IOWA
PRESIDENTIAL WATCH
Iowa...
Where Presidents Begin
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on each candidate to see today's news stories
(caricatures by
Linda Eddy)
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
GENERAL NEWS HEADLINES with excerpts
"Whether you voted for me, or you voted for Barack, the time is now to unite as a single party with a single purpose"
"No way, no how, no McCain"
"I want you to ask yourselves:
Were you in this campaign just for me?
upset delegate's reaction to speech: "She was presidential..."
Hillary goes out with a whimper
[The Atlantic's Joshua Green]
Clinton didn't seem angry or betrayed or entitled or any of the things that critics have attributed to her -- she seemed merely unenthused, and so did the audience.
Senator Clinton ran her presidential campaign making clear that Barack Obama is not prepared to lead as commander in chief. Nowhere tonight did she alter that assessment. Nowhere tonight did she say that Barack Obama is ready to lead.
What's missing from Hillary's speech
[The New Republic/The Stump]
...on first read of Hillary's speech text I see no clear, flat assertion that Obama is qualified and prepared to be commander in chief from day one, which of course was always her central critique of him. That was something I had expected to see.
Clinton seemed to say, even if Obama is everything she said during the campaign, he's still a better candidate than McCain.
... She took the high road Tuesday night because it was also her best road politically; if Obama wins, she still emerges as a central voice in American liberalism, replacing the ailing Sen. Edward Kennedy. And if Obama loses, as Hillary said he would during the campaign, she is blameless and the party can turn back to her without guilt in four years.
"She offered the electrifying fight that the limpid Obama has not"
Many Clinton supporters say speech didn't heal divisions
[WashPost's Eli Saslow]
Despite Clinton’s plea for Democrats to unite, her delegates remained divided as to how they should proceed.
[Politico's Roger Simon]
Tuesday night she said some of the right words. But between now and November, Hillary Clinton can go out and work to heal the wounds or sit back and keep them open.
The choice is hers, and it will determine her future.
[Politico's Ben Smith]
Hillary's speech — a success in the hall — was a study in the virtue of low expectations.
... Clinton's speech probably did what it had to, closing out ambiguity and putting Obama in a position to close the deal on Thursday.
Many Clinton supporters say speech didn't heal divisions
[WashPost's Eli Saslow]
...when Clinton stepped off the stage and the standing ovation faded into silence, many of her supporters were left with a sobering realization: Even a tremendous speech couldn't erase their frustrations.
Clinton calls on Democrats to end their rift
[LATimes' Mark Barabak]
Hillary Rodham Clinton, accepting defeat with grace and generosity, moved to close the divide among fellow Democrats on Tuesday night by offering a forceful and unequivocal endorsement of her fierce rival, Barack Obama.
One first is celebrated. What about the second?
[NYTimes' Alessandra Stanley]
when the first female also-ran at a convention merits such hoopla and hosannas, then it is harder for viewers to understand why the Democrats seem intent on soft-pedaling their presumptive nominee’s arguably more remarkable breakthrough.
[USA Today's Susan Page]
The 25-minute speech focused on policy and warned of the risks of four more years of GOP rule, and she mentioned Obama's name more than a dozen times.
But Clinton didn't talk about Obama in personal terms. She didn't address criticisms she made during the primaries that he lacked the experience to handle the demands of the presidency.
Clinton's speech: was it enough?
[WashPost's 'The Fix' Chris Cillizza]
Did she do enough? If the party begins to coalesce behind Obama in the days and months to come does Clinton deserve the credit?
[WSJ's Amy Chozick, Laura Meckler]
Though Sen. Obama is the Democrats' nominee, Sen. Clinton is crucial to uniting a party that remains divided between her supporters and his.
Hillary Clinton -- her words scrutinized for every nuance, her voice for every inflection -- delivered a speech tonight seeking to strike a precarious balance.
She is simultaneously honoring her supporters and her own 18 million votes, but imploring them to transfer their allegiance to her one-time rival Barack Obama.
Dem convention off to a rocky start
[TheHill's Bob Cusack]
The 2008 Democratic convention has gotten off to a rough start amid party infighting, second-guessing and outside distractions.
Clinton delivers emphatic plea for unity
[NYTimes' Patrick Healy]
While Mrs. Clinton is in the midst of a “catharsis,” friends say, Mr. Clinton remains angrier than people realize about the Obama campaign’s portrayal of his wife as deceitful and of his administration as middling and his political tactics as, at times, racially charged.
Bill Clinton to skip Obama's
acceptance speech Thursday night
...according to a source close to former President Bill Clinton, he will not: the source tells CNN that Clinton will not join his wife at Invesco Field Thursday night.
THE CANDIDATES:
John McCain... today's headlines with excerpts
John
McCain will spend this week reminding people of the
fundamental unreadiness of Barack Obama to lead the
nation in perilous times. Yesterday, he used Hillary
Clinton as his unwitting spokesperson, but today he uses
… Barack Obama. His extemporaneous comments on the lack
of threat from “tiny” Iran in May get featured in
“Tiny”.
watch it
New McCain ad: "Hillary's right. John McCain for president"
Republican
John McCain's campaign released a TV ad Tuesday that
uses part of an ad that Hillary Rodham Clinton deployed
against Barack Obama during the Democratic primaries. It
reprises a question Clinton posed: "Who do you want
answering the phone" in the White House at 3 a.m.?
watch it
McCain aide mocks Obama's columned stage
"Is this from the Onion?" quipped a McCain adviser.
