Donald Trump said that President Obama’s concerns about the environment were infringing on his rights to use aerosol hairspray, the New York Times reports.
Said Trump: “You can’t use hairspray because hairspray is going to affect the ozone.”
However, aerosol sprays were actually phased out in the United States in the 1990s, years before Obama was president.
“It’s not a political strategy he’s pursuing, it’s a short-term public relations strategy. Every day, he figures out some way to dominate the news. But in the general election, not only is Bill Clinton still popular with a lot of swing voters, they don’t think it’s fair to run against the spouse. This is not a legitimate general election issue. It’s simply a tactic of Donald’s to dominate the news.”
— GOP lobbyist Charlie Black, quoted by Politico, on Donald Trump attacking Bill Clinton’s personal indiscretions.
A new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds the percentage of Republicans among those likely to vote in the 2016 election lags Democrats by 9 percentage points, compared with a 6-point deficit in the year leading up to Barack Obama’s 2012 victory.
Key finding: “While the American electorate has become more diverse the last three years, the party’s support among Hispanic likely voters and younger likely voters has shrunk significantly.”
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Politico: “All presidents back away from some of their most dramatic campaign promises. But seven years into Obama’s presidency, the revolving door shuttling officials out of his administration is spinning at a rapid clip, and Obama has seen his campaign promise founder against the deeply ingrained culture of selling government expertise in Washington.”
The Ohio Secretary of State has rejected Martin O’Malley’s petition to be placed on the Democratic presidential primary ballot, according to Ballot Access News.
He needed 1,000 signatures and submitted 1,175. He has been told that only 772 signatures are valid.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) “captivated the political world for a good portion of 2015 with will-she-or-won’t-she suspense over a potential presidential run,” Politico reports.
“By June, even her most ardent supporters conceded she was out, and much of the spotlight trained on the freshman Massachusetts senator shifted as the White House race heated up without her. But with her influence on the rise, Warren and her allies racked up victories all year, winning fights over executive branch nominees, fending off regulatory rollbacks for banks and prodding financial regulators to take a harder line with the firms they oversee.”
The ghostwriter of Donald Trump’s 2000 book The America We Deserve said he’s not voting for the billionaire real estate mogul, BuzzFeed reports.
Said Dave Shiflett: “I’ll tell you what really bugs me about him, where it really ripped it with me and Trump was the stuff he said about McCain. McCain suffered severely, and I had a son who did two tours in Middle East during the last war and we had kids from here who went over there and some of them got hurt. They ain’t gonna be the same.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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