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History > 2007 > USA > Politics (III)
Clinton
Says
She'd Give Up Some Powers
October 23,
2007
Filed at 1:04 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times
NEW YORK
(AP) -- If elected president in 2008, Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton would
consider giving up some of the executive powers President Bush and Vice
President Cheney have assumed since taking office.
In an interview published Tuesday in Guardian America, a Web site run by the
London-based Guardian newspaper, Clinton denounced the Bush Administration's
push to concentrate more power in the White House as a ''power grab'' not
supported by the Constitution.
Asked if she would consider giving up some of those powers if she were
president, Clinton replied, ''Oh, absolutely ... I mean, that has to be part of
the review that I undertake when I get to the White House, and I intend to do
that.''
Since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Bush and Cheney have taken several
steps to expand presidential authority and diminish the role of Congress and the
federal judiciary. Among other things, they have pushed for warrantless
wiretapping of terrorist suspects and the use of ''signing statements'' to
justify ignoring or defying laws enacted by Congress.
In the interview, Clinton noted that other presidents, including Abraham
Lincoln, had taken on new presidential powers but had gone back to Congress
later to ratify their actions.
Bush and Cheney had taken a different course, she said.
''There were a lot of actions which they took that were clearly beyond any power
the Congress would have granted, or that in my view was inherent in the
Constitution,'' Clinton said. ''There were other actions they've taken which
could have obtained Congressional authorization but they deliberately chose not
to pursue it as a matter of principle.''
----
On the Net:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections08/
hillaryclinton/story/0,,2197233,00.html
Clinton Says She'd Give Up Some Powers, NYT, 23.10.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Clinton-Executive-Power.html
Major
Presidential Candidates Will Spend
October 17,
2007
Filed at 10:36 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times
NEW YORK
(AP) -- Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards have
proposed vast policy programs costing billions of dollars. Republicans Rudy
Giuliani, Mitt Romney, John McCain and Fred Thompson have vowed to extend
President Bush's tax cuts and continue the multibillion-dollar wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan indefinitely.
The top candidates on both sides of the 2008 presidential contest have shown
their eagerness to spend tax dollars. But their priorities reflect widely
differing views of the role of government in addressing complex problems.
Clinton, Obama and Edwards have embraced ambitious government programs to help
provide health care and education and to conquer global warming. For the most
part, Clinton and Obama have offered specific ways to fund their proposals,
while Edwards has argued that running a modest federal deficit is acceptable if
it means investing in health care and reducing poverty.
Giuliani, Romney, McCain and Thompson promote tax cuts and the need to rein in
federal spending. They frequently deride their Democratic rivals as big
spenders, but are themselves reluctant to say what they would cut to pay for tax
cuts and U.S. military engagements.
Paul Weinstein, an economist at the centrist Progressive Policy Institute,
argues that candidates of both parties need to adjust their rhetoric if they are
to be taken seriously as responsible fiscal stewards.
''Democrats need to talk about budget cuts first -- not just things like closing
corporate loopholes, but specific programs they would cut to have the money
necessary for other things,'' he said. ''Republicans need to 'fess up' about the
fact that under the Republican leadership of the last six years, we've cut taxes
but we've also spent more and not managed our books. Low taxes are important for
growth but we also have to make a reasonable attempt to trim government.''
Here's where the major candidates are on federal programs, spending and tax
cuts:
DEMOCRATS:
Clinton's latest proposal, a $1 billion paid family leave program outlined
Tuesday and financed by eliminating some tax shelters, comes atop several other
major costly social programs she's outlined recently. But the New York senator
isn't the only Democrat advocating major new federal initiatives. Obama and
Edwards also have laid out multibillion-dollar programs on health care, energy
independence and tax fairness.
-- HEALTH CARE: Clinton, Obama and Edwards have outlined major health insurance
plans with the goal of providing universal coverage for all. Obama has estimated
his would cost $50 billion-$60 billion per year, while Clinton and Edwards say
theirs would cost closer to $100 billion annually. All say they would pay for
the plans largely by allowing Bush's tax cuts to expire on schedule in 2010.
-- ENERGY: They have proposed expensive initiatives to reduce the reliance on
fossil fuels.
Clinton wants to create a $50 billion ''strategic energy fund'' to develop new
sources of fuel and has proposed paying for it by eliminating tax subsidies for
oil companies. Edwards has outlined a similar program and would eliminate the
oil company subsidies as well as establish a cap-and-trade system requiring
companies to pay for emitting pollution.
Obama has pledged a 10-year, $150 billion program to produce ''climate
friendly'' energy supplies. To pay for it, he would implement a 100 percent
carbon auction where businesses would have to bid competitively for the right to
pollute.
-- TAX RELIEF: Obama and Edwards want to shift the income tax burden. Edwards'
$25 billion per year plan would cut middle-class taxes by raising the capital
gains rate on people making more than $250,000 per year. Obama's plan, projected
to cost $85 billion a year, would be funded by raising the capital gains rate
and closing some corporate tax loopholes.
-- RETIREMENT: With Social Security projected to run out of money in the next 40
years, Obama and Edwards say they would consider increasing the level of income
that is taxed to provide benefits. To fund the system, the government currently
assesses a 6.2 percent tax on incomes up to $97,500. Clinton has refused to say
whether she would support that idea. But to address the issue of retirement
security, she recently rolled out a $25 billion-per-year program to help
individuals set up 401(k) plans by offering a federal match of up to $1,000 per
person. She says she would pay for the plan by freezing the estate tax at 2009
levels.
REPUBLICANS:
-- IRAQ WAR: Giuliani, Romney, Thompson and McCain say they favor a protracted
military presence in Iraq, requiring tens of billions of dollars of continued
spending. The U.S. currently spends about $10 billion a month in Iraq and nearly
$2 billion a month to fight terrorism in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
-- TAX CUTS: All four would preserve Bush's cuts. The Congressional Budget
Office has estimated it would cost the government $2.3 trillion from between
2008 and 2017 if the expiring tax provisions were extended.
McCain, who has a long record as a spending hawk, voted against Bush's 2001 tax
cuts but now says they should be extended because doing otherwise would amount
to a tax increase.
Recently, the candidates have been challenged on the issue of the alternative
minimum tax. Originally introduced in 1970 over concern that wealthy families
were able to avoid paying federal income taxes, the AMT has never been indexed
for inflation and has begun to snag millions of middle-class taxpayers.
In a debate on economic issues last week, Thompson advocated indexing the AMT
for inflation and phasing it out altogether over time. But that would cost the
government $621 billion in revenue over the next 10 years, say the CBO and the
Joint Committee on Taxation.
Romney has said he would eliminate taxes on interest and dividends for families
earning less than $200,000 annually, which the campaign says would cost $32
billion. Aides say it would be paid for through economic growth and by holding
non-defense, discretionary spending to inflation minus 1 percentage point.
-- HEALTH CARE: Giuliani, McCain and Romney have proposed making health care
more affordable but have avoided assigning a price tag.
McCain was the most ambitious of the three, focusing on cost containment,
treating chronic diseases and providing tax subsidies to buy insurance. When he
unveiled the plan last week, McCain acknowledged that he didn't know how much it
would cost, but aides said it would be paid for by ending a provision in the tax
code that lets employers deduct the cost of health care from their taxable
earnings.
Giuliani also offered no cost estimate for his health plan, which would provide
tax credits to help individuals pay for insurance rather than relying on
employers to do so.
Romney has said his plan is revenue neutral. It would spend existing resources
and reroute federal dollars to the states to cover the uninsured with private
insurance. He has distanced himself from a major initiative passed in
Massachusetts while he was governor that requires all residents to buy health
insurance.
