“Turn on CNN in 15 minutes. The president will have an announcement —
and, by the way, tell Ted to get ready to open that bottle.”
— CIA Director Leon Panetta, quoted by the Los Angeles Times, talking to the wife of restauranteur Ted Balestreri, who bet a $10,000 bottle of wine that Panetta couldn’t find Osama bin Laden.
Gary Johnson “knew he was an underdog for the Republican presidential nomination, but his campaign laid out a strategy for breaking through, called ‘the New Hampshire Path,'” the Los Angeles Times reports.
“The idea was that Johnson could build a base of support in the small state where voters place a premium on retail politics. The campaign’s limited resources would go further there than in more expensive states. He even rented a house in Manchester to serve as a base of operations.”
One problem: Johnson nearly failed to qualify for the New Hampshire primary ballot and had to rearrange plans to get to New Hampshire today to file the necessary paperwork in person.
First Read notes that with the Super Committee’s Thanksgiving deadline fast approaching, “the presidential race might actually take a back seat – at least for a few weeks — to what’s happening in Washington.”
“Of course, the same dividing lines that caused Boehner and Obama from failing to come to a grand bargain are still there. And now with political finger-pointing taking place among committee members themselves, this seems destined to end in stalemate. What’s worse: There’s talk the deadline of Nov. 23rd is not real. In fact, even the threatened automatic cuts, which wouldn’t go into effect until 2013, seem less real today. Who doesn’t envision Congress saying, ‘Well, no agreement, the automatic cuts will take place in 2013’ — only to have the lame duck Congress after the ’12 election react to the election results and go in another direction?”
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After weeks of missteps, Howard Kurtz reports Herman Cain’s strategists “are slowing the pace to give their man a chance to focus.”
“Cain has made one high-profile blunder after another since his unlikely surge to the top of the GOP presidential polls. By the normal rules of political discourse, he should be back to peddling pepperoni any day now. He has somehow managed to emerge unscathed — but his team is determined to stop the bleeding.”
Said one top aide: “We’re trying to slow down a little bit, make sure he’s rested, make sure he’s focused.”
This post is part of our guest series from Inkwell Strategies analyzing the 2012 campaign ad war.
Political commentators generally agree that the 2012 Republican race will come down to two slots: Mitt Romney and Other. Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum clearly agrees with this view, which is why his latest ad attacks Romney’s current biggest threat, Herman Cain.
In an effort to appeal to Iowa’s right wing social conservatives, Santorum zeroes in on Cain’s muddled position on abortion in a new 3 minute web ad. Taking a page from the classic attack ad playbook, the ad mixes unflattering photographs of Cain with quick zooms and clips from recent television appearances in which Cain appears to take a pro-choice stance.
Bloomberg: “A record 49% of Americans live in a household where someone receives at least one type of government benefit, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And 63% of all federal spending this year will consist of checks written to individuals for which the government receives currently no services, the White House budget office estimates. That’s up from 46% in 1975 and 18% in 1940.”
“Those figures will climb in coming years. The 75 million baby boomers have only begun their long march into retirement, while President Obama’s health-care overhaul will extend insurance coverage to more than 30 million additional people.”
Jonathan Alter says that while President Obama goes into his re-election campaign with a weak economy, he still has one asset that hasn’t received much attention: He’s honest.
“How did we end up in such a scandal-less state? … For starters, the tone is always set at the top. Obama puts a premium on personal integrity, and with a few exceptions (Tim Geithner’s tax problems in 2009) his administration tends to fire first and ask questions later. The best known example is Shirley Sherrod, the Agriculture Department official who was mistakenly fired by her boss over a miscommunication that led higher-ups to believe — wrongly — that she had made inappropriate racially tinged remarks. In several other cases, the decision to give staffers accused of wrongdoing the boot was made within hours, taking the air out of any possible uproar.”
The latest National Journal Political Insiders Poll finds GOP insiders almost unanimous in thinking Mitt Romney will win their party’s presidential nomination.
Charlie Cook takes a look at the most recent national polling on the presidential race.
