The Hotline
notes that Elizabeth Warren, the likely Democratic nominee for the
Senate race in Massachusetts, is “the biggest rock star candidate in the
2012 Senate races” and “riding a wave of enthusiasm inside the state —
one we haven’t seen with other top Senate recruits so far this cycle.”

The
proof: “While she raised 70 percent of her third quarter haul from
outside of Massachusetts, the, her total haul was $3.14 million, meaning
that nearly $1 million was raised from donors in the state. That’s no
small sum… The Democrat drew a crowd of about 1,000 people at a
campaign rally in Roxbury on Sunday, NECNreports. And, as the Boston
Globe notes, it’s not her first campaign event to draw a large number of
people. Warren has also held volunteer events that have consistently
drawn hundreds of people… Those are numbers even the presidential
candidates wouldn’t turn up their noses at.”

New York magazine compiles a slideshow of Newt Gingrich looking at people condescendingly.

In her soon-to-be published book, Core of Conviction, Rep. Michele Bachmann accuses former President George W. Bush of “socialism” for his 2007 decision to bail out financial institutions that were near collapse, ABC News reports.

Writes Bachmann: “The Bush administration, which had always professed faith in the free-market system, was now reversing its course.”

She says Bush and then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson were embracing a kind of “bailout socialism.”

After Herman Cain’s bumbling answer on Libya yesterday, Daniel Drezner has had enough:

“There’s a mercy rule in Little League, and I’m applying it here — unless and until Herman Cain surges back in the polls again, or manages to muster something approaching cogency in his foreign policy statements, there’s no point in blogging about him anymore. I can only pick on an ignoramus so many times before it feels sadistic.”

With Newt Gingrich the latest Republican presidential candidate to become a frontrunner, First Read notes this “leaves just Ron Paul and Rick Santorum as the only GOP presidential candidates who haven’t enjoyed being the GOP flavor of the month.”

“Good news for them: We have still have two months to go. Of course, all of this volatility underscores the extent to which GOP voters are undecided, the extent to which Mitt Romney hasn’t closed the deal with them (at least not yet), the extent to which the debates have come to matter in the modern TV era, and the extent to which things can still change before the contests begin in January. And Newt’s current rise underscores how much can change — and how much people can forget — in just a few months.”

Stu Rothenberg: “OK, I give up. I don’t know what the heck is going to happen in the Republican race.”

Mitt Romney “veered into some talk about the political chessboard” at a Florida fundraiser, the St. Petersburg Times reports.

“Romney said after airing ads in Iowa for nearly an entire year during the 2008 campaign, he has not run any spots to date. Romney told the crowd his campaign calculus was that he could spend nothing and come in fourth or spend a bit and finish second or third. He guessed that Republicans could split the first three events, which would make Florida particularly important.”

“Romney predicted a Tea Party favorite would win Iowa and that he would take New Hampshire, according to interviews with six people in the audience. Romney told the crowd he would seal the nomination by then winning Florida’s Republican contest.”

A new Bloomberg News poll in Iowa shows Herman Cain at 20%, Ron Paul at 19%, Mitt Romney at 18% and Newt Gingrich at 17% among the likely attendees with the caucuses that start the Republican presidential nominating contests seven weeks away.

Key finding: 60% of respondents say they still could be persuaded to back someone other than their top choice and 10% are still undecided.

Said pollster Ann Selzer: “In Iowa, it’s long been a two-person race between Romney and someone else. It is now a four- person race between Romney and three someone elses.”

“If you’re not tough enough to withstand this kind of scrutiny, you’re sure not tough enough to be President of the United States.”

— Newt Gingrich, in a Fox News interview, saying his support “clicked” because Republicans “want someone who can debate Obama.”

[Read more…]

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds Herman Cain’s unfavorable ratings have soared by 17 points in the face of allegations of past sexual harassment, including a sharp increase in negative views of Cain within his own party.

“President Obama called for the removal of Gaddafi. Just want to make sure we’re talking about the same thing before I say, yes I agree, I know I didn’t agree. I do not agree with the way he handled it for the following reason — no, that’s a different one. I gotta go back to… Got all this stuff twirling around in my head. Specifically, what are you asking me, did I agree or not disagree with on what?”

— Herman Cain, struggling to collect his thoughts in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, which was recorded on video.

[Read more…]

The effort to recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) will start at midnight, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.

Organizers have to gather more than 540,000 signatures to force a recall election against Walker but they hope “to gather 600,000 to 700,000 signatures to allow a cushion if some signatures are found not to properly count.”

Joshua Spivak notes the signature requirement “is not low: The 540,000 represents 25% of the vote for the governor’s office in the last election.”

New research from the Federal Reserve concludes that the European debt crisis is raising the odds of a U.S. recession, with economic contraction more likely than not by early 2012, according to Reuters.