The reference to the satirical newspaper came after Reuters reported that Obama is planning an elaborate rock concert set-up complete with post-speech fireworks.
...The celebrity-like trappings of Obama's Thursday's speech may have given the Republicans new ammo...
Romney: McCain earned his homes, Obama didn't
Speaking to reporters at a lunch sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, Romney said that while McCain deserved his houses because of the "hard work" of himself and his family, "Barack Obama got a special deal from a convicted felon."
"I think it was a strange thing for Barack Obama to seize upon," Romney said. "If homes is going to be the topic of discussion that Barack Obama is going to end up on the short end of that one."
McCain plans 3-state VP rollout
John McCain is planning to rollout his vice-presidential nominee in three battleground states this weekend, with large-scale rallies planned for Ohio, Pennsylvania and Missouri, according to aides and advisers.
The GOP nominee-in-waiting will move to immediately change the campaign conversation from Barack Obama’s football stadium acceptance speech Thursday to the new Republican ticket, to be revealed at a noontime Friday rally in a Dayton, Ohio, basketball arena. McCain and his running mate will then travel by bus to Pennsylvania, where they’ll hold an outdoor event at a minor league baseball stadium in Washington County, just southwest of Pittsburgh. On Sunday, the duo will head to suburban St. Louis for another event to be held at a minor league baseball stadium, this one in O’Fallon, Mo.
McCain hits Obama on confidence in America
McCain suggested Obama had failed to express confidence in America as "the greatest force for good on this earth" when he gave a speech in Berlin last month before more than 100,000 people.
"He was the picture of confidence. But in some ways confidence itself and confidence in one's country are not the same," McCain said...
Barack Obama & Joe Biden... today's headlines with excerpts
Obama's speech stage resembles ancient Greek temple
Barack Obama's big speech on Thursday night will be
delivered from an elaborate columned stage resembling a
miniature Greek temple.
The stage, similar to structures used for rock concerts, has been set up at the 50-yard-line, the midpoint of Invesco Field, the stadium where the Denver Broncos' National Football League team plays.
Some 80,000 supporters will see Obama appear from between plywood columns painted off-white, reminiscent of Washington's Capitol building or even the White House, to accept the party's nomination for president.
He will stride out to a raised platform to a podium that can be raised from beneath the floor.
Ed Morrissey: Obama's temple for the cult of personality
RE:
plans for Obama to deliver his acceptance speech in
front of a fake Greek temple... That this scales heights
of presumptuousness can hardly be refuted. What genius
thought of this motif? Probably the same one
that concocted
Vero Possumus and the
Fleeing Eagle. It’s a paean to an ego run amuck —
and if American voters wondered about the cult of
personality that Obama has inspired, this settles the
question and explicitly makes Obama the cult leader.
(artwork on left courtesy HotAir.com)
Obama to highlight tax cuts for middle class in Thursday speech
Barack Obama said he plans to focus on the struggles of middle-class Americans, including their tax burden, in his Thursday night speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president...
Biden struggles to tame hyperbole, quips
During his first full day of solo campaigning, newly minted Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden showed some of the flashes of the hyperbole, exaggerations and quips that Republicans are hoping to use to paint him as a loose cannon.
... None of his assertions, in and of themselves, is likely to cause problems for the Democratic vice presidential candidate.
But the comments offer a harbinger of what to expect from Biden, a Delaware senator whose freewheeling stream of consciousness has gotten him into trouble.
See also:
Barack Obama is striking back fiercely and swiftly to stamp out an ad that links him to a 1960s radical, eager to demonstrate a far more aggressive response to attacks than John Kerry did when faced with the 2004 "Swift Boat" campaign.
Obama not only aired a response ad to the spot linking him to William Ayers, but he sought to block stations the commercial by warning station managers and asking the Justice Department to intervene. The campaign also planned to compel advertisers to pressure stations that continue to air the anti-Obama commercial...
Doh! -- Obama opens Ayers door with new ad
Jennifer Rubin/CommentaryMagazine:
"What
would possess the Obama camp to go down this road? Obama’s lame
defense of the relationship–that he was eight when Ayers committed his
crimes–is, of course, entirely irrelevant. His association with Ayers,
as Hillary Clinton pointed out in the Philadelphia debate, ran deeper
than he has tried to present it and it began and continued when both
men were adults, long after Obama had become acquainted with Ayers’s
past.
Soon enough everyone will learn that Ayers donated money to Obama, held a fundraiser to launch his first political race in his home, served on the board of the Woods Foundation with Obama, and headed the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (the records of which Stanley Kurtz will gain access to tomorrow), an organization which Obama supported and for which he may have approved grant money. We are off to the races on this. It’s unclear why Obama opened the door..." watch ad
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