------
Associated Press Writer Liz Sidoti in Washington contributed to this report.
Major Presidential Candidates Will Spend, NYT, 17.10.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Candidates-Spending.html
Details
of Candidates' Fundraising
October 16,
2007
Filed at 3:48 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times
Details
from the candidates' fundraising reports:
CLINTON:
Total receipts to date: (includes contributions for primary and general
elections, loans and transfers) $90.9 million; (including $16.3 million for the
general election).
Total contributions to date: $80.4 million.
Total spending: $38.6 million.
Third quarter contributions: $27.3 million.
Third quarter spending: $21.3 million.
Third quarter transfers or loans: None.
Cash on hand: $50.5 million, $15.9 million of which is for the general election.
Debt: $2.3 million.
Top donor states this quarter: California, $4.5 million; New York, $4.2 million;
Florida, $1.4 million.
Employees of Morgan Stanley gave at least $207,670; Employees of Goldman Sachs
gave at least $186,540; employees of Citigroup gave at least $96,015.
Of note: The Clinton fundraising juggernaut continued unabated for the third
quarter, raising a like amount to the second quarter. The senator raised more
from the state of California than her home state and continued to draw big
contributions from Wall Street financiers.
OBAMA
Total receipts to date: (includes contributions for primary and general
elections, loans and transfers) $80.2 million. (including $4.2 million for the
general election)
Total contributions to date: $79.2 million.
Total spending:$43.8 million.
Third quarter contributions:$20.6 million.
Third quarter spending: $21.3 million.
Third quarter transfers or loans: none.
Cash on hand: $36.1 million, $4.2 million of which if for the general election.
Debt:$1.4 million
Top donor states this quarter: California, $3.7 million; New York, $1.7 million;
Illinois, $1.6 million.
Employees of the accounting firm KPMG gave at least $30,000; employees of Viacom
contributed at least $28,000 and staffers on Obama's campaign gave more than
$24,000.
Of note: Obama's fundraising declined in the third quarter and he spent slightly
more than he raised. He led Democrats in ad spending during the quarter,
devoting about $3.8 million to advertising placements and media production.
EDWARDS
Total receipts to date: (includes contributions for primary and general
elections, loans and transfers) $30.3 million. (including $2.4 million for the
general election).
Total contributions to date: $30.1 million.
Total spending: $17.7 million.
Third quarter contributions: $7.1 million.
Third quarter spending: $8.2 million.
Third quarter transfers or loans: none.
Cash on hand: $12.4 million, $2.4 million of which is for the general election.
Debt: None.
Top donor states this quarter: California, $987,000; Texas, $490,500; New York,
$355,000.
Employees of Florida-based law firm Stearns Weaver Miller Weissler Alhadeff &
Sitterson gave at least $34,000; employees of Morgan & Morgan, another
Florida-based law firm, contributed at least $26,000.
Of note: Edwards has said he will seek public matching funds to increase his
financial strength. He is eligible to receive at least $10 million in federal
funds, but must live with spending limits that other candidates like Obama and
Clinton don't have to observe.
BIDEN
Total receipts to date: (includes contributions for primary and general
elections, loans and transfers) $8.2 million (including $1.2 million for the
general election)
Total contributions to date: $6.2 million.
Total spending:$6.3 million .
Third quarter contributions:$1.72 million.
Third quarter spending: $2.6 million.
Third quarter transfers or loans: None.
Cash on hand: $1.9 million, of which $1.2 million is for the general election
Debt: $128,000.
Top donor states this quarter: New York, $471,000; Pennsylvania, $436,000;
Delaware, $397,000.
Lawyers with the Mississippi law firm of Patterson Balducci contributed more
than $26,000; lawyers with the litigation firm of Kreindler & Kreindler gave
$23,000.
Of note: Biden has been forced to run a frugal campaign. He spent about $1.2
million in media consultants and about $1 million on staff payroll. He travels
mostly on commercial flights, while his better heeled rivals charter planes.
DODD
Total receipts to date: (includes contributions for primary and general
elections, loans and transfers) $13.6 million (including $1.5 million for the
general election)
Total contributions to date: $8.8 million .
Total spending: $9.7 million.
Third quarter contributions: $1.5 million.
Third quarter spending: $4 million.
Third quarter transfers or loans: None.
Cash on hand: $3.9 million, of which $1.5 million is for the general election)
Debt: None.
Top donor states this quarter: New York, $317,000; Connecticut, $186,000;
California, $100,500.
Firefighters and union officials affiliated with the International Association
of Firefighters, which endorsed Dodd, gave at least $32,000; employees of Apollo
Management and Apollo Investments, related investment firms, gave at least
$32,000.
Of note: Dodd spent more than $1 million on television commercials between April
and June, placing more spots during the first nine months of the year than
Clinton, according to the Nielsen Co. Bu he cut back considerably during the
summer months as better financed rivals increased their media spending.
MCCAIN:
Total receipts to date: (includes contributions for primary and general
elections, loans and transfers) $32.1 million; (including $1.8 million for the
general election).
Total contributions to date: $30.6 million.
Total spending: $21.2 million.
Third quarter contributions: $5.7 million.
Third quarter spending: $1.8 million.
Third quarter transfers or loans: None.
Cash on hand: $3.5 million, $1.8 million of which is for the general election.
Debt: $1.7 million.
Top donor states this quarter: California, $570,353; New York, $461,068; Texas,
$358,390.
Employees of salesforce.com, a ''customer relationship management'' firm gave at
least $20,700; employees of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, a law firm, gave at
least $19,821; and Goldman Sachs workers gave at least $12,150.
Of note: McCain's campaign collected less than half the amount in contributions
in the third quarter than it did in the second. His spending has also dropped
off considerably as he has trimmed his campaign. His debt is slighlty higher
than his cash on hand available for the primary.
PAUL:
Total receipts to date: (includes contributions for primary and general
elections, loans and transfers) $8.3 million.
Total contributions to date: $8.2 million.
Total spending: $2.8 million.
Third quarter contributions: $5.2 million.
Third quarter spending: $2.1 million.
Third quarter transfers or loans: None.
Cash on hand: $5.4 million.
Debt: None.
Top donor states this quarter: California, $496,628; Texas, $399,218; Florida,
$183,504.
Members of the U.S. Army contributed at least $14,349 and Google Inc. workers
gave at least $12,200.
Of note: Ron Paul's long-shot campaign continues to gather steam as far as
fundraising is concerned. His total contributions for the third quarter were
more than twice what he received in the second. He also reported $5.4 million in
the bank.
RICHARDSON:
Total receipts to date: (includes contributions for primary and general
elections, loans and transfers) $18.7 million (including $674,679 for general
election).
Total contributions to date: $18.5 million.
Total spending: $12.8 million.
Third quarter contributions: $5.3 million.
Third quarter spending: $6.6 million.
Third quarter transfers or loans: None.
Cash on hand: $5.8 million.
Debt: None.
Top donor states this quarter: New Mexico, $995,064; California, $551,405; New
York, $332,747.
New Mexico state employees contributed at least $39,600; employees of Kaplan,
Fox & Kilsheimer gave at least $20,300 and employees of Dreier LLP gave at least
$12,150. Both are New York City law firms.
Of note: The New Mexico governor continues to draw support from his loyal
underlings. Mostly senior-level state employees were top givers to his campaign
for the quarter and have kicked in at least $257,230 overall. Another $42,150
has come from employees of the University of New Mexico thus far in the
campaign.
