Fox News obtained a copy of Donald Trump’s forthcoming book, Time To Get Tough, in which he writes he was so close to running for president that he had already prepared to disclose his finances, something many suggested he would never do.
In an afterword section, Trump claims a net worth of just over $7 billion, of which $3 billion he calls “brand value.”
Sarah Palin infuriated Fox News chief Roger Ailes because she didn’t make the announcement she wouldn’t run for president on Fox News, Gabriel Sherman reports.
Instead, she made the October 5 announcement on Mark Levin’s radio program with Fox getting a follow-up interview on Greta Van Susteren’s 10 p.m. show.
Said Ailes: “I paid her for two years to make this announcement on my network.”
Newt Gingrich had some tough words for the Congressional Budget Office, CNN reports.
Said Gingrich: “The CBO is a reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic growth, does not believe in innovation and does not believe in data that it has not internally generated.”
Former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican, called the allegation “ludicrous.”
Said Holtz-Eakin: “I think if you parse that phrase carefully, he got one out of three
right. I do agree it is an institution. If you’re
playing baseball, that’s a decent batting average.”
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Herman Cain reversed himself and will sit down for a taped interview with the editorial board of the New Hampshire Union Leader, caving to pressure after skipping his previous interview.
Politico:
“Just last week, Cain backed out of a Union Leader interview because
the paper insisted on a 60-minute interview, as opposed to the
20-minute, camera-free conversation Cain hoped for. The newspaper
blistered Cain in a Monday missive titled, ‘Recording Cain: What’s he afraid of?‘”
“The biggest single threat to our economy is not Europe’s instability or China’s monetary policy or anything else. It is this partisan paralysis and political cowardice that I think is defining Washington and we just cannot afford to have that continue.”
— New York City Michael Bloomberg, quoted by the New York Daily News, on the failure of the congressional supercommittee.
As expected, the congressional deficit-reduction committee said it had “failed to reach an agreement on slashing the U.S. budget gap, a move that triggers mandatory cuts to military spending and some social programs starting in 2013,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
According to National Journal, President Obama “warned that he will veto any attempt to eliminate the automatic spending cuts that go into effect with that failure.”
He added: “There will be no easy off-ramps on this one.”
Marc Ambinder: “President Obama would have preferred the super committee produce a
bipartisan deal, but what remains is not so bad: the prospect of up to
$6 trillion in debt reduction if Congress does nothing, and the
certainty of sharply defined election-year contrasts with Republicans.”
A new CNN/Opinion Research poll confirms what many other recent national polls have found: Newt Gingrich is the new GOP presidential frontrunner.
Gingrich leads with 24%, followed by Mitt Romney at 20%, Herman Cain at 17%, Rick Perry at 11%, Ron Paul at 9%, Michele Bachmann at 5%, Rick Santorum at 4% and Jon Hunstman at 3%.
Said pollster Keating Holland: “But don’t think that Gingrich has risen in the polls simply because other alternatives to Romney have fizzled. The number of Republicans who would be pleased or enthusiastic if he won the party’s nomination has grown from 51% in May to 70% now — not the kind of numbers you would expect if voters were ‘settling’ for Gingrich.”
“I tasted a beer and tried a cigarette once, as a wayward teenager, and never did it again.”
— Mitt Romney, in a forthcoming People magazine interview.
Mitt Romney told the Nashua Telegraph that his staff wiped electronic records at the end of his term as governor because they didn’t want “opposition research teams” to have access to them.
Said Romney: “Well, I think in government we should follow the law. And there has never been an administration that has provided to the opposition research team, or to the public, electronic communications. So ours would have been the first.”
David Gergen: “It’s difficult to remember a Congress that has put the nation so much at risk in the service of ideology and to hold onto office. Partisans on both sides are grievously failing the country.”
A new Fairleigh Dickinson PublicMind Poll finds that the Sunday morning political shows on television “do the most to help people learn about current events, while some outlets, especially Fox News, lead people to be even less informed than those who they don’t watch any news at all.”
“For example, people who watch Fox News, the most popular of the 24-hour cable news networks, are 18-points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government than those who watch no news at all (after controlling for other news sources, partisanship, education and other demographic factors). Fox News watchers are also 6-points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government than those who watch no news.”
These results mirror a University of Maryland study published last year.
Check out the latest listings at Political Job Hunt.
A new American Research Group poll in New Hampshire finds Mitt Romney leading the Republican presidential field with 33%, followed by Newt Gingrich at 22% and Ron Paul at 12%.
Support for Romney has remained steady for months. In April, support for Romney was at 32%. Romney was at 29% in June and 30% in September.
Former Mike Bloomberg aide Kevin Sheekey hints to Newsweek that big things are planned for the New York mayor once he leaves office.
Said Sheekey: “City Hall holds him back. He stands to become something much larger after he leaves office. Mike Bloomberg has the ability to be the best parts of Bill Clinton, Rupert Murdoch, and Bill Gates all rolled up into one.”
Sheekey, of course, was behind the effort to quietly explore a Bloomberg independent bid for president in 2008.
Paul Begala: “Republicans, apparently, will date anyone before they’ll marry Mitt. Remember their brief fling with Donald Trump? Then, after he decided not to throw his hair into the ring, they fell for Michele Bachmann, the Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya of the far right. Then it was Rick Perry — the guy who claims he jogs with a loaded gun (without a safety) tucked into his shorts. And now that they’ve tired of Herman Cain’s, umm, hands-on style of leadership, it’s Newt’s turn.”
“And so, like MacArthur, Newt has returned. I, for one, could not be happier–but then again, I’m a Democrat, so I have to take my political pleasures where I can find them. I seriously doubt Newt will be the GOP nominee. But a guy can dream, can’t he?”
Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) and Rep. Charlie Bass (R-NH) endorsed Mitt Romney for the Republican presidential nomination, the Nasua Telegraph reports.
Jonathan Bernstein: “The political science literature tells us that high-profile endorsements are important indicators for at least two reasons. One is that these endorsements probably have a direct effect, as primary voters with little way of choosing from among similar-sounding candidates may turn to opinion leaders to sort things out. The other, and perhaps more important, factor is that high-profile endorsements are the most visible ways of seeing the co-ordination of party actors as they compete over the nomination and eventually settle on a candidate.”
Greg Sargent, in one sentence: “Democrats wanted the rich to pay more in taxes towards deficit reduction, and Republicans wanted the rich to pay less in taxes towards deficit reduction.”
Jonathan Chait: “Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president. They can be happy with the idea of a Democratic president — indeed, dancing-in-the-streets delirious — but not with the real thing.”
“For almost all of the past 60 years, liberals have been in a near-constant emotional state of despair, punctuated only by brief moments of euphoria and occasional rage. When they’re not in charge, things are so bleak they threaten to move to Canada; it’s almost more excruciating when they do win elections, and their presidents fail in essentially the same ways: He is too accommodating, too timid, too unwilling or unable to inspire the populace. (Except for Johnson, who was a bloodthirsty warmonger.)”
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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