“These numbers certainly don’t show Obama’s reelection fortunes as hopeless, but they paint a very challenging situation. If events and the state of the economy don’t change enough to raise his approval rating and his chances of winning an election that is framed as a referendum on his tenure, he will have to try to turn the contest into a choice between him and the GOP nominee. That will be easier if Republicans nominate an ideologue (and this still might be possible in a matchup with Romney). Recall the 2004 Bush-Cheney reelection campaign when it turned Democratic nominee John Kerry into an ideological weathervane, an unacceptable choice.”
“It’s been a brutal three years. It’s been a very, very difficult three years, an incredible three years.”
— White House chief of staff Bill Daley, in an interview with Roger Simon.
“Despite a pledge not to take money from lobbyists, President Obama has relied on prominent supporters who are active in the lobbying industry to raise millions of dollars for his re-election bid,” the New York Times reports.
“At least 15 of Mr. Obama’s ‘bundlers’ — supporters who contribute their own money to his campaign and solicit it from others — are involved in lobbying for Washington consulting shops or private companies. They have raised more than $5 million so far for the campaign.”
A new Kaiser Family Foundation poll shows the health care reform law’s popularity hit an all-time low this month.
Just 34% of those surveyed said they have a favorable view while 51% said they have an unfavorable view.
Politico: “That’s more lopsided than most of the Kaiser tracking polls have found since President Barack Obama signed the legislation into law. In most cases, the public has been about evenly split in its views of the law. The big difference this time is that Democrats seem to be souring on the reform law.”
Mother Jones
has a photo of the massive crowd that turned out at a recent volunteer
meeting in Massachusetts for U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren (D),
noting that it “looks more like the kind of crowd you’d see at
presidential volunteer meeting late in the campaign than a rally for a
Senate candidate 13 months before the general election.”
The AP profiles Mark Block, Herman Cain’s unorthodox campaign manager made famous in the viral ad that shows him smoking a cigarette. He’s “left a trail of questionable campaign work behind him.”
“Block has been accused of voter suppression and was banned from running Wisconsin political campaigns for three years to settle accusations he coordinated a judge’s re-election campaign with a special interest group. Records show Block has faced foreclosure on his home, a tax warrant by the Internal Revenue Service and a lawsuit for an unpaid bill. He also acknowledges he was arrested twice for drunken driving.”
If you want to see next month’s “modified Lincoln-Douglas debate” between Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich — not carried on television — it will cost you, the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Bleacher seating at the Gingrich/Cain debate, hosted by the Texas Tea Party Patriots at the Woodlands Resort in Houston, costs a cool $200. The next step up, the $500 ticket, gets you ‘prime seating’ and a ticket to the ‘Nite Cap party after the Debate,’ … And for the really high rollers, $1,000 will get you ‘the best seating in the house for the debate’ and ‘a professional picture taken with the candidates.'”
There’s no word if the candidates are getting paid for their appearance, but Dave Weigel, who first broke the story, reports proceeds will go to the Tea Party Patriots group.
The Daily Beast reports Newsweek‘s Michele Bachmann cover has become a Halloween costume.
A new Public Policy Polling survey in Florida finds Charlie Crist remains a popular figure in the state with a 51% to 34% favorability rating and if he were to run as a Democrat to reclaim his old office against Gov. Rick Scott (R) he would lead by 13 points at 51% to 38%.
In a hypothetical rematch of last year’s race, Alex Sink (D) would lead Scott 52% to 41%.
This is the first in a guest series from Inkwell Strategies analyzing the 2012 campaign ad war.
In the coming weeks and months, the Republican primary campaign will shift from debating and handshaking to the far more expensive – and often uglier – realm of paid media.
While we haven’t yet seen many candidates go up on the airwaves, we are seeing an uptick in the number of web ads – commercials designed not for a television audience, but for online viewers.
Web ads are a great way to tinker with the candidate’s message while earning free (or very inexpensive) coverage. Think of them as spring training for media consultants.
Last week, Texas Gov. Rick Perry released a powerful ad that almost surely previews his traditional television advertising campaign to come. Politics aside, the ad is not only a master stroke by his campaign team, but required viewing for anyone interested in the art of candidate marketing.
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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