HUNTER:
Total receipts to date: (includes contributions for primary and general
elections, loans and transfers) $1.9 million.
Total contributions to date: $1.8 million.
Total spending: $1.8 million.
Third quarter contributions: $486,357.
Third quarter spending: $616,097.
Third quarter transfers or loans: $50,000.
Cash on hand: $132,742.
Debt: $50,000.
Top donor states this quarter: California, $51,549; Texas, $52,235; Nevada,
$9,400.
Of note: The California Republican loaned his campaign $50,000 this quarter.
KUCINICH:
Total receipts to date: (includes contributions for primary and general
elections, loans and transfers) $2.1 million.
Total contributions to date: $2.1 million.
Total spending: $1.8 million.
Third quarter contributions: $1 million.
Third quarter spending: $888,564 million.
Third quarter transfers or loans: None.
Cash on hand: $327,094.
Debt: None.
Top donor states this quarter: District of Columbia, $573,938; California,
$190,222; Washington, $23,615.
Of note: Kucinich's campaign, while not bringing in anywhere near the totals of
his better-known opponents, is trending in a positive direction. Contributions
topped $1 million for the first time in his campaign.
BROWNBACK:
Total receipts to date: (includes contributions for primary and general
elections, loans and transfers) $925,745.
Total contributions to date: $3.5 million.
Total spending: $4.1 million.
Third quarter contributions: $817,286.
Third quarter spending: $1.3 million.
Third quarter transfers or loans: None.
Cash on hand: $94,654.
Debt: None.
Top donor states this quarter: California, $70,673; Kansas, $54,581; Virginia,
$37,054.
Of note: Brownback's top contributor is a little-known technology startup called
M2Z Networks, whose employees gave at least $11,200 to the Kansas Republican.
The company wants to build a nationwide wireless broadband network.
ROMNEY:
Total receipts to date: (includes contributions for primary and general
elections, loans and transfers) $62.8 million.
Total contributions to date: $44.8 million.
Total spending: $52.8 million.
Third quarter contributions: $9.8 million.
Third quarter spending: $21 million.
Third quarter transfers or loans: $8.5 million.
Cash on hand: $9.2 million.
Debt: $17.4 million.
Top donor states this quarter: California, $1.3 million; Utah, $822,094;
Florida, $724,988.
Employees of The Villages, a Florida retirement community, gave at least
$58,100; Huron Consulting Group, at least $53,300; Credit Suisse Group, at least
$23,650.
Of note: Romney again leaned on his personal wealth, loaning his campaign $8.5
million in the third quarter. Contributions totaled $9.8 million while
expenditures were more than twice that. The former Massachusetts governor has
loaned his campaign a total of $17.4 million.
THOMPSON:
Total receipts to date: (includes contributions for primary and general
elections, loans and transfers) $12.8 million.
Total contributions to date: $12.8 million.
Total spending: $5.7 million.
Third quarter contributions: $9.3 million.
Third quarter spending: $5.4 million.
Third quarter transfers or loans: None.
Cash on hand: $7.1 million.
Debt: $678,432.
Top donor states this quarter: Tennessee, $1.7 million; Texas, $1 million;
Florida, $471,087.
Employees of the Morgan Stanley financial services firm gave at least $34,200;
Winston & Strawn law and lobbying firm, at least $25,800; Deutsche Bank, at
least $20,950.
Of note: Thompson was the last major candidate to begin fundraising, waiting
until June to hit the money trail. Notable home-state donors include John Rich
of the country duo Big & Rich, who gave the maximum $2,300 for Thompson's
primary campaign. Though Thompson is an actor, Hollywood has yet to rally around
him; there are no famous actors on his donor list.
GIULIANI:
Total receipts to date: (includes contributions for primary and general
elections, loans and transfers) $47.3 million (including $5 million for general
election).
Total contributions to date: $45 million ($5 million for general election).
Total spending: $30.1 million.
Third quarter contributions: $11.5 million.
Third quarter spending: $13.1 million.
Third quarter transfers or loans: none.
Cash on hand: $16.6 million ($5 million for general election).
Debt: $169,256.
Top donor states this quarter: New York, $2 million; California, $1.1 million;
Texas, $970,310.
Employees of R.B.S. Greenwich Capital gave at least $47,000; Tempus Resorts
International, at least $36,800; Ernst & Young LLP, at least $29,550.
Of note: Giuliani raised $11.5 million for the third quarter but spent $13.1
million. The campaign has $16.6 million on hand, though $5 million is reserved
for the general election. Among the former New York mayor's contributors of
note: NASCAR. Employees of the stock racing organization chipped in at least
$17,900.
HUCKABEE:
Total receipts to date: (includes contributions for primary and general
elections, loans and transfers) $2.3 million.
Total contributions to date: $2.3 million.
Total spending: $1.7 million.
Third quarter contributions: $1 million.
Third quarter spending: $819,376.
Third quarter transfers or loans: none.
Cash on hand: $651,300.
Debt: $47,810.
Top donor states this quarter: Arkansas, $112,217; Texas, $94,168; California,
$61,890.
Employees of the Bentley Forbes real estate investment company gave at least
$6,900; the Stephens Inc. investment bank, $4,600; Northrop Grumman aircraft
company, $2,550.
Of note: Huckabee's $1 million haul marks his best fundraising quarter so far,
but with less than that in the bank, he lags far behind the front-runners on the
money trail. The conservative Government is Not God political action committee
gave the former governor $2,500 in the third quarter.
Details of Candidates' Fundraising, NYT, 16.10.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Fundraising-Glance.html
Clinton
Now Ahead of Obama in Money Race
October 16,
2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:04 a.m. ET
The New York Times
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton has pulled ahead of rival Barack Obama
at the bank as well as in the polls and both continue to crush Republicans in
the money race.
Clinton holds nearly $35 million three months before the voting starts, to
Obama's $32 million.
The Republican money leader, Rudy Giuliani, reported $11.6 million in the bank
for the primaries.
Clinton, who had trailed Obama in fundraising and in money in the bank at the
end of June, edged past him with an aggressive third quarter of fundraising.
The New York senator, who also has been raising money for the general election,
had a total of $50.5 million in the bank, her campaign reported. But nearly $16
million of that cannot be used for the primaries.
She reported raising $23.7 million for the primary and had operating expenses of
$21.3 million. Obama spent a nearly identical amount, but he raised $19.3
million in the quarter. They each reported debts -- Clinton owed $2.3 million
and Obama owed $1.4 million.
Democrat John Edwards reported $12.4 million in the bank after raising nearly
$7.2 million and spending almost $8.3 million during the quarter. New Mexico
Gov. Bill Richardson, trying to establish himself among the Democratic leaders,
reported $5.8 million in the bank. He raised $5.3 million in the quarter and
spent $6.6 million.
Among Republicans, Mitt Romney spent $21 million during the third quarter, more
than twice what he raised during the period and more than what he spent in
previous quarters, according to his FEC report.
John McCain, enjoying something of a resurgence in the polls after a dismal
second quarter, reported more than $1.6 million cash on hand for the primaries
and more than $1.7 million in debts, putting his campaign in the red. McCain has
an extra $1.8 million in the bank that can only be used if he wins the
Republican nomination.
McCain's financial condition may force him to accept public financing for his
campaign, providing an infusion of cash but limiting how much he can spend.
McCain's report detailed how his primary spending has been allocated by state,
an indication that he is prepared to accept matching federal money.
Romney, a former Massachusetts governor and venture capitalist, has been tapping
his personal wealth to supplement money from contributors. He raised $9.8
million and lent his campaign $8.5 million over the summer.
