Vice President Joe Biden is poised to attack the Republican presidential candidates over entitlement programs through a speech in Florida, CNN reports.
Biden will say, “Make no mistake, if Republicans in Congress and their amen corner of Romney, Santorum and Gingrich get their hands on the White House, they will end Medicare as we know it.”
“I’m going to wait to see which Romney it is.”
— Former Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA), in an interview with The Hill, saying he’s considering voting for Mitt Romney this November.
A new Public Policy Polling survey finds Rick Santorum is headed for a commanding win in Louisiana on
Saturday. He leads Mitt Romney, 42% to 28%, followed by Newt
Gingrich at 18%, Ron Paul at 8% and Buddy Roemer at 2%.
Key findings: “It’s interesting to look at these numbers in the context of last week’s
results in Alabama and Mississippi. Mitt Romney averaged 30% in those
two contests, and that’s about where he is here. Rick Santorum and Newt
Gingrich combined for 64% in those two contests, and they combine for a
relatively similar 60% here. The big difference though is that
conservative voters appears to be abandoning Gingrich for Santorum now,
and that’s why Louisiana is likely to be much more lopsided than either
of last week’s contests were.”
A new American Research Group survey shows Santorum leading Romney, 43% to 27%, followed by Gingrich at 20% and Paul at 6%.
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“You win by giving people the opportunity to see a different vision for
our country, not someone who’s just going to be a little different than
the person in there. If you’re going to be a little
different, we might as well stay with what we have instead of taking a
risk with what may be the Etch A Sketch candidate of the future.”
— Rick Santorum, quoted by NBC News, suggesting Republicans may be better off with President Obama than Mitt Romney.
Alex Koppelman: “In the modern, post-machine-politics era, individual endorsements simply don’t matter as much as we sometimes pretend they do. The exceptions are, typically, the endorsements from those politicians who still do have a machine — or at least a robust activist and fundraising operation — that can be employed on the endorsee’s behalf.”
A new report finds that 248 members of Congress allegedly used their positions to benefit their families since 2008.
The report found that 82 members — 40 Democrats and 42 Republicans — paid family members through their congressional offices, campaign committees and political action committees but highlighted Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) as an example, noting he “paid six relatives salaries or fees, the most of any member.”
With John Edwards denying reports he used a prostitution ring in New York City, New York magazine gives a brief history of Edwards denying things — many of which later proved true.
Huffington Post: “In 1994, as he was making his first successful run for the U.S. Senate, Rick Santorum was followed by a trackers, who were hired by the state Democratic party and equipped with video cameras. The trackers trailed Santorum into public events at municipal buildings, on factory floors and inside community centers across Pennsylvania. They recorded how many people were in the room, whether or not media was on hand and Santorum’s every word.”
“After every event, a tracker wrote up a memo for the campaign staff of Santorum’s opponent, Harris Wofford… The memos are documents of an era long before politicians operated in social media, reporter embeds live-tweeted what songs the campaign blasts before each speech and gaffes became instant YouTube memes.”
The DNC released another Etch-A-Sketch video designed to ensure Mitt Romney cannot “shake” the conservative positions he took in the GOP primary.
“I think their assessment is that Romney is much less a threat to them as events are a threat to them, and I agree with that. Romney cannot beat Obama, only events can beat Obama.”
— James Carville, quoted by BuzzFeed, on whether the Obama campaign is worried about facing Mitt Romney in the general election.
Massachusetts U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren (D) called on President Obama “to finish evolving and support same-sex marriage,” the Washington Blade reports.
Said Warren: “I want to see the president evolve because I believe that is right; marriage equality is morally right.”
She also said she wanted the issue included in the Democratic national platform.
Greg Sargent: “It’s worth noting that even though Warren is running for Senate in Massachusetts, this is not necessarily a politically easy thing for Warren to do. Scott Brown opposes marriage equality, and Warren is under heavy attack right now over cultural issues. Brown and national Republicans are attacking her regularly over her support for Obama’s contraception coverage mandate, which they are falsely portraying as anti-Catholic.”
Joe Klein thinks the Etch-A-Sketch gaffe “may go well beyond a momentary embarrassment and become a campaign-defining disaster, much as John Kerry’s ‘I voted for it before I voted against it’ gaffe — which came at almost exactly the same point in that campaign.
The key reason: “Most obviously, this was a classic Kinsleyan gaffe — an inadvertent blurting of the truth — that goes to the very heart of the character problems that have bedeviled Romney throughout this campaign.”
But more important: “It makes it much harder, perhaps impossible, for Romney to begin to tack back to the center to appeal to the centrist voters, an absolute necessity for the fall campaign after the free-range extremism of the Republican primary. Every time Romney makes a move, or even a head-fake, it becomes an Etch-a-Sketch moment.
“Even if Rick Santorum wallops Mitt Romney in Pennsylvania next month by winning every Republican vote on primary day, he’s unlikely to gain the crucial support of all the delegates he could get,” the Allentown Morning Call reports.
“The lack of an early organization has haunted Santorum all year. In state after state, whether he would have won or lost the popular vote, he hasn’t qualified for all the delegates available… But it’s particularly embarrassing for Santorum that in Pennsylvania, a state he represented in Congress for 16 years, he failed to utilize his connections to flush the ballots with old friends and supporters.”
A group of students, many of them enrolled in the Clinton School of Public Service, unveiled a new political action committee called Naturally Blue, the New York Times reports.
The group aims to “maintain the tenuous majority of Democrats in the Arkansas legislature to promote an agenda of economic populism and to take the fight to the rest of Dixie.”
A new Rasmussen survey in Louisiana shows Rick Santorum way ahead of Mitt Romney, 43% to 31%, followed by Newt Gingrich at 16% and Ron Paul at 5%.
The Louisiana primary is on Saturday.
The latest Economist/YouGov poll finds President Obama leading Mitt Romney among women by a whopping 17 points, 55% to 38%.
In contrast, Romney edges Obama among men by 45% to 43%.
Out next week: Blowout, a novel by former Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) about the battle over green energy technology.
Newt Gingrich told NPR that “he sees no reason to exit the Republican presidential race and that there’s a chance of a new contender emerging at the party’s convention in August.”
Said Gingrich: “I’m not so sure you wouldn’t get a series of brand new players.”
Also interesting: Gingrich admitted for the first time he was likely to finish third in the delegate race.
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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