Tag: Campaign 2008

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison

No one is suggesting any variation in the all-male, all-white GOP presidential pool, but a new idea has sprung up to reassure Repubs they have a chance in 2008. It’s simple. Just trot out Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (Tex-R) for vice president!

Republicans must win Texas if they have the slightest hope of keeping the White House.

Next, consider current polls. They suggest that New York Sen. Hillary Clinton may well be the Democratic nominee for president…

Presenting a softer side to the GOP ticket might be the remaining chance the party has to harvest a significant number of women voters, particularly against Clinton.

Hutchison’s “softer side” includes support for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge after receiving more contributions from big oil and gas than anyone in Congress, overturning a ban on handguns in the nation’s capital, and receiving a rating of zero from the League of Women Voters for her environmental record.

On the other hand, she is a leading critic of immigration reform, and wanted to go Bush one better with her “No Amnesty Amendment.” Although defeated, it would have forced those trying to become citizens to leave the country for at least two years before applying. This last move has red meat Republicans sniffing a winner. All I smell is the same old Texas cow pies.

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Everything GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney says about his practice of transporting his Irish setter in a kennel strapped to his car roof in the 1980s just makes the whole thing sound worse.

In his latest statement, he seems to have been warned by his spinners not to use the word “dog” — referring to the setter and other dogs he owned four times as “family pets”:

Romney said, “sometimes when the stories come out in the media they don’t quite get it accurate. The kennel that my family pet used to ride in is enclosed. It’s not an open aired kennel. It’s enclosed and there are air vents of course at the back. My family pet used to climb up there and lie down on his own. And we love our family pets. Have always loved our family pets. And have nothing but honor and pride in taking care of great dogs. We’ve had quite a few.”

There is also the matter of the story one of Romney’s sons told about the dog’s poop coming out of the carrier during a trip and sliding down the car window. We’ll assume the “enclosed” kennel was vented at the bottom.

What this reveals, I think, is that Romney is indeed a dumbass. Fortunately for him, being as stupid as a bag of hammers is no longer a disqualifier for the presidency.

The Boston Globe’s Scott Lehigh penned a pointed, but under the circumstances, quite restrained analysis of the Mitt Romney dog on the roof story.

For the last few mornings, I’ve lingered over the breakfast table, reading all about Mitt Romney, from his Michigan boyhood to his boffo business career to his determined days as chief of the 2002 Winter Olympics.

And what do I come away thinking?

One: Poor Seamus Romney.

And: Does a vacuum periodically settle in between the ears of the Mighty Mighty Mittster, rather like one of those low-pressure areas that sometimes stalls for days on end over New England?

Good questions, especially about someone who portrays himself as a sensible — if not outright clever — guy. As it was, the dog probably had reason to believe that Mormon was out of his freaking mind.

And who, really, can blame Seamus, riding up there alone and forgotten, eyeing each approaching overpass and anxiously wondering if Mitt had calculated the clearances correctly, while the rest of the Romneys were safely ensconced in the vehicle below, no doubt whiling away the hours with joyous renditions of “This land is your land, this land is my land”?

…I suspect that if the question of what to do with Seamus was presented as a Harvard Business School case study, the remedy Mitt arrived at would not be widely seized upon as the most intelligent choice…

The story made me wonder a little about the rest of the Romneys as well…I’d like to think that at some point during the trip, Tagg or Matt would have displayed enough of that brash iconoclasm to pipe up and inquire: “Say, Dad, do you hear that howling? Have you considered that Seamus may not be enjoying himself up there on top of the car?”

Lehigh suggests that if space inside the car was at such a premium, there was still one more possibility.

If the rooftop ride really was such a smart solution, at the very least Mitt could have taken a turn up there himself. Certainly he’s proved resolute in the face of risk, at least in the business world, and I have it on good report that the hair product he uses is guaranteed to hold fast in gusts of up to 70 miles an hour.

He should have gone to jail in 1983:

Romney strapped a dog carrier — with the family dog Seamus, an Irish Setter, in it — to the roof of the family station wagon for a twelve hour drive from Boston to Ontario, which the family apparently completed, despite Seamus’s rather visceral protest. [The dog beshat himself.]

Massachusetts’s animal cruelty laws specifically prohibit anyone from carrying an animal “in or upon a vehicle, or otherwise, in an unnecessarily cruel or inhuman manner or in a way and manner which might endanger the animal carried thereon.” An officer for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals responded to a description of the situation saying “it’s definitely something I’d want to check out.” The officer, Nadia Branca, declined to give a definitive opinion on whether Romney broke the law but did note that it’s against state law to have a dog in an open bed of a pick-up truck, and “if the dog was being carried in a way that endangers it, that would be illegal.”

A new CBS News/MTV/New York Times (talk about your avis of evil) poll of 17- to 29-year-olds finds that there is interest in the Democratic front runners among America’s youth. Not only that, but according to National Journal’s PollWatch, they are already paying attention to an election that’s still nearly a year and a half away.

Democrats may have more reason to be optimistic this time around, because 58 percent of prospective young voters said they are paying at least some attention to the 2008 presidential election. And 54 percent of young voters polled said they would vote for a Democratic presidential candidate over a Republican if the election were held today. Just 32 percent said they’d side with the GOP.

Although a whopping 45 percent said they’re not enthusiastic about any candidate, the Democratic Party’s two front-runners — Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama — were the only two names to garner a respectable amount of enthusiasm at 17 percent and 18 percent, respectively, in an open-ended question. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) was a distant third with just 4 percent saying they were enthusiastic about his candidacy, and six other candidates received less than 3 percent.

When it comes to the candidates’ messages, it’s the economy the youngest voting bloc most wants to hear about: Twenty-three percent said economic issues are their No. 1 priority in the presidential race, followed by the war in Iraq at 20 percent and education policy at 15 percent. In general, however, 18 percent said the war is the “most important issue” facing people of their generation, and 32 percent said it’s the biggest issue for the country as a whole — the top slot in both questions.

One week ago, Rudolph Giuliani’s finance chairman in South Carolina, Thomas Ravenel, had to step down because he was indicted by the feds who accuse him of distributing massive amounts of cocaine.

Today, the Giuliani campaign announced that Ravenel’s father, Arthur, would serve as a state co-chair. They either did not vet the elder Ravenel’s reputation in South Carolina, or they simply did not care that he has a history of creating controversy by making racist statements, including this beaut from January 2000:

Republican state Sen. Arthur Ravenel told the crowd at a Statehouse rally that lawmakers should not cave into the pressure of outside influences when they return next week for a legislative session that is certain to take up the divisive issue.

Ravenel told the crowd that he was recently confronted with questions by an out-of-state reporter who asked: “Aren’t you people in South Carolina worried about what the people in the rest of the country think about you?” To which the crowd shouted back with a resounding “No.”

“Can you believe that there are those who think that the General Assembly of South Carolina is going to . . . knuckle under, roll over and do the bidding (of) that organization known as the National Association for Retarded People?” lawmaker Ravenel asked the cheering crowd.

Later, reacting to the controversy, Ravenel proved how truly tasteless he is. “I made a rhetorical slip,” he told a Charleston newspaper, “and they want to lynch me for it.”