Giuliani reported spending $13 million during the same period, compared to the
$10.2 million he raised for the primary campaign. Giuliani also raised about
$1.3 million to spend on the general election if he wins the nomination.
Fred Thompson, who didn't officially enter the race until early September,
reported spending $5.4 million during the quarter, more than half of it last
month.
Thompson, whose report covers fundraising and spending since June, when he began
exploring a presidential bid, raised $12.8 million during that four
month-period. He reported $7.1 million in the bank at the end of September, as
well as $678,000 in debts.
Romney reported $9.2 million cash in hand, thanks in large part to the $17.5
million he has funneled into his campaign since the beginning of the year. He
has raised $45 million since January, but leads all Republican candidates with
$52.8 million in spending for the year.
In the Republican surprise of the quarter, long-shot candidate Ron Paul
capitalized on his anti-war stance and Internet following to amass $5.2 million
in contributions. He reported $5.4 million cash on hand at the end of September.
As a group Romney, Giuliani and Thompson enter the final stretch before the
first nominating contests with money to spend on get-out-the-vote and
advertising campaigns.
Giuliani led the Republican field in fundraising this summer, according to early
estimates provided by the campaigns, though his July-September total fell from
his high during April-June. It was the first time Giuliani's campaign spent more
than it raised during a quarter.
Thompson, the former Tennessee senator and actor on NBC's ''Law & Order,''
raised $9.3 million of his $12.8 million total during July-September.
Among Democrats, Clinton used the third quarter to secure her place as a
national front-runner. She has recently hit 50-percent support among Democrats
in national polls, though the race is closer in Iowa, where she holds a small
lead in a cluster with Obama and Edwards.
Her biggest expenditure for the quarter was $4 million for salaries followed by
$2.2 million for travel. Her advertising expenses, which are beginning to
increase, were $1.7 million.
Clinton also refunded $1.2 million to donors, including more than $800,000 to
donors linked to disgraced Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu.
Obama had a $3.8 million payroll for the quarter and spent $2.3 million on
travel.
Giuliani is the Republican front-runner nationally, but he lags behind Romney in
the leadoff caucus state of Iowa. In New Hampshire, another important early
voting state, polls show the race a virtual toss-up among Giuliani, Romney and
John McCain. Thompson also is competitive with the top tier in state and
national polls.
According to Giuliani's report, the campaign spent more than $2 million on
payroll and $1.3 million on travel from July-September, about as much as it had
during the first six months of the year.
His campaign increased advertising this quarter, spending nearly $470,000 on
radio and newspapers, including a full-page ad in The New York Times last month
that criticized Clinton, the Democratic front-runner. Giuliani leads all
candidates in radio advertising with more than 640 spots in several states,
according to the Nielsen television ratings company.
Romney has spent much more on television, but radio is cheaper and can be
targeted to specific audiences.
Romney spent nearly $6 million on television and radio commercials, bringing his
total ad spending for the year to a whopping $12.7 million. So far, Romney has
placed the most political ads on the air than any candidate, Democrat or
Republican. The Nielsen Co., which also monitors advertising, reported Monday
that Romney had placed 10,600 television ads from Jan. 1 to Oct. 10. Richardson,
the Democrat, was second with 5,800 television spots.
Both candidates, little known outside their states or national political
circles, have used their ads to increase their name recognition, particularly in
Iowa, the state scheduled to hold the first-in-the-nation caucuses in early
January.
Obama ramped up his advertising toward the end of third quarter, spending nearly
$3.3 million on media. He has placed more than 4,200 spots on television,
practically all of them in Iowa, according to Nielsen. Clinton has placed nearly
2,200 spots, with more than 1,600 airing in Iowa. According to Nielsen, Clinton
also has placed a small number of ads in other states, including New York,
Tennessee, Louisiana and Arizona.
------
Associated Press writers John Dunbar and Sharon Theimer contributed to this
report.
Clinton Now Ahead of Obama in Money Race, NYT, 16.10.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Campaign-Fundraising.html
Voting
Machines Giving Florida New Headache
October 13,
2007
The New York Times
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
MIAMI, Oct.
12 — It used to be that everyone wanted a Florida voting machine.
After the history-making presidential recount of 2000, Palm Beach County sold
hundreds of its infamous Votomatic machines to memorabilia seekers, including a
group of chiropractors in Arizona, the cable-news host Greta Van Susteren and
the hotelier André Balazs. One machine ended up in the Smithsonian Institution.
Dozens were transformed into pieces of contemporary art for an exhibition in New
York.
But now that Florida is purging its precincts of 25,000 touch-screen voting
machines — bought after the recount for up to $5,000 each, hailed as the way of
the future but deemed failures after five or six years — no one is biting.
“I think we are going to have them on hand for a while,” said Arthur Anderson,
the elections supervisor in Palm Beach County, which must jettison 4,900
touch-screen machines for which it paid $14.5 million in 2001 and still owes
$4.8 million. “They are probably, for the most part, headed to the scrap pile.”
Across the nation, jurisdictions that experimented with touch-screen voting
after 2000 are starting to scale back or abandon it based on a growing
perception that the machines are unreliable and concern that they do not provide
a paper trail in case questions arise. California will sharply scale back
touch-screen voting next year after a review by the secretary of state found it
was vulnerable to hackers.
Florida is the biggest state to reject touch screens so sweepingly, and its
deadline for removing them, July 1, 2008, is the most imminent. For the 15
counties that must dump their expensive systems, buy new optical-scan machines
and retrain thousands of poll workers, hurdles abound.
Six counties still owe a combined $33 million on their touch-screen machines,
which most bought hurriedly to comply with a new federal law banning punch-card
and lever voting systems after the recount. Miami-Dade County alone must cast
aside 7,200 touch-screen machines, for which it paid $24.5 million and still
owes $15 million.
Secretary of State Kurt S. Browning is seeking buyers for the touch screens, but
he will not even begin to recoup the counties’ losses. Inquiries have come from
a Veterans Affairs hospital in Miami, which hoped to convert some of the
machines into “learning kiosks” for disabled patients, and the Century Village
retirement community in Palm Beach County, which wanted them for condo
association elections.
Sequoia Voting Systems, which manufactured some of Florida’s machines, offered
to buy them back for a bleak $1 apiece.
“We’re not accepting that offer,” said Sterling Ivey, a spokesman for the
Florida Division of Elections. “We can get more for our money.”
So far, Mr. Ivey said, the most likely options are selling the machines to
recycling companies that would strip them for parts — from the wheels on the
voting booths to the circuit boards — or reselling them to other states or
countries through one of the original vendors, Election Systems and Software of
Omaha.
“We would expect a number of jurisdictions to be interested in adding to their
existing voting terminals as they prepare for the 2008 general election,” said
Ken Fields, a spokesman for the company.
Most of the money for the touch screens came from the federal government, and so
will most for the replacement machines, which cost about $6,000 each. But with
Florida county budgets tightening due to a state mandate to cut property taxes,
election officials are griping.
“I think it’s a real waste of money,” said Kay Clem, the elections supervisor in
Indian River County. “I don’t have my heart in it, because I think we’re going
30 years backwards.”
Under the state’s new election law, disabled voters can keep voting by touch
screen — akin to using an A.T.M. — until 2012. But everyone else will use them
only twice more, for the presidential primaries on Jan. 29 and municipal
elections next spring. With optical scanning, voters use pens to mark paper
ballots that are then read by scanning machines, leaving a paper record for
recounts.
