Former Sen. John Edwards suspended his presidential campaign Wednesday afternoon after disappointing showings in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina.

I wrote previously that Edwards really drove much of the debate during the 2008 Democratic primary. He was the first candidate to release a universal health care plan, the first to really push hard against accepting PAC and lobbyist money, and, perhaps most importantly, it was Edwards, not Obama, who most aggressively criticized Sen. Hillary Clinton as Clinton saw her armor of inevitability begin to crack.

Now the question is how his exit from the race will affect the remaining two candidates. Where his supporters go will tell us a lot about how primary voters really make their decisions.

Read the rest

Traditionally, the Democratic responses to President George W. Bush’s State of the Union Speeches have been a reaction. They haven’t set agendas so much as they have explained their disagreements with the President’s agendas. This was, in some ways, an important strategy for enabling Democrats to vote against the President on issues where the American people would not otherwise have heard their point of view.

Monday night afforded the Democratic Party a different opportunity. It was chance for them diminish Bush’s presidency by giving a speech with more ambitious an agenda than the president himself.
Read the rest

My home state of Florida is holding its presidential primary tomorrow in violation of both the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee rules. The rule-breaking date was imposed on the state by its Republican state legislature and governor, and those elected officials did not make their decision until after it was absolutely certain that Democratic candidates would not campaign in Florida should they choose a date before February 5 for their primary.

Democrats in Florida objected to the GOP’s imposition, although there is some debate about how strenuously they actually did so. Once the date was set, conservatives ensured that at least one harmful referendum would be placed on the ballot, preventing Florida Democrats from deciding to hold a primary on a different day. To do so would almost guarantee the passage of the Republican ballot initiative, which would provide for a regressive restructuring of property tax rates in a state that already has no income tax.

For Democrats in early states and elsewhere across the country, the issue became a question of who controls the Democratic Party’s presidential nominating contest: should it be the DNC, or should it be Florida’s GOP-controlled legislature? Only one Democratic candidate thinks it should be the latter.

Read the rest

I’m going to editorialize for a moment. I know this is a personal blog, and I should feel comfortable doing it without any pretext, but this is a touchy subject. Here, I attempt to explain why I think it is OK for a Democratic presidential candidate to criticize former president Bill Clinton. Some of the points made in this post I agree with wholeheartedly. Other points are merely mentioned because I think they are subconsciously at work in the backs of the minds of members of my generation.

It is the dogmatic pro-Bill Clinton expectations put forth by other bloggers that prompted me to write this post. In particular, I am troubled by my friend Taylor Marsh’s recent opinion that she might not support Sen. Barack Obama should he win the nomination because Obama had the audacity to criticize Clinton, whom she repeatedly and admiringly describes as “the only two term Democratic president since F.D.R.”
Read the rest

The emerging conventional wisdom seems to be that Sen. Barack Obama has made a huge mistake by engaging former President Bill Clinton on some of Clinton’s attacks against him. Clinton was, after all, a fairly popular Democratic president. He served two terms. He has a legacy. And I’ve heard of polls that measure his current favorability ratings among Democrats around 80%.

The conventional wisdom is wrong. Obama will benefit from the highly publicized arguments with Bill Clinton.

Read the rest

Blogging is interesting. One day, you’re totally into it. The next day, you can’t think of anything to write.

And then you make excuses to yourself for it. Excuses like “the template for my blog has gotten old,” or “my web address is childish.”

Today, my fair readers, the well of excuses runs dry. The other shoe drops. And my metaphorical bag of tricks, which contains the rest of my metaphors (and not really much else), returns to the scene.

Notice the new address. It’s more descriptive, but it keeps to that familiar “initials + preposition + noun” formula that you’ve come to expect. Old links to the old me will still function — both online and in person. Read the rest

Just a quick note that Michigan’s primary, which has been virtually nullified on the Democratic side but which could prove decisive on the Republican side, happens today. Iowa Indy’s sister site in Michigan, the Michigan Messenger, is providing all-day coverage.

So far, turnout seems light. Given that no Democrats are running field operations there, I suppose that’s not a surprise.

There’s a lot of big news out of New Hampshire today, but one I didn’t expect to hear about — even during the time-filling that happens on cable news — was Sal Mohamed, Iowa’s hometown hero. Constitutionally ineligible to actually be president, Mohamed is on the New Hampshire Democratic primary ballot today.

Mohamed did not win a single precinct in Iowa, let alone a single delegate. But he still earned a mention on MSNBC today, when Dan Abrams listed a few of the unknown candidates who are also on the ballot.

Perhaps Sal’s rather lackluster presidential campaign has really been a strategy for building name identification in a strategically important state for next time. That would explain it.

Kudos to Ann Seltzer, pollster for the Des Moines Register, for releasing numbers that confounded almost every bit of conventional wisdom I had ever heard before this week and getting it right. I do not envy her for having to make the decision to release that poll, knowing that her reputation and that of the Register would live or die by the truly counterintuitive numbers she came up with.

And too bad for David Yepsen, who remained detrimentally cynical of young and first-time voter participation the whole way through. His demographic generalizations also turned out to be exaggerated or simply inaccurate. And remember his claim that heavy young voter participation would delegitimize an Obama victory going into New Hampshire? What happened with that?

Perhaps for the statewide paper of record, the win and the loss will balance each other out.