter policy of ID enforcement.
“[D]on’t get carried away on turnout — the Iowa GOP did a much better job of checking for Iowa IDs than in years past.”
How Will History Judge Karl Rove?
With Karl Rove’s resignation the top political story today, consider this great timing: The latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly has a must-read profile of Rove by Joshua Green.
“The story of why an ambitious Republican president working with a Republican Congress failed to achieve most of what he set out to do finds Rove at center stage. A big paradox of Bushs presidency is that Rove, who had maybe the best purely political mind in a generation and almost limitless opportunities to apply it from the very outset, managed to steer the administration toward disaster.”
“Years from now, when the major figures in the Bush administration publish their memoirs, historians may have a clearer idea of what went wrong than we do today. As an exercise in not waiting that long, I spent several months reading the early memoirs and talking to people inside and outside the administration (granting anonymity as necessary), in Congress, and in lobbying and political consulting firms that dealt directly with Rove in the White House. (Rove declined requests for an interview.) The idea was to look at the Bush years and make a first pass at explaining the consequential figure in the vortex — to answer the question, How should history understand Karl Rove, and with him, this administration?”
The complete piece should be posted on the magazine’s website later today or tomorrow.
Quote of the Day
“I read about some of the things I’m supposed to have done, and I have to try not to laugh.”
– Karl Rove, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
Inside Obama’s Campaign
As noted on Political Insider yesterday, GQ puts Sen. Barack Obama on the cover of its current issue. The piece by Ryan Lizza focuses on Obama’s life on the campaign trail. His personal characteristics — “the crowd-pleasing charisma, the outsize ambition, the audacity of hope” — are clear, but does he have “the nerve, the political spine, and the will to do the (sometimes dirty) work it takes to get to the White House?”
The piece also focuses on how Obama could translate stratospheric approval ratings into real support. “What the press didnt know is that Obamas resistance to becoming a candidate of white papers had a strategic logic. As his pollsters had clearly divined, if the campaign hinged on who had the best health care plan or who better understood the minutiae of tax policy, then Obama was toast. That was the contest Hillary was hoping to have. To close the Gap, Obamas senior strategists decided he had to make the campaign a more high-minded argument about political reform.”
It’s a must-read piece that will be live on the GQ website at 10 a.m.
Update: The piece is now available on the GQ site.
Rove Resigns
White House political guru Karl Rove is resigning as White House deputy chief of staff effective Aug. 31, and returning to Texas, he said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
Rove “first floated the idea of leaving a year ago. But he delayed his departure as, first, Democrats took Congress, and then as the White House tackled debates on immigration and Iraq, he said. He said he decided to leave after White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten told senior aides that if they stayed past Labor Day they would be obliged to remain through the end of the president’s term in January 2009.”
Question of the day: Who will Rove support in the Republican presidential primaries?
Thompson Calls it Quits
Former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson (R) “dropped out of the race for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination tonight, a day after he finished a disappointing sixth in the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa,” reports the Washington Post.
