A new Pew Research study finds negative coverage of President Obama outweighed his positive coverage in each of the last 15 weeks — the only presidential candidate where that was true.
“While a sitting president may have access to the ‘bully pulpit,’ that does not mean he has control of the media narrative, particularly during the other party’s primary season.”
A recent Gallup poll found that 27% of Democrats would not vote for a Mormon under any circumstances, versus 18% of Republicans.
Peter Beinhart: “One reason Democrats may be more anti-Mormon than Republicans is that Democrats, on average, are more secular. Devout Protestants, Catholics, and Jews may be more tolerant of Mormonism because they understand from firsthand experience the comfort and strength that religious commitment brings. Many secular Democrats, by contrast, may start with the assumption that religious orthodoxy produces irrationality and intolerance… Democrats may exhibit greater suspicion of Mormonism, in other words, because they exhibit greater suspicion of all organized religion. It’s just that anti-Mormonism is still socially acceptable enough to confess to a pollster.”
The Gallup daily tracking poll, which kicked off eight days ago with Mitt Romney leading by two points, now has President Obama in front by 7 points, 49% to 42%.
Meanwhile, a new DailyKos/SEIU poll shows Obama leading Romney 49% to 44%.
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Walter Shapiro writes about his “political-journalistic courtship” of John Edwards “that now makes me cringe.”
“With Edwards on trial in North Carolina on charges of violating federal campaign-finance laws — after the disgrace of being caught with a mistress and denying being the father of her baby — I wish I had befriended a comparatively more honorable political figure like Eliot Spitzer or Mark Sanford… In hindsight, I feel like the jaded city slicker, bristling with self-confidence that he can never be fooled, who ends up hoodwinked by the smiling rural Southern confidence man.”
“I’m not sure what that is because I’m not serving right now.”
— Missouri U.S. Senate candidate Sarah Steelman (R), quoted by the Springfield News-Leader, when asked for her position on reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.
Despite ripping his own party over the weekend, Jon Huntsman told CNBC that he’s still firmly behind Mitt Romney for president.
Said Huntsman: “Absolutely, I am. Listen, the economic message is going to carry the day in November, and I think that message will resonate — or not — through the critically important states in the Midwest… These are gonna be the states that will tell the story in November. I think it’s about recovery, it’s about rebuilding our manufacturing muscle in this country, and the prospects for job creation. I think he’s best positioned by virtue of his own background training to be able to provide that leadership.”
That said, Jeff Greenfield is convinced Huntsman will leave the Republican party.
Jon Karl reviews Do Not Ask What Good We Do by Robert Draper.
“Mr. Draper embedded himself in the House in 2011, getting to know the key players — newcomers and old-timers alike. In his group portrait, he doesn’t make any sweeping judgments about who is to blame for the failure of this Congress to address the country’s long-term problems. But his refreshingly balanced account captures the drama of one of Congress’s most combative and maddeningly frustrating years in memory.”
John Heilemann profiles U.N. ambassador Susan Rice and wonders if she might take the top foreign policy post in an Obama second term.
“Whatever ultimately transpires with Iran and Syria, Rice’s U.N. tenure is already seen in the administration — and particularly by the guy behind the big desk in the Oval Office — as having been a success.. along with [national security adviser Tom] Donilon and John Kerry, she is considered the likeliest successor to Clinton should Obama win reelection.”
Ezra Klein worked with three political scientists to create a model to forecast the 2012 presidential. You predict how the economy will do, and where President Obama’s approval rating will be in 2012, and the model spits out the winner.
The inputs “may seem a bit thin. But it calls 12 of the past 16 elections right. The average error in its prediction of the two-party vote share is less than three percentage points.”
RNC spokeswoman Alexandra Franceschi told The Fernando Espuelas Show that the Republican party’s economic platform in 2012 is going to be the same as it was during the Bush years, “just updated.”