The only county that has already switched is Sarasota, where voters last year
approved a charter amendment requiring a paper-ballot system. More than 18,000
votes cast on touch-screen machines were not recorded in a close Congressional
race in the county last year, raising an outcry that hastened the statewide
switch to optical scanning.
Sarasota County’s touch-screen machines are sequestered under court order while
an investigation into last year’s election continues. Most of the other counties
getting new equipment will ask the state to cart their touch screens away after
the presidential primaries.
“I will get them off my hands, one way or the other,” Mr. Browning said.
Like many other county election officials, he said he still believed in
touch-screen voting, calling it “a very accurate, secure, reliable system.” He
supports the switch to optical scanners, Mr. Browning said, only because the
public no longer trusts touch screens.
“If you were to do a very thorough study of problems with touch screens,” he
said, “you would probably find that 99.9 percent of them would be traced back to
human error.”
Public interest groups almost universally supported the move to optical
scanning, which is now thought more reliable than touch-screen voting, if only
because it leaves a paper trail.
One problem that could persist is poor ballot design, which was responsible for
widespread voter confusion in Palm Beach County in 2000 and possibly for the
not-recorded votes in Sarasota County last year. Mr. Browning said the state
would revise its ballot design rule in time for the presidential election in
2008.
As for the displeasure of election supervisors, Mr. Browning said it was
understandable given that for many this would be the third voting system in
eight years.
“After a while, you get a little change-weary,” he said. “Nothing seems to be
stable or constant anymore. But I am very, very hopeful that this is the last
major change to voting systems in Florida for some time.”
Voting Machines Giving Florida New Headache, NYT,
13.10.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/us/politics/13voting.html?hp
The Web,
Despite Its Promise, Fails to Snare Iowa Voters
October 13,
2007
The New York Times
By JULIE BOSMAN
IOWA CITY,
Oct. 6 — Jean M. James, a retired art historian, has never read a blog, visited
a candidate’s Web site, watched a video on YouTube or lingered over a MySpace
page.
“I can’t be bothered,” Ms. James, sitting at a barbecue for Johnson County
Democrats, said crisply before burying her nose in a Seymour Hersh article in
The New Yorker.
It’s not that the Democratic presidential campaigns in Iowa haven’t tried to
reach out. Their staffs have bombarded prospective caucusgoers with e-mail and
text messages and with recorded voice mail from celebrities. They have built
elaborate MySpace and Facebook pages in the candidates’ names, adding thousands
of online “friends.” And aides adorned with new titles like “director of
e-strategy” talk rapturously of how the Internet is transforming politics.
Yet even the campaigns concede that many caucusgoers in Iowa are happily encased
in an old-media bubble, immune to the digital overtures of the modern
presidential campaign and much more tuned in to commercials on television than
to videos on a candidate’s Web site.
“It’s clearly true,” said Joe Trippi, a senior adviser to former Senator John
Edwards, “that blogs and Web sites, and even some of the cool stuff that our
team is doing in Iowa, has got less of an impact in Iowa.”
One reason is that the state’s population is older, and so are its caucus
voters. According to the 2004 National Election Pool entrance poll in Iowa, 27
percent of Democratic caucusgoers were 65 or older — people less likely to
download candidate podcasts, though more inclined to withstand the rigors of
caucusing, which can require hours of votes and revotes.
Using technology to attract younger, first-time voters was crucial to Howard
Dean’s strategy four years ago, and Mr. Edwards and Senator Barack Obama have
tried to mimic it. (Indeed, Mr. Obama in particular appears to have plenty of
young supporters, although it is unclear whether they will actually caucus.)
But privately, campaign aides say the ramped-up Internet efforts are intended to
build buzz and positive press, with little expectation that they will translate
directly into votes. (Mr. Dean, once considered the 2004 Democratic
front-runner, finished third in Iowa.)
Though the typical caucus voters here are avid followers of the news, they get
their information in traditional ways. They read the morning papers, watch the
network news and tune in to the Sunday news programs with the fervor of
Washington political operatives. As Brenda Brenneman, a graphic artist from Lone
Tree, Iowa, gushed, “If ‘This Week With George Stephanopoulos’ wasn’t on, I
wouldn’t get out of bed on Sunday morning.”
Talk radio, still a hugely influential medium, even reaches farmers out in the
fields, whose tractors often come equipped with satellite radio.
But new
media?
Even in a crowd of Democrats in the college town of Iowa City, mingling over
lemonade and apple pie at their annual barbecue, it was hard to find many people
who had so much as heard of the king of all liberal blogs, Daily Kos. (“Daily
Post?” one man repeated quizzically.)
Rick Zimmermann, a lawyer in Iowa City, said he picked up two or three
newspapers a day but never read blogs or online commentary. “That stuff has
never seemed important to me,” he said.
According to a poll commissioned by The Des Moines Register, newspapers and
television are still the predominant sources of information for likely Iowa
caucus voters.
The poll, conducted by Selzer & Company, a firm based in Des Moines, asked
likely caucus voters in May how they got their information, and found that the
traditional media were still the favorites.
While more than 70 percent of the respondents said they watched candidate
debates, read newspaper articles about campaigns and took in campaign
advertisements on television or radio, only about 7 percent visited candidate
pages on the social-networking sites MySpace and Facebook.
J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Company, said that while the occasional
Internet phenomenon — like the “Obama girl” video several months ago — could
trickle down to Iowa voters, it remained a rare event.
“People were hoping to see an explosion of new media — blogs and Web sites — but
it really isn’t that strong,” Ms. Selzer said.
Some of the campaigns are realizing that.
Mr. Edwards in particular has embraced the Internet just as Mr. Dean did in
2004, even hiring Mr. Trippi, the Internet Svengali who managed Mr. Dean’s
campaign.
In July, Mr. Trippi said in an interview that “you need to use the Internet,
blogs, technology, YouTube, to reach out to people.”
Elizabeth Edwards, the candidate’s wife, who is known as a close reader of
political blogs, echoed his sentiments. “The Internet is the principal way we
are communicating with voters right now,” she said.
But in a recent interview, Mr. Trippi made a slight amendment. “It’s less true
in Iowa,” he said. “Iowa is the older generation of Americans in terms of the
way it skews demographically. In terms of being wired or connected, Internet
penetration is relatively low.”
New Hampshire voters, by contrast, appear more plugged in. Many residents live
in the Boston media market and work in the technology industry. And while local
blogs are scarce in Iowa, they have proliferated in New Hampshire.
Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor seeking the Republican
nomination, is one candidate whose campaign has relied on old-fashioned methods
of reaching voters in Iowa. Mr. Romney has been saturating the airwaves with
television commercials in both Iowa and New Hampshire — at least 10,000 spots so
far.
“By every measure, Iowa caucusgoers still get their news through traditional
media,” said Tim Albrecht, a spokesman for Mr. Romney in Iowa. “We still do the
traditional postcard and phone call.”
The Web, Despite Its Promise, Fails to Snare Iowa Voters,
NYT, 13.10.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/us/politics/13blogging.html
Clinton
Unveils Health Care Plan
September
17, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:49 p.m. ET
The New York Times
DES MOINES,
Iowa (AP) -- Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday
offered a sweeping health care reform plan to ensure coverage for all Americans
with federal assistance to help defray the cost.
Thirteen years after her first effort was abandoned -- but saying she still bore
the scars from that failure, Clinton described her new plan as necessary to
address the crisis of some 47 million uninsured.
''I believe everyone -- every man, woman and child -- should have quality,
affordable health care in America,'' the New York senator told an audience in
Iowa. She vowed to accomplish the goal in her first term.
