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Mike Huckabee just channelled Jed Bartlet during an answer about his suggestion in a sermon that wives should submit themselves to their husbands. Huckabee clarified the Biblical quote he was referring to: "As wives submit themselves to the husbands, the husbands also submit themselves."
There's a West Wing episode where President Bartlet hears a pastor quote the first half of the same passage. Later, speaking with the First Lady, he points out the second half. So either Huckabee knows the Bible really well, or he's a closet Aaron Sorkin fan.
(In the meantime, anyone got a YouTube link? Lemme know.)
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In response to a question on foreign policy, Rudy Giuliani goes waaay out of his way to squeeze in this canned line: “The kind of change Democrats are talking about is taking the change out of your pocket.”
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Chris Wallace asks Romney whether the primary results in New Hampshire suggest the people value experience over his message of “change.”
His response could have come out of a certain Democratic senator’s mouth. Paraphrased: If you stick with the same people, I’m convinced you’re going to see same results. If you send the same people back to Washington to sit in different chairs, nothing happens.”
McCain then rebuts charges that he’s a Washington insider: “Ask Jack Abramoff if I’m an insider in Washington. You’d probably have to go during visiting hours because he’s in prison.”
Correction, Jan. 14, 2008: This item originally misspelled Jack Abramoff’s name.
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McCain conflates trading with Arab nations with trading with al-Qaida. "I don’t want to trade with al-Qaida, all they want to trade is burqas," he says, smiling smugly. "I don’t want to travel with them, all they want is one-way tickets."
That's almost as good as Thompson's remark about the Iranian boats: "One more step and they would have been introduced to the virgins they were looking forward to seeing."
That's great, first we had the Hillary debate. Now we get the racism debate! Welcome to South Carolina.
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Carl Cameron tries to play Ron Paul off against his crazy 9/11 conspiracy theorist supporters. Will Paul tell them to renounce their beliefs?, Cameron asks.
He might as well have asked a cat to bark. Paul, good libertarian that he is, refuses to denounce them. He says he doesn’t agree, but that they’re entitled to their own opinions. “So please can I participate in the current debate?” Big applause.
Paul must know he's being kept around as something of a side show. It's the least he can do to request legitimate policy questions.
UPDATE 9:41 p.m.: Moments later, Paul gets laughed out of the room for railing against a "rush to judgment" surrounding the faceoff with Iranian boats, which he compares to the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Mitt Romney gets in a pretty devastating slam: "I think Congressman Paul should not be reading as many of Ahmadinejad’s press releases." Paul looks like he might cry.
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We’re not in New Hampshire anymore.
Thompson butts in on a question about the Reagan coalition so he can rattle off a litany of attacks on Huckabee. He thinks we have an “arrogant foreign policy,” says Thompson. “He thinks Guantanamo should be closed” and the prisoners brought into the American court system. “He has the endorsement of the NEA.” “He said he’d sign a bill to ban smoking nationwide.” And so on. He makes Huckabee sound so reasonable!
South Carolina is make-or-break for Thompson. And with Huckabee's popularity among southern Baptists posing a major threat, Thompson has to pull out all the stops.
When he’s done, he gets the first burst of applause of the night. Could that be the sound of Thompson bouncing?
Update 11:33 a.m.: Yes, we changed the headline. Sorry!
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Finally, Rudy Giuliani gives a less-than-absolutist answer on the question of whether tax cuts raise revenues. “The reality is some tax cuts lead to revenues, some tax cuts don’t lead to revenues,” he says. That’s a big change from his previous stark statements.
“Let me give you an example,” he says. "If you cut the corporate tax from 35 percent to 30 percent," that will stimulate the economy and raise revenue. “Our corporate tax is second highest in the world.” He doesn't give examples of tax cuts that wouldn't raise revenue, but at least he acknowledges their existence.
The most important thing, he says, is to “guard against overtaxing, overspending, overregulating, and oversuing.”
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After blocking Ron Paul from Sunday's debate, FOX News adjusted the cutoff standards to be either a fifth-place finish in New Hampshire primary or to have at least five percent in national polls. The first criterion allows Paul in. The second admits Thompson. Sounds like the result of some backroom negotiations, especially after the Internet practically exploded at Paul's exclusion.
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Check back here starting at 9 p.m. for live updates on tonight's Republican debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C.
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Ever since Michigan violated Democratic Party rules by moving its primary up to Jan. 15, thereby getting its delegates stripped, people have been calling the race a “beauty contest.” And considering that the only Democrats still on the ballot are Hillary Clinton, Dennis Kucinich, and Mike Gravel, it’s not hard to guess who’s the fairest of them all.
But a new campaign to get voters to check “Uncommitted” on the ballot could prevent an otherwise inevitable Clinton victory. Ben Smith has the promo video here.
A group pushing this move, Detroiters for Uncommitted Voters, suggests that an “Uncommitted” vote is a vote for Obama. But really, it’s a vote against Hillary. And that’s why it has the potential to hurt her so badly—it might attract people who currently support Edwards and Richardson as well.
