Day: September 28, 2007

Poll: Edwards at 3 Percent among South Carolina African-Americans

Jon Ponder

John Edwards has been playing to win Iowa, hoping to build momentum that will make him competitive with the frontrunner coming out the gate. Across all the polling I’ve seen, he is only doing well in Iowa.

The next stop after Iowa and New Hampshire is South Carolina. If Edwards, who was born in South Carolina but he grew up in North Carolina — and, yes, there is difference — can’t win or place in the season’s first Southern state primary, his campaign will likely end there.

African-Americans are arguably the most important Democratic constituency in South Carolina, and two new polls of South Carolina voters — a poll of African-Americans only from Winthrop College and ETV, South Carolina’s public television network,and a poll of all voters from the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg — shows big trouble for the Edwards campaign:

Winthrop/ETV Poll

Overall
• Obama   35 percent
• Clinton   31 percent
• Edwards   3 percent
• Undecided   29 percent

African American men
• Obama   42.4 percent
• Clinton   30.5 percent
• Edwards   3.4 percent
• Undecided   21.7 percent

African American women
• Obama   30.6 percent
• Clinton   30.9 percent
• Edwards   2.9 percent
• Undecided   33.8 percent

Times/Bloomberg poll

Among all Democrats
• Clinton   45 percent
• Obama   27 percent
• Edwards   7 percent
• Undecided   13 percent

Among African Americans
• Clinton   43 percent
• Obama   32 percent
• Edwards   4 percent
• Undecided   18 percent

Of course, the percentage of “Undecideds” is significant, and it is possible they cold break toward Edwards if he moves up. For now, however, they’re not feeling it.

Eye on Newt: Citizen Gingrich Will Run If Supporters Raise $30 Million

Jon Ponder

Could a narcissistic ideologue with the personal warmth of a salamander win the Republican nomination next year? Under normal circumstances, if the salamander in question were Newt Gingrich, the answer would be no.

“I don’t see as a citizen how you could turn that down.”
— Newt Gingrich, upon challenging his supporters to raise a $30 million war chest.

But when you consider his competition in the current GOP field — a thrice-married, mentally deranged pro-gay, pro-choice former New York mayor; a flip-flopping, dim-witted former Massachusetts governor who is a Mormon; an actor and former abortion lobbyist and senator whose performance on the stump has left people snoring; and a current senator famous for his meltdowns who has lashed himself to an unpopular war that could well re-ignite just as the campaign goes into its final heat next year — the answer becomes maybe.

“Maybe” in 2008 is as close as Gingrich will ever get, however. So while he is still playing coy about whether he’ll get in, on Sunday he issued a challenge to Fox News viewers:

In the latest sign of how unsettled the Republican presidential race is, Newt Gingrich says he’ll run if supporters come up with $30 million in three weeks.

“I don’t see as a citizen how you could turn that down,” Gingrich said yesterday on “Fox News Sunday.”

…Gingrich has tasked longtime adviser Randy Evans with launching the ambitious fund-raising bid next Monday [Oct 1], and reporting back in three weeks.

“I want the commitments first,” Gingrich said. “If there is, in fact, enough people in the country who think we need this kind of approach and this kind of change-oriented policies, then I think I’d feel a responsibility to run.”

Even if he were to win the nomination, it’s hard to see how Gingrich would stand a chance in the general. The Beltway gang likes to pair him with Hillary Clinton, comparing them as equally polarizing figures on the left and right.

While Clinton has been caricatured by the right as a screeching feminist harpy, she won reelection to the Senate in 2004 with 65 percent of the vote, and even carried Republican counties upstate, arguably because voters got to know her true persona.

If anyone has caricatured Newt, it’s Newt himself. And most voters who remember the 1990s have a clear perception of him. The consensus is that underneath his aloof, know-it-all shell, Newt really is a bully, a blowhard and a jerk.

In a way, the Dems has won against Newt on a national ticket before. In 1996, the Clinton-Gore campaign made then-House Speaker Gingrich the de facto running mate of their opponent, former Senate majority leader, Bob Dole. (His official running mate was Jack Kemp.)