Her original plan was an unprecedented initiative for a first lady. This time,
she is offering a $110 billion a year program as a candidate for the presidency,
in the leadoff state that is her toughest battleground. The health care plan
came late in her primary campaign, after several rivals had already described
their visions.
''Perhaps more than anybody else I know just how hard this fight will be,''
Clinton said.
Dismissing the inevitable Republican criticism, Clinton admonished the crowd.
''I know my Republican opponents will try to equate health care for all
Americans with government-run health care. Don't let them fool us again. This is
not government-run.''
Clinton says she has learned from the 1990s experience, which almost derailed
Bill Clinton's presidency and helped put Republicans in control of Congress for
years to come. Aides say she has jettisoned the complexity and uncertainty of
the last effort in favor of a plan that stresses simplicity, cost control and
consumer choice.
The centerpiece of Clinton's ''American Health Choices Plan'' is the so-called
''individual mandate,'' requiring everyone to have health insurance -- just as
most states require drivers to purchase auto insurance. Rival John Edwards has
also offered a plan that includes an individual mandate, while the proposal
outlined by Barack Obama does not.
The Democratic presidential contenders have been united in advocating universal
coverage. They have parted ways on certain specifics, including the individual
mandate, which has detractors from both ends of the political spectrum.
Republican skeptics say it would be too invasive and would restrict personal
freedom and choice. Liberal Democrats have expressed concern that such a mandate
would be too financially burdensome for lower-income individuals and families --
a concern shared by Obama, who has said individuals cannot be forced to purchase
insurance until the cost of coverage is substantially reduced.
Aides said Clinton believes that an individual mandate is the only way to
achieve health care for all. A key component of her plan would be a federal tax
subsidy to help individuals pay for coverage.
Clinton's plan builds on the existing employer-based system of coverage. People
who receive insurance through the workplace could continue to do so; businesses,
in turn, would be required to offer insurance to employees, or contribute to a
government-run pool that would help pay for those not covered. Clinton would
also offer a tax subsidy to small businesses to help them afford the cost of
providing coverage to their workers.
For individuals and families who are not covered by employers or whose
employer-based coverage is inadequate, Clinton would offer expanded versions of
two existing government programs: Medicare, and the health insurance plan
currently offered to federal employees. Consumers could choose between either
government-run program, but aides stress that no new federal bureaucracy would
be created under the Clinton plan.
Clinton proposed several specific measures to pay for her plan, including an end
to some of the Bush-era tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 per year.
Edwards has vowed to completely repeal the tax cuts for high earners to pay for
the cost of his plan, estimated at $90 billion-$120 billion per year, while
Obama would pay for his plan in part by letting the tax cuts expire in 2010.
In response, Obama said Clinton's plan is similar to one he proposed in the
spring, ''though my universal health care plan would go further in reducing the
punishing cost of health care than any other proposal that's been offered in
this campaign.''
He took another swipe at the Clinton administration's closed-door sessions on
health care in the 1990s, saying ''the real key to passing any health care
reform is the ability to bring people together in an open, transparent process
that builds a broad consensus for change.''
Other Democratic rivals were swift in their criticism.
Delaware Sen. Joe Biden said, ''If universal health-care plans could have gotten
us health care, we would have gotten it a long time ago,'' while Connecticut
Sen. Chris Dodd said, ''To ensure all Americans have affordable health care will
take more than leadership that simply knows how to fight.''
Added John Edwards: ''If you're going to negotiate universal health care with
the same powerful interests that defeated it before, your proposal isn't a plan,
it's a starting point.''
Republican Mitt Romney, in New York City for a fundraising stop, criticized
Clinton's proposal, saying, '''Hillary care' continues to be bad medicine ... in
her plan, we have Washington-managed health care. Fundamentally, she takes her
inspiration from European bureaucracies.''
The plan that Romney helped institute while governor of Massachusetts requires
the same individual insurance mandate as Clinton's and uses state subsidies to
help reduce the cost of private coverage. Since then, Romney has said he would
leave it up to the states to decide whether they supported such a mandate.
Said Republican Rudy Giuliani's campaign: ''Senator Clinton's latest health
scheme includes more government mandates, expensive federal subsidies and more
big bureaucracy -- in short, prescription for an increase in wait times, a
decrease in patient care and tax hikes to pay for it all.''
------
Associated Press Writer Ashley M. Heher in Chicago contributed to this report.
------
http://www.hillaryclinton.com
Clinton Unveils Health Care Plan, NYT, 17.9.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Clinton-Health-Care.html?hp
Clinton
to Propose Universal Health Care
September
16, 2007
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR
WASHINGTON,
Sept. 15 — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday will lay out a plan to
secure health insurance for all Americans while severely limiting the ability of
insurers to deny coverage or charge higher premiums to people with chronic
illnesses and other medical problems, her aides and advisers say.
Mrs. Clinton’s purpose, they said, is not only to cover the 47 million people
who are uninsured but to improve the quality of health care and make insurance
more affordable for those who already have it.
The goal of Mrs. Clinton’s plan, to be outlined in a speech in Des Moines, is
similar to that of the ill-fated plan that she and President Bill Clinton pushed
in 1993 and 1994.
But advisers to Mrs. Clinton, a Democrat from New York, said Saturday that she
would try to avoid the perception that she was advocating a bureaucratic,
big-government solution. That perception, promoted by conservative Republicans
and the insurance industry, sank the Clinton plan in 1994.
In her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Mrs. Clinton
routinely receives applause when she admits having made mistakes as first lady.
“I’ve tangled with this issue before, and I’ve got the scars to show for it,”
she said recently.
Previewing her speech, Clinton aides said she would assert on Monday that there
was a moral imperative to ensure that “every single American has quality
affordable health coverage,” just as she contends there is an economic
imperative to rein in costs.
Phil Singer, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said Saturday that he could
not provide details. But aides and advisers who spoke on condition on anonymity
said that Mrs. Clinton would propose expanding the Children’s Health Insurance
Program as a step toward universal coverage. She has denounced President Bush’s
efforts to restrict eligibility and limit spending on the program.
Clinton aides said her plan would preserve a large role for private insurance
companies; would promote the use of health information technology and low-cost
generic drugs; and would create a public-private institute to evaluate and
compare drugs, devices and medical treatments.
Mrs. Clinton will not try to impose an overall limit on national health
spending, the aides said. But she is prepared once again to do battle with
insurance companies, which she has said “spend tens of billions of dollars a
year figuring out how not to cover people” and “how to cherry-pick the
healthiest persons, and leave everyone else out in the cold.”
Aides to Mrs. Clinton said her proposal would elaborate several ideas that she
has floated this year.
They said, for example, that Mrs. Clinton would amplify a comment in March when
she declared, “We could require that every insurance company had to insure
everybody, with no exclusion for pre-existing conditions.”
On another occasion, she vowed, “As president, I will end the practice of
insurance company cherry-picking once and for all by allowing anyone who wants
to join a plan to do so, and by prohibiting insurance companies from carving out
benefits or charging higher rates to people with health problems.”
Karen M. Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the chief lobby
for insurers, said they endorsed the goal of universal coverage. But Ms. Ignagni
said that insurers denied only 3 percent of claims, and that many of those were
for experimental procedures that employers did not cover.
Mary Nell Lehnhard, senior vice president of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield
Association, said, “Some of Mrs. Clinton’s proposals, while trying to make
insurance more affordable for older, sicker people, could unintentionally drive
up costs for young, healthy people and ultimately for everyone.”
Mrs. Clinton’s role as architect and champion of the plan to remake the nation’s
health care system in 1993 and 1994 is still hotly debated.
