George Will: Wife’s work on Rick Perry’s campaign doesn’t pose problem (Poynter)

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by Steve Myers

Nov. 14, 2011  

Asked about Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s election chances on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, syndicated columnist George Will disclosed that his wife has joined the campaign, then proceeded to say that candidates can recover from gaffes like the ones that have plagued Perry. Will’s wife Mari Maseng, who’s worked in politics for 30 years, is advising the Perry campaign on messaging and debate preparation. Will said on the show that some staffers for Mitt Romney had tried to make an issue about it. Politico’s Dylan Byers notes that Will has used his column to criticize Romney, including an Oct. 28 column headlined, “The pretzel candidate.”

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Newspaper editor defends Cain interview (Editor & Publisher)

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by CNN Producer Gabriella Schwarz

(CNN) – The editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel criticized efforts by Herman Cain's campaign to discredit the newspaper's interview with the presidential candidate when he stumbled over questions on Libya and collective bargaining.

"Trying to spin it and say it was edited or handled some other way is just not accurate," Marty Kaiser said Tuesday on CNN's "American Morning."

After video of the interview went viral Monday, Cain Communications Director J.D. Gordon said the video was "out of context in some measure," adding that the former pizza executive endured 45 minutes of questions from the paper's editorial board.

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Bachmann Camp Accuses CBS of Bias After Email Suggests Candidate Would Get Fewer Questions (TVNewser)

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

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By Alex Weprin
November 13, 2011

The Michele Bachmann campaign is furious at CBS News this morning, following the foreign policy debate held last night. The reason? The campaign volunteered Bachmann to appear on the post-debate webcast, and (just announced) CBS News political director John Dickerson–apparently unaware a Bachmann staffer was on the email chain–responded in a way that suggested that Bachmann would be getting fewer questions than other candidates, and that they should hold out for a better candidate on the webcast.

“Okay let’s keep it loose though since she’s not going to get many questions and she’s nearly off the charts in the hopes that we can get someone else,” Dickerson wrote.

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Newsweek, Mired in Red Ink, Cancels Longtime Political Series (New York Times)

 

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By JEREMY W. PETERS
November 13, 2011

It has been one of Newsweek’s signature ventures and a staple of American political journalism since 1984.

Every presidential election season, the magazine detached a small group of reporters from their daily jobs for a year to travel with the presidential candidates and document their every internal triumph and despair — all under the condition that none of it was to be printed until after the election.

Then two days after Election Day, the sum of their reporters’ work would appear in the magazine. But the ambitious undertaking, known inside the magazine simply as “the project,” is no more. Newsweek, bleeding red ink and searching for a fresh identity under new ownership, has decided the project would not go forward this election season.

Explaining the decision to end the series, Edward Felsenthal, executive editor of Newsweek and The Daily Beast, its online partner, cited the quickening speed of the news cycle. In a news environment when scoops are often measured in milliseconds between Twitter posts, fewer news organizations are comfortable waiting to publish the kinds of attention-grabbing anecdotes that they would have once saved for longer articles.


“Sitting on election news felt to us out of place in an era where so much information comes out so fast,” he said. The pace seems measurably faster than even four years ago when many of the most titillating anecdotes about the 2008 campaign were reported in “Game Change” by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, a book that did not hit store shelves until January 2010.

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Pro Publica's Guide to the Best Coverage of Ron Paul and His Record

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by Lois Beckett
ProPublica, Aug. 23, 2011

This is the latest installment in a series of reading guides on 2012 presidential candidates. Here are the other guides.

Three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul is consistently disregarded by the media, a point made recently by comedian Jon Stewart and confirmed by a Pew Research Center analysis of news coverage.

But the 76-year-old Texas Republican congressman's tiny-government ideals have become increasingly relevant to the national debate. And despite some eye-rolling by television anchors, there's been plenty of substantive coverage of Paul's ideals and track record. Here's our guide to some of the best reading on Ron Paul.

The basics:

The best place to start is a 2001 Texas Monthly profile by Sam Gwynne, who explains why Paul remained such a viable Republican congressional candidate despite his refusal to toe the party line.

