Karl Rove-backed American Crossroads is up with a video which strings together clips of President Obama dancing, singing, drinking a beer and “slow-jamming” the news.
The tagline: “After 4 years of a celebrity president, is your life any better?”
First Read: “The ad picks up where John McCain left off with his Biggest Celebrity in the World ad, a narrative that was starting to take hold… until McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate.”
The drama of John Edwards’s trial “took a few more twists” as former staffer Andrew Young “admitted submitting misleading financial statements to a wealthy benefactor who thought he was helping the senator hide a mistress,” thew New York Times reports.
Young admitted asking Fred Baron, a wealthy Texas trial lawyer who was a fervent supporter of Edwards, to pay $28,261 for a BMW that had been bought for Rielle Hunter. However, the car had actually already been paid for with money from the heiress Rachel Mellon.
The economic output of the United States grew at an annual rate of 2.2% in the first quarter of the year, easing from the prior quarter’s growth rate of 3%, the New York Times reports.
Reuters: “Although the details were mixed, the GDP
report offered a somewhat better picture of growth compared with the
fourth quarter, when inventory building accounted for nearly two thirds
of the economy’s growth. In the first quarter, demand from consumers
took up the slack.”
A New York Times reporter met Shahbaz, a scammer who used fake bank alerts to make victims panic. When confronted, he just laughed—no guilt, no remorse.
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“With Mitt Romney raising private funds for the fall campaign, this year’s presidential election will be the first since the Watergate scandal in which neither major party’s nominee accepts federal funding,” Bloomberg reports.
“Public financing was enacted by Congress after President Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 amid revelations about his role in covering up a 1972 break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate hotel and office complex in Washington. The investigation uncovered illegal activities funded by some of the unregulated private donations to Nixon’s re-election campaign.”
Bill Clinton cuts a very powerful video extolling President Obama as commander in chief.
Even though Newt Gingrich has announced he’ll end his presidential campaign next week, the New York Times reports he’s still campaigning.
“One of the quirky indulgences of modern campaigns is that candidates announce their intent to run for president on multiple occasions — essentially, stunts to milk media attention. They announce the formation of exploratory committees, announce that they intend to run, announce that they are actually running, etc. Ever the innovator, Mr. Gingrich has applied that ritual to quitting.”
A federal judge refused to order the Obama administration “to release photos and video of the U.S. military operation that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan almost a year ago and the al Qaeda leader’s burial at sea,” Reuters reports.
“This is the biggest job in the world and I’ve never seen a president make it smaller.”
— House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), quoted by NBC News.
Karl Rove‘s latest electoral vote forecast finds President Obama with 220 votes and another 64 votes which “lean Obama.” Mitt Romney has 93 votes with another 79 which “lean Romney.” The remaining 82 votes are “toss ups.”
Most interesting: Rove lists both South Carolina and Missouri as “toss up” states.
“I’m not going anywhere, don’t worry.”
— New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), quoted by ABC News, when a supporter said, “I really, really hope that you serve your term here.”
Time has a fascinating look at the White House decisionmaking that led to the death of Osama bin Laden. One of the biggest challenges was confirming that the al Qaeda leader was actually at the Abbottabad compound.
“Most of the actions the CIA could take to increase its confidence about the target would also unavoidably increase the odds that bin Laden or Pakistani intelligence officers would learn that the U.S. had discovered his whereabouts. More-advanced drones could provide better overhead photography of activity in the compound, but what if one crashed, as an RQ-170 did in Iran seven months later? A broadsheet of options included everything from surveilling the neighborhood with a miniaturized UAV that resembled a bird (so convincing that one was attacked by an eagle) to analyzing local sewage for genetic markers.”
“My commitment to my Church and faith is all encompassing.”
— Mitt Romney, in a 2002 interview with the Mormon newspaper Church News, via BuzzFeed which notes Romney often dismisses questions about his religion arguing that he’s “not running for pastor-in-chief.”
One more tidbit from Do Not Ask What Good We Do by Robert Draper, courtesy of the Daily Beast:
“John Dingell is the longest currently-serving member of Congress (and the third longest-serving ever). The acerbic 85-year-old Michigan Democrat had long been contemptuous of Tea Partiers. He found them unruly and difficult to get along with. Dingell tended to refer to them as ‘teabaggers,’ a phrase that has an alternate sexual meaning. This normally wouldn’t have been a problem in the hall of Congress, but when Dingell was booked to appear on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, his staff felt the need to finally warn and educate him. When his chief of staff shared the other meaning of ‘teabagger’ with Dingell, the Congressman went through three different stages of reaction. At first, he said ‘hah,’ then said ‘that’s disgusting,’ and finally the octogenarian congressman reached the plain of acceptance and said, ‘It’s funny and I’m going to keep using it.'”
Stuart Rothenberg notes that all of the talk about Mitt Romney’s running mate “is a lot of wasted, useless, meaningless hot air” but warns that cable television news networks have “4,416 hours to fill from May 1 to the end of October — and they’ll need to fill some of those hours with chatter from people who want to hear themselves talk about running mate selections.”
At a debate last weekend, Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) equated federal student loan programs with stage three cancer.
Said Aikin: “America has got the equivalent of the stage three cancer of socialism because the federal government is tampering in all kinds of stuff it has no business tampering in. So first, to answer your question precisely, what the Democrats did to the private student loans and take it all over by the government was wrong, it was a lousy bill, and that’s why I voted no. The government needs to get its nose out of the education business.”
A Wenzel Strategies poll in Indiana shows Richard Mourdock (R) leading Sen. Richard Lugar (R) in the GOP U.S. Senate primary by five points, 44% to 39%.
The poll was conducted by a Mourdock-supporting group. The primary is on May 8.
Vice President Joe Biden sharply criticized Mitt Romney in a campaign speech by digging up a Romney quote from 2008, BuzzFeed reports.
Said Romney at the time: “Well, if we want somebody who has a lot of experience in foreign policy, we can simply go to the State Department and pluck out one of the tens of thousands of people who work there… A president is not a foreign policy expert.”
Biden: “In my view, the last thing I think we need is a president who will subcontract our foreign policy to some expert at the State Department.”
The Seattle Times notes it’s been “a common practice in politics for years” for trackers to follow politicians trying to get their gaffes recorded “and most politicians have learned to blow off such tracking efforts.”
But Washington gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna (R) “appeared to let it get under his skin” in an encounter earlier this week. McKenna told the tracker — who identified herself as a “youth worker” — wasn’t being “honest” and was trying to “bushwhack” him. Walking away, he said, “You’re just trying to gain a political advantage, sorry. Why don’t you go get a job?”
Of course, the exchange is on video.
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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