In an essay posted Friday on the Web site of The American Prospect, Paul Starr,
who was a senior adviser at the White House in 1993, said that Bill Clinton had
“settled on the basic model for reform” before he took office. Mrs. Clinton’s
role was “not to choose a policy, but to develop the one that the president had
already adopted,” said Mr. Starr, a Princeton professor and co-founder of The
American Prospect, a liberal journal.
But aides to Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, one of Mrs. Clinton’s rivals for
the Democratic presidential nomination, said she bore a large measure of
responsibility for the fiasco.
She insisted on developing the 1993-94 plan under a veil of secrecy, refused to
compromise on her vision of “health care reform” and threatened to demonize
anyone who tried to block it, the Obama aides said.
Clinton to Propose Universal Health Care, NYT, 16.9.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/us/politics/16clinton.html?hp
Behind
an Antiwar Ad, a Powerful Liberal Group
September
15, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO and JEFF ZELENY
There is no
mistaking the influence of MoveOn.org, with its 3.2 million members and powerful
fund-raising apparatus, within the Democratic Party.
This liberal activist group has come to occupy a prominent seat at the table
among the party elite, so much so that Republicans leaped at a chance to hold
Democrats and their presidential candidates responsible for MoveOn’s positions
after it ran an advertisement attacking the credibility of Gen. David H.
Petraeus.
MoveOn, which has raised tens of millions of dollars for Democratic candidates
since its inception in 1998, clearly enjoys friendly relations with Democratic
Party officials. Its leaders have met several times over the year with Speaker
Nancy Pelosi and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, to discuss policy and
strategy on ending the Iraq war.
MoveOn representatives also take part, as co-founders of a coalition of antiwar
groups together under the umbrella Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, in a
daily conference call with the Democratic leadership staff on Capitol Hill to
coordinate efforts.
Despite conservatives’ efforts to lump together the grass-roots organization and
the party and to force individual Democrats to take responsibility for MoveOn’s
wordplay on General Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, as “General
Betray Us” in its advertisement in The New York Times, the relationship between
the two is often complicated and, at times, shows visible fractures.
“I think Democrats understand that when we can join forces and work together,
it’s very powerful,” said Eli Pariser, executive director of MoveOn Political
Action. “And then when we can’t, it’s not fun.”
This month, MoveOn sent an e-mail message to members asking whether it should
start organizing potential primary challenges against Democrats who were not
tough enough on the war, a move that upset Democratic leaders. The group plans
to announce the results of its survey on Monday.
The group also sent a strongly worded warning in the spring to Democratic
leaders on Capitol Hill not to capitulate to the White House as they struggled
to come up with a strategy after President Bush’s veto of the $124 billion Iraq
spending bill that tied the money to a troop withdrawal timetable.
“We felt it was important for Reid and Pelosi to understand, if they were unable
to come through to a conclusion that was seen as bold, they were going to lose
the faith of a lot of people,” Mr. Pariser said.
With its attention primarily focused on Congress, MoveOn has yet to become
vigorously involved in the 2008 presidential race, although its members have
been encouraged at points to telephone Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and
Barack Obama’s offices to keep them in line on Iraq. Next week, it is beginning
an advertising campaign against the Republican candidate Rudolph W. Giuliani in
Iowa. Mr. Giuliani took out an advertisement yesterday in The Times attacking
the group and Mrs. Clinton.
The group has held two online presidential forums, one on Iraq in April and the
other on climate change in July. Mr. Obama, of Illinois, came out on top in a
straw poll for offering the best hope for leading the country out of Iraq and
John Edwards won on climate change.
Mrs. Clinton, of New York, trailed significantly in both.
“Anybody who has 3.2 million people in an organization and can mobilize and
raise resources and things, they are going to have a big impact,” said Joe
Trippi, a senior adviser to Mr. Edwards.
MoveOn has shown a willingness to depart from party orthodoxy on campaigns. Last
year, despite party leaders’ entreaties, it took an active role in aiding the
antiwar candidacy of Ned Lamont, who was trying to unseat Senator Joseph I.
Lieberman of Connecticut, then a Democrat supporting the war effort.
Mr. Lamont won the Democratic primary. Mr. Lieberman ran as an independent in
the general election and kept his seat.
“It’s good for the Democrats to have an engaged and vocal left,” said Jenny
Backus, a Democratic strategist in Washington. “It’s something the Republicans
have benefited from in the last couple campaign cycles. It allows Democrats to
look moderate. A vocal left keeps the party from drifting toward triangulation.”
Democratic leaders in Congress and presidential campaigns said they winced when
they saw the MoveOn advertisement. While they may have agreed with its overall
point, that the troop buildup has not worked, several Democratic officials said
privately that the advertisement had been counterproductive.
They said MoveOn had handed Republicans a fresh talking point to criticize
Democrats and turn the focus from Iraq in a critical week in the war debate.
Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said on MSNBC that the
advertisement was “simply over the top, and I think it’s inappropriate, period.”
Ms. Pelosi said on “Good Morning America” on ABC that she “would have preferred
that they not do such an ad.”
Republicans have called on Democratic Congressional leaders and presidential
candidates to disavow the advertisement, but they have largely declined.
Several officials said even though the text of in the advertisement might be
over the top, public sentiment shared a frustration over the war. Officials said
they did not want to play into the Republican Party’s hands or anger MoveOn
members.
Behind an Antiwar Ad, a Powerful Liberal Group, NYT,
15.9.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/washington/15moveon.html
McCain:
I Was Right About Iraq Strategy
September
11, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:19 p.m. ET
The New York Times
SIOUX CITY,
Iowa (AP) -- Republican presidential hopeful John McCain said Tuesday that he
was right from the start about the war strategy in Iraq.
''For almost four years we pursued a failed policy in Iraq. ... I condemned it,
I was criticized by Republicans and others for doing so, and I saw it was doomed
to failure and I argued for the strategy that is now succeeding,'' McCain said.
The current strategy under Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq,
including the infusion of thousands of additional troops, is right on track,
McCain said.
''This strategy is working. It is succeeding, and it must be given a chance to
succeed,'' he said.
McCain spoke at an airport hangar in western Iowa, where he made a grand
entrance from his campaign bus for two days of appearances, part of a tour he
has dubbed ''No Surrender.''
McCain is trying to breathe new life into his campaign, which has floundered
partly because of his unwavering support for the war and for the addition of
thousands more troops to Iraq.
He flew in from Washington, where as the top Republican on the Senate Armed
Services Committee he questioned Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker about
the military and political situation in Iraq.
Both officials acknowledged that Iraq remains largely dysfunctional but said
violence had decreased since the addition of U.S. troops.
McCain said he understands ''the bitterness'' of the debate over the war. But he
said Americans can either choose to support U.S. troops and the strategy or ''we
can choose to lose.''
''I choose to win, I choose to stay and I choose to support these young men and
women and let them win,'' McCain said.
McCain spoke hours after Petraeus recommended to Congress that the U.S.
withdraw, by July 2008, the 30,000 extra troops sent over earlier this year.
Flanked by war veterans and huge American flags that hung from the ceiling,
McCain addressed about 200 people on the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11,
2001, terrorist attacks.
Asked by reporters whether it was appropriate to campaign on the anniversary,
McCain said it was a fitting tribute.
''The important thing about September 11 is that it not be repeated. If we leave
Iraq, then it will be repeated,'' he said. ''I can't think of a better way to
remember and revere their memories and prevent further tragedies and attacks on
the United States than to rally support'' to stay and win the war in Iraq.