Paul, an obstetrician who has delivered an estimated 4,000 babies, is a pro-life Libertarian who believes that much of the federal government is unconstitutional. (His son, Kentucky Republican Rand Paul, is a U.S. senator and Tea Party favorite.)

Ron Paul's 2012 campaign website summarizes his policy views, which include abolishing the Federal Reserve and the IRS, eliminating income and capital-gains taxes and refusing to raise the debt ceiling.

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Perry’s Blunt Views in Books Get New Scrutiny as He Joins Race (New York Times)

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By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
September 2, 2011

WASHINGTON — Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, believes that climate change is a “contrived, phony mess.” The federal income tax was the “great milestone on the road to serfdom.” And the Boy Scouts of America are under attack by “a radical homosexual movement.”

Mr. Perry also thinks that senators should be chosen by legislatures, not the people. And he says that Social Security, the retirement program for the nation’s elderly, is a “failure” enacted during a power grab called the New Deal and is “something we have been forced to accept.”

Those blunt assertions are in two books Mr. Perry wrote while building a deep base of support in Texas among evangelical voters and Tea Party supporters. But the books have drawn new scrutiny now that Mr. Perry, a Republican, is running for president.

On Wednesday, Mr. Perry is likely to be asked about some of the statements he makes in the books when he takes the stage in his first nationally televised presidential debate. How he responds, and whether he defends the ideas or distances himself from them, will be an early test of his campaign.

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Joe Kaufman for Congress Reports: Obama and Wasserman Schultz sunning it up in Martha’s Vineyard

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This just in from the campaign of Florida Republican Joe Kaufman: the President of the United States took a week's vacation in late August and was visited by U.S. Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. That's important for Kaufman, because he's running against Wasserman Schultz in Florida’s Congressional District 20.

This past week, as America’s northeast got hit with an earthquake and readies itself for a potential hurricane, President Barack Obama and DNC Chair and U.S. Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz have been taking in the sun at Martha’s Vineyard.

While Obama has been hitting the golf course, Schultz, his number one cheerleader, has been heading up various fundraisers for the President, under the title ‘Voices for Obama.’

Republican candidate for United States Congress, Joe Kaufman, who is looking to unseat Wasserman Schultz in November 2012, stated “Americans and Floridians are suffering, jobs are scarce, food and gas prices are way too high, and the country is preparing to face another natural disaster. What’s the President and his assistant Debbie’s response? A Massachusetts vacation!”

Hard to believe the brass balls of Obama and Wasserman Schultz, taking time off while Congress is in session!

Wait... we're just getting breaking news from the crack researchers in the It's Political Bullshit newsroom...

This is shocking! Shocking!

Apparently the entire United States Congress -- the House of Representatives and the Senate -- is on vacation from August 8 through September 5!

We're also hearing that Obama ended his one-week vacation early this week to deal with the approach of Hurricane Irene along the Eastern Seaboard. The nerve of that man to go back to work after less than a week while Congress stays out an entire month till the end of Labor Day weekend!

For the benefit of Mr. Kaufman, to whom this will apparently also be news, here's a link to the 2011 vacation and holiday schedule for both houses of Congress, thanks to TheCapitol.net: http://www.thecapitol.net/FAQ/cong_schedule.html .



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In Campaign Events, Bachmann Controls Image (New York Times)

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By TRIP GABRIEL
August 24, 2011 

MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. — As Representative Michele Bachmann’s blue bus pulled up to a recent rally here, a campaign aide shooed a reporter poised to ask a question from the spot where she would step down. “Our arrivals are closed,” he said.  

After her speech under a scorching sun, Mrs. Bachmann popped back into the bus to freshen up before meeting reporters and their high-definition cameras, looking as pulled-together as if she had visited a day spa. 

All presidential candidates try to control their image. But the campaign of Mrs. Bachmann, the winner of the Iowa straw poll this month who is now battling to be seen as a national front-runner, is more controlling than most, carefully stage-managing her contacts with the news media and the public.

