In the coverage of