McCain, a Navy pilot who spent 6 1/2 years in a North Vietnamese prison during
the Vietnam War, was introduced by Col. Bud Day, of Sioux City, one of McCain's
fellow prisoners of war in Hanoi.
Day said he is endorsing McCain because he was right about the strategy that
should be taken in Iraq.
McCain: I Was Right About Iraq Strategy, NYT, 11.9.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-McCain.html
Edwards’s Campaign Tries to Harness Internet
August 1,
2007
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
WASHINGTON,
July 31 — Most presidential campaigns mark their progress by how they are doing
in the polls and how much money they are raising.
John Edwards’s campaign has another barometer of success: a 90-day calendar that
tracks, in a jumble of red, green and black numbers, the spikes and dips in
traffic to the campaign’s Web site. The calendar is taped on the wall of Joe
Trippi, a senior campaign adviser, who can connect each spike to some effort to
stir voters, including the video Mr. Edwards showed at a Democratic debate
mocking the media for writing about his $400 haircut, and the time Elizabeth
Edwards confronted the conservative commentator Ann Coulter on television.
After running a decidedly traditional race for the White House in 2004 and in
the early stages of this contest, Mr. Edwards has quietly overhauled his
campaign with one central goal: to harness the Internet and the political energy
that liberal Democrats are sending coursing through it. In a slow but striking
power shift, advisers who champion the political power of the Web have eclipsed
the coterie of advisers who long dominated Mr. Edwards’s inner circle, both
reflecting and intensifying his transformation into a more populist, aggressive
candidate.
“They want me to shut up,” an unsmiling Mr. Edwards said to an audience in
Creston, Iowa, on Thursday — remarks that were videotaped by an Edwards campaign
worker and posted both on YouTube and the popular liberal Web site MyDD.com.
“Let’s distract from people who don’t have health care coverage. Let’s distract
from people who can’t feed their children. Let’s talk about this frivolous,
nothing stuff.”
“They will never silence me,” he continued, not explaining who “they” were.
At the vanguard of the change is Mr. Trippi, something of a celebrity in the
Democratic Internet world after managing Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign. Mr. Trippi
— who left Mr. Dean’s collapsing campaign in a storm of recriminations — has
returned for an unexpected Round 2 at the urging of Mr. and Mrs. Edwards,
breaking a vow Mr. Trippi says he made to himself not to return to presidential
politics.
His role has been to help Mr. Edwards find ways to connect his message to the
party’s liberal base in a campaign in which the traditional media channels have
been clogged with news about Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama,
his two main Democratic rivals. The populist message that Mr. Edwards offered
with a sunny face to living rooms of Iowans in 2004 is this time offered with
indignation and anger, replete with us-against-them attacks on President Bush,
establishment Washington, the wealthy and the news media. And his campaign is
methodically pitching it on the Web.
“The Internet is the principal way we are communicating with voters right now,”
Mrs. Edwards said in an interview.
Over the past month, Mr. Trippi has brought two of his associates from his last
job — as a media consultant to a union-financed and highly effective Web-driven
campaign against Wal-Mart — to manage communications and political organizing
for Mr. Edwards. With the express approval and urging of Mr. and Mrs. Edwards,
they have taken steps like using the Edwards Web site to gather signatures for a
petition demanding the impeachment of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales while
urging Mr. Edwards to press his tough-edged populist message even harder.
These days the Edwards campaign has taken on the appearance of Dean 2.0, and
listening to Mr. Edwards is often akin to reading the postings on an angry blog.
Mrs. Edwards said she had been posting messages on the Internet since before
there were blogs, and had increasingly seen its power as a tool in political
campaigns.
She described Mr. Trippi as a “free thinker,” and contrasted him with political
strategists grounded in past campaigns who she said at most grudgingly accepted
the Internet as a political tool, instead arguing that campaigns should stick
with proven methods.
“Joe came from the same tradition, but when he was confronted with somebody
saying, ‘Why don’t we do it this way?’ he’d be like, ‘Let’s explore it,’ ” she
said. “That’s the difference.” Inevitably, this shift has produced something of
a culture clash as Mr. Trippi — an ambling 51-year-old college dropout from
Silicon Valley with chronic diabetes — has pressed the campaign to try
unorthodox tactics.
“Yeah, there are a bunch of differences,” Mr. Trippi said in an interview at the
headquarters in Chapel Hill. “It was — it is — a more traditional campaign than
the Dean campaign. The one thing is in a strange way, Edwards and Elizabeth —
Elizabeth in particular, but Edwards, too — get it that the old way doesn’t
work. That you need to use the Internet, blogs, technology, YouTube, to reach
out to people.”
“She’s much more into it than he is, but he gets it in a way that Howard
didn’t,” Mr. Trippi said. “I mean Howard got it, but he didn’t get into it. You
would never get a call from him saying: ‘Should I call Ann Coulter? Or should I
blog on this today?’ What I’m trying to say is she and John think about it
more.”
By all accounts, this is not simply the story of another power struggle in
another campaign. Instead, it reflects a decision that Mr. Edwards could not
rely on traditional means to get his message through in a Democratic field where
the Clinton-Obama battle sometimes threatens to reduce him to an afterthought.
“We’re in a different world than last time, with two big celebrity candidates,”
said Jonathan Prince, who is also a senior campaign adviser and one of the few
holdovers from the 2004 campaign. “And we have the message that is most
change-oriented and empowering. So we both need to use the channel to reach
people and should be using the channel that’s the most empowering thing out
there.”
Mr. Trippi has been working in political campaigns for 30 years, but has become
so closely identified with the Internet political community since 2004 — “it
totally erased like 30 years of my life,” he said — that he is regularly
accosted for autographs at events attended by bloggers. It was his status in
that world that led Mr. and Mrs. Edwards to Mr. Trippi, as part of their effort
to figure out how to channel the attitude of Democrats who are angry at
compromise, eager to take on powerful institutions in Washington, fiercely
antiwar and generally very supportive of the untrammeled populism that is coming
to define Democratic politics.
Like Mrs. Edwards, who is undergoing treatment for cancer, Mr. Trippi suffers
from a form of neuropathy, a condition that causes sharp pain in his
extremities, in his case as a result of his acute diabetes and for her an
apparent side effect of treatment. “We bonded over neuropathy,” she said.
The video about Mr. Edwards’s hair, shown at a debate where most of the other
candidates made more conventional appeals for support, suggested the extent to
which Mr. Edwards was willing to take risks.
Among those arguing against the effort, campaign officials said, was Harrison
Hickman, Mr. Edwards’s pollster. Mr. Hickman did not return calls. The video was
met with perplexed silence from Democrats sitting in the hall in Charleston, but
Edwards aides declared victory the next day after noting that 124,000 people had
watched their video on YouTube, far more than clicked onto the Clinton or Obama
videos.
“The hair commercial was Joe’s idea,” Mrs. Edwards said. “Your choice on the
hair stuff is to say this is not important, or make a joke at yourself or get
angry at it because you know who is pushing it — we know who is pushing it and
what campaigns are associated with it,” she said, without elaborating. “He
thought of a 30-second way to make the point.”
There are risks to this strategy: As Mr. Edwards’s aides said, it is critical
that he not throw out the best of the old in his search to harness the passion
and money that can be raised through the Internet. And of course, Dean 1.0 did
not take Mr. Dean even through Iowa.
But Mr. Edwards is not Mr. Dean. And the Internet is an entirely different force
today from what it was when Mr. Trippi and Mr. Edwards ran their last campaigns.
Edwards’s Campaign Tries to Harness Internet, NYT,
1.8.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/01/us/politics/01edwards.html
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