Clinton-Gore won with 49.2 percent against Dole-Kemp-Gingrich’s 40.7 percent. Ross Perot took 8.4 percent.

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

There are in fact four very significant stumbling blocks in the way of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to earn a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority, longstanding custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance while making a display of our apparent wisdom.

— Roger Bacon (1220-1292) English philosopher, scientist

Molly Ivins Was Right: Bush Is the ‘Dead Chicken’ Wired Around the Neck of GOP Voters

Jon Ponder

A few days after the 2004 elections, the late Molly Ivins found a small sliver of a silver lining in the reelection of George W. Bush.

If the GOP nominee runs against Bush, he risks alienating the GOP base, none of whom he can afford to lose. If he runs with the president, he’ll have a very hard time peeling off 20 or 30 percent of independents, without whom he can’t win.

Some people think you cannot break a dog that has got in the habit of killin’ chickens, but my friend John Henry always claimed you could. He said the way to do it is to take one of the chickens the dog has killed and wire the thing around the dog’s neck, good and strong. And leave it there until that dead chicken stinks so bad that no other dog or person will even go near that poor beast. Thing’ll smell so bad the dog won’t be able to stand himself. You leave it on there until the last little bit of flesh rots and falls off, and that dog won’t kill chickens again.

The Bush administration is going to be wired around the neck of the American people for four more years, long enough for the stench to sicken everybody. It should cure the country of electing Republicans.

Nearly three years later, with the 2008 election ramping up, it appears Molly was right. Bush’s lousy performance, especially his mishandling of the war and the economy, has brought the Republican Party to its lowest point since Watergate. With fewer than 60 weeks until the election, chances that the GOP will win back the Congress and hold the White House are slim.

[…]

It was a Democrat, not Republicans, Who Moved Florida’s Primary Date

Buck Banks

When the hubbub over Florida’s new presidential primary date began, the Florida Democratic Party was quick to blame the Republican-led state legislature for a change that violated national Dem Party rules and introduced the state party to a world of hurt. It turns out, however, that it was actually a Democratic state senator who introduced the original legislation that moved the primary date to Jan. 29. Hmmm.

But when newly spineful state party chair Karen Thurman gathered the Democratic faithful around her last weekend to announce that the state party would defiantly promote the Jan. 29 vote as a “real” election that “counts,” the man responsible for the original legislation was conspicuously absent.

‘I hear that a lot, that I was duped by the Republicans. No one duped me.’
— Fla. Sen. Jeremy Ring

When Karen Thurman surrounded herself with Broward County Democrats last Sunday to tout the Jan. 29 primary: state Sen. Jeremy Ring. No one invited the Broward state Senator who sponsored the original bill moving Florida’s primary from March to January and undercut the Democrats’ argument that the early primary was all the Republicans’ fault.

So, the party needed an alternate explanation, and they found one — in an alternate universe: Ring was somehow fooled by Republicans into proposing the primary move, fully aware that Howard Dean and his Democratic National Committee would beat on Florida Democrats like Ringo Starr on a snare drum. Right.

“If you turn on the left wing liberal radio down in Broward, I am public enemy number one,” said Ring, who actually campaigned in 2006 on the need for an early primary and makes no apologies for his leading the effort. “I hear that a lot, that I was duped by the Republicans. No one duped me.”

Now that the Florida Democratic Party is resigned to the fact that the state will be off-limits to the leading Democratic candidates (except for blue-plate fundraisers — so much for the Dems who can’t afford that) and the party’s convention next month will be just another diversion at Disney World and the state will be stripped of its convention delegates, Thurman et. al. seem bent on ignoring the fact that a fellow party member actually started the whole thing.

It would be inconvenient to acknowledge Ring’s role in a process where the Florida Democratic Party has morphed into the Defiant Victim — victimized by the Republican-dominated legislature, victimized by its own national party and victimized by the prez candidates, yet standing up on its hind legs and saying “Go to hell” to its victimizers. The reminder that Ring ran on the notion of moving up the primary date, was elected on it and followed through on his campaign promise is an inconvenient truth that the FlaDems simply must ignore.