But no matter what happens, she’s sort of screwed. If she does win a decisive victory, it will look hollow (and maybe even vaguely Stalinist, given that she’s the only viable candidate on the ballot), considering her main opponent is a nameless, faceless concept. People can say the movement never gained traction. If she loses to “Uncommitted,” or even wins by only a small margin, it will humiliate her campaign. If she can't even win against "Uncommitted," how can she expect to beat Obama? the thinking will go. According to a pollster for the Detroit News, “anything less than 60 percent in Michigan would be a black eye for Clinton.”
Who knows where that cutoff comes from, but that’s the point: No matter what the result, anyone can spin it against her. Perhaps staying on the ballot was not the wisest choice.
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Finally, a glimpse into Bill Richardson's mind. From an email Richardson wrote to his supporters announcing his withdrawal today:
It was my hope that all of you would first hear this news from me and
not a news organization. But unfortunately, as with too many things in
our world today, it's the ending of something that garners the most
intense interest and speculation. (emphasis added)
So that's why he wanted to end the war so badly.
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Earlier this week, we pointed out how all the top Democrats are talking about how "personal" this race is. “For me and Elizabeth, this is personal,” says John Edwards—not "academic" or "political" like his opponents. Hillary and Obama made similar statements.
Now the meme has made its way across the aisle. In today's New York Times, Mitt Romney adopts the phrase as his own: "I care about Michigan. For me, it's personal. It's personal for me because it's where I was born and raised."
By the end of this race, will there be no one left running for vague, distant, non-personal reasons?
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Obama supporters and Clinton conspiracy theorists, relax. John Kerry is endorsing Barack Obama, but it’s not the kiss of death everybody thinks. Sure, it recalls Al Gore’s endorsement of Howard Dean in 2004, but as Chris Cillizza notes, this is a different ballgame. Nor is Kerry a Hillary Clinton plant intended to ruin Obama’s change momentum. Most likely, this will end up being a very quiet, behind-the-scenes partnership in the long run.
It’s hard to remember, but think back to Pat Robertson’s endorsement of Rudy Giuliani. We haven’t heard anything from Mr. 700 Club since. Giuliani needed Robertson to prove that his message jived with evangelicals, and then he needed Robertson to shut up.
Kerry isn’t as big of a liability, but he is the dour face of the Democratic base that Obama is trying to transcend. (Plus, Kerry did have that nasty soldiers-are-dumb moment in 2006.) For Obama, Kerry is a gateway to the Democratic establishment that can make his change message even more legitimate and a key resource in the fund-raising battle with Hillary Clinton.
If Edwards continues to fade, the Democratic race will be a one-on-one showdown where money will play an even more important role than it did in small, retail-politics states. The candidates will be holding more rallies and fewer house parties since they need to hit multiple states before Feb. 5. That means ads are their most important surrogates—and that means money is their most important asset.
The real worry for Obama fans is not the curse; it’s that Kerry didn’t even think the endorsement was a boon to Obama back in December. According to the New York Times, Kerry had made his support for Obama known to the campaign before Iowa’s caucuses, but everybody decided to hold off on a public announcement until after New Hampshire. Maybe they were worried about the curse, or maybe they were worried about Kerry weighing Obama’s hope message down. Either way, I doubt we’ll be hearing from Kerry too often.
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Ron Paul’s fifth-place showing in the New Hampshire primary disappointed his supporters, who saw the Granite State as his last best chance to penetrate the first tier of GOP candidates.
But Paul doesn’t appear to be slowing down. The $20 million he raised in the fourth quarter should carry him at least through the Feb. 5 states. And the grassroots money fountain shows no signs of drying up. “If I said I needed 50 million dollars, they’d probably do it,” he told me after a speech in Nashua earlier this week.
I asked whether there’s been any tension between the official campaign and what supporters call the “real” campaign of online supporters. “There will always be,” he said, but on the other hand it’s better, since “they don’t have to wait for marching orders.” Paul talks about the campaign as if it’s not really up to him whether
or not he stays in the race—and that’s a good thing. “We don’t have any
choice but to keep it going,” he said.
Paul also laid to rest (again) any notions of an independent candidacy. “Short of an absolute no, I’ve said the same thing: I have no plans, no intention to run.” Getting on the ballot would be hard enough, he said, let alone negotiating some states’ “sore loser” laws, which prevent candidates who have run in the primary from running again in the general.
But his attitude doesn’t sound like the usual maybe-I-will-maybe-I-won’t coyness. He actually seems open to all possibilities—he just can’t think of any circumstance that would make him want to run as a third party candidate: “I can’t conceive of anything that would change my mind.”
If he got out of the race, I asked, would he throw his weight (and fundraising acumen) behind another candidate? No, he said, because his supporters are non-transferrable: “People have asked me, ‘What’s your technique? Where do you get your lists?’ … They don’t understand this is spontaneous. If I endorsed someone I’d lose all credibility and we wouldn’t get any money anyway.”