Can Joe the Plumber Turn it Around? By Michael Barone
Can Joe Wurzelbacher, Joe the Plumber from Ohio, change the course of this campaign? That’s one question that was raised at the third presidential debate.
Can Joe Wurzelbacher, Joe the Plumber from Ohio, change the course of this campaign? That’s one question that was raised at the third presidential debate.
Is Sarah Palin ready to be president? I haven't seen enough of the GOP vice presidential candidate to get a handle on the answer to that question. I know that she wants to finish the job in Iraq.
The short term impact of the third debate will be to help Barack Obama. But the long term implications may give John McCain a needed boost. Obama looked good, but McCain opened the tax-and-spend issue in a way that might prevail.
Before Wednesday night's debate, Team Obama sent out pre-debate "talking points," which Politico.com posted, that hit John McCain for his "erratic and unsteady" response to the economic crisis, while lauding Barack Obama's "steady leadership."
For a while, I had expected to emerge mostly unscathed from the eight years of George W. Bush.
For anyone who followed the story of how and why Sarah Palin fired her state's public safety commissioner, last week's release of a legislative investigation that found she had violated state ethics statutes was anticlimactic. After all, everyone knows that she and her husband, Todd, tried to push Walt Monegan, then Alaska's public safety commissioner, to fire a state trooper named Mike Wooten, who was involved in a bitter divorce from Ms. Palin's sister -- and that after Mr. Monegan refused, he lost his job.
The good news just keeps on coming for Democrats. As we discussed last week, presidential nominee Barack Obama is the clear favorite to win a substantial victory in the race for the White House
John McCain's position in the Electoral College continued to deteriorate in the previous seven days. We are making the following adjustments, accordingly.
A Barack Obama victory in less than three weeks will mean many things at home and abroad. It will mean a new team on foreign and domestic policy and new political leadership for both the Democratic Party and the country. And it will mean, finally, the end of any excuse to listen to the self-involved, selfish and stupid rantings of the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
The essence of this election season couldn't be simpler. The American public is so appalled at the condition of the country (which it unfairly, but not implausibly blames on the despised President Bush) that with fate casting John McCain in the role of Bush's surrogate, a majority actually is considering voting for Sen. Obama.
It certainly wasn’t the big-bang across-the-board tax-reform and tax-cut plan that I and others lobbied for. But John McCain’s “Pension and Family Security Plan” unveiled today on the campaign trail does have some solid pro-growth nuggets.
Over beers, Brian McConnell and his buddies came up with the idea to put a measure on the San Francisco ballot to rename a city sewage plant after President Bush. Ha, ha, ha.
Stocks are up over 700 points today, a record-breaking one-day rally. Good news is coming from the four corners of the world as the U.S., G-7, and G-20 are all working to stem the global banking crisis and credit freeze-up.
John McCain needs a couple breaks if he's going to make the presidential race competitive down to the wire.
The race card is back. After Tuesday night's debate, Washington party-crossover dean David Gergen announced it was "too early" to declare victory for Democrat Barack Obama, not because the election is a month away, but because "Obama is black."
"I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors," Barack Obama told a crowd in Elko, Nev. "I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face." Actually, Obama supporters are doing a lot more than getting into people's faces. They seem determined to shut people up.
With one month remaining in the 2008 presidential campaign, national and state polling data indicate that Barack Obama holds a clear lead over John McCain.
There are just eleven governorships up for grabs from coast to coast, six currently held the Democrats and five by the Republicans.
Nothing in the presidential campaign so far has been as instructive as its swift descent into the politics of personal destruction. Although voters have probably heard little lately that they did not already know about Sen. Barack Obama, they have learned something very important about Sen. John McCain.
Take a great nation with a fabulous work ethic and inventive people. Turn its $236 billion budget surplus into an estimated $482 billion deficit, and nearly double the national debt to $10 trillion. In the meantime, fuel economic growth with a consumer-led borrowing binge that makes America beholden to China.