First Read: “Even though the general election campaign is now underway — after Rick Santorum’s exit earlier this month — there are five primaries today in Connecticut, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania (Santorum’s home state), and Rhode Island. As a result, this is the first primary day where Romney doesn’t face any real competition. So when we watch the returns, we’ll get a good idea of the true anti-Romney vote tonight. Does he get at least 50% in all of these contests? What about 60%? 70%?”
“There are a bunch of fools running, literally. These are not even C-team people. It’s the D team. They’re silly people.”
— Democratic media consultant Neil Oxman, quoted by The Atlantic, on the Republican U.S. Senate candidates running in today’s Pennsylvania primary.
First Read: “This GOP field should be a warning sign to Republicans who want to make
this state competitive in November: They couldn’t find a top-tier or
even second-tier challenger to take on Casey in this battleground state.”
A new NY1/Marist College poll finds New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D) breaking away from the Democratic pack of mayoral candidates.
Quinn leads with 32%, a full 20 points ahead of her nearest rival, former City Comptroller Bill Thompson (D).
Meanwhile, Republicans are trying to convince police commissioner Ray Kelly to run.
Nadia Lockyer, wife of California Treasurer Bill Lockyer (D), resigned from the Alameda County Board of Supervisors and spoke to the San Jose Mercury News about her drug addiction and “tortured extramarital affair with a methamphetamine addict.”
However, her account “raises serious questions” about her husband’s actions. “While she tried to defend him last week, saying that she holds responsibility for taking drugs, she did not deny her earlier claim that Bill Lockyer bought and supplied her with some of those drugs years ago.”
Lockyer “also revealed for the first time that she had sought dependency treatment in June 2010 — after winning a spot for the November runoff, not after the election was over, as previously reported. Bill Lockyer financed most of her campaign from his own political coffers, and of the $1.5 million he kicked in, more than two-thirds came after the June election. If he in effect bought her the office knowing she was addicted to drugs or alcohol, his own judgment — and his respect for the public he’s supposed to serve — are in serious question.”
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is tried to convince New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to support Mitt Romney’s bid for president in a meeting yesterday, the New York Post reports.
Said McCain: “I just came in to pay my respects to the mayor. He and I are old friends from many years back. I told him that I just spent last weekend with Romney and I thought that Romney was on message . . . and tried to convince the mayor that we’ve got a winning campaign.”
Maggie Haberman: “Bloomberg, having decided against a run himself, could end up making his voice heard with an endorsement, and he’s made clear privately to many people he doesn’t think highly of the job President Obama has done.”
Barely an hour into the first day of testimony in the John Edwards criminal trial, “sex and conniving had already surfaced” when defense lawyers had asked permission to mention in their opening statement a one-night stand that former aide Andrew Young, a married father of three, had with a co-worker in 2007, the Raleigh News and Observer reports.
Young wrote a tell all book about the Edwards scandal and is a key witness for the prosecution.
However, in a packed courtroom, the judge “muzzled any unprompted mentioning of Young’s alleged sexual liaison.”
A new WMUR/University of New Hampshire poll finds President Obama leading Mitt Romney in the Granite state by nine points, 51% to 42%.
First Read: “Much of the southern part of the state is essentially a suburb of Boston. And what these poll numbers suggest is that Republicans are struggling in the ‘burbs. So if Romney’s down in New Hampshire, that also means he’s trailing in Northern Virginia and the Philly suburbs.”
A Dartmouth poll last week showed Romney with a two point lead.
Nate Silver looks the impact of a vice presidential nominee’s home state on the ticket’s ultimate success and finds it is “is normally quite modest — perhaps two or three percentage points on average, if a little more in some cases and a little less in others. To be sure, two or three percentage points in the right swing state is not trivial, but it is probably not enough to outweigh the other strengths and weaknesses that a vice presidential candidate could potentially impart onto the ticket.”
“Indeed, presidential campaigns in recent years have largely abided by
this principle, with recent vice presidential nominees hailing from
states like Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, New York and Wyoming that did
not figure to be competitive.”
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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