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Huntsman Says He’d Be Open to Being Bachmann’s VP (Slate.com)

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By Josh Voorhees
Aug. 23, 2011

Jon Huntsman said Monday that he’d be open to filling out the VP slot on the Republican ticket if Michele Bachmann were to win the party's presidential nomination.

Huntsman, who has so far struggled to break through into the top tier of GOP presidential candidates, made the somewhat surprising admission Monday night during an interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan. After Morgan then pointed out that his comments would likely be perceived as the admission of a possible defeat, Huntsman appeared to backtrack slightly, saying he gave a “more or less a hypothetical answer.”

As can be the case with television interviews, especially whenever politicians are concerned, it wasn’t exactly clear whether the interviewer and the interviewee were on exactly the same page. Still, Huntsman’s comments made clear that he’d be hard pressed to turn down the VP slot if offered, whether by Bachmann or another candidate.
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Comic’s PAC Is More Than a Gag (New York Times)

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By DAVID CARR

Published: August 21, 2011

Let’s start with a spot political quiz. Which of the following are legitimate political action committees known as Super PACs, and which is fake? 


A) Citizens for a Working America

B) Make Us Great Again

C) Citizens for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow

D) We Love USA

If you guessed that C was the fake, you’d be wrong. It was a trick question: these are all legitimate Super PACs. “Citizens for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow” was created by the comedian Stephen Colbert, which makes it funnier.

But not by much. Citizens for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow may be a running gag on “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central, but it is spending money as it sees fit, with little in the way of disclosure, just like its noncomedic brethren.

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What Would Hillary Clinton Have Done? (New York Times)

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By REBECCA TRAISTER

Published: August 17, 2011 

In the worst of the Democratic primary campaign in 2008, the angry end of the thing, when I had become a devoted Hillary Clinton supporter and was engaged in bitter arguments with people with whom I often agreed, I used to harbor a secret fear, the twin of my political hope: I worried that Hillary Clinton would win her party’s nomination.  

This possibility scared me because I knew, with a furious surety, that if she went on to win the presidency, I and the handful of other Clinton supporters in my privileged, mediacentric, Obama-drunk circle would be forced to spend the next four to eight years hearing the words “We told you so,” spoken at various accusatory pitches. Every time she made a compromise, lost a battle or started a war, those of us who had — often shamefacedly — proclaimed a preference for her would have to answer for it, and more profoundly, have to answer for the dream we dashed. We would have to apologize to the world for robbing it of an imagined Barack Obama presidency. 

Three years after that intense and acrimonious time, in a period of liberal disillusionment, some on the left are engaging in an inverse fantasy. Almost unbelievably, they are now daydreaming of how much better a Hillary Clinton administration might have represented them. 

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Year of the Elephant: Tampa & RNC 2012 (Creative Loafing/Tampa)

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 by Mitch Perry
August 18, 2011

Despite Florida's Democratic voter majority, Republicans dominate the state elections. And because the Sunshine State is as critical a battleground as any in the country, it makes sense that the GOP would hold its national convention in Florida.

But it's not just anywhere in Florida, of course — it's in Tampa, where organizers say they're ready for an expected 45,000 people (mostly delegates, reporters and protesters) to jam into the Cigar City the week of August 27, 2012, to observe the Republican Party's 40th national convention. The city was left at the altar in both 2004 and 2008 in its attempts to host the event, but as Mayor Bob Buckhorn would say, "This is our time." So what's going to happen?

Show us the money
 
When you write about a convention, you've got to employ a lot of dollar signs, since that seems to be really what the whole thing is about: cash.

And optimistic officials with the RNC Host Committee are expecting to bring in a lot of it — a boost to the Tampa Bay economy of approximately $175 million, the bulk of it to be spent on hotels, transportation, food, entertainment and security.

Is that number real? Other cities' track records suggest it could be. A study conducted by the Minneapolis/St. Paul 2008 Host Committee found that the GOP convention generated a direct economic impact of more than $153 million and an indirect impact of an additional $15 million. The Beacon Hill Institute says the 2004 GOP New York City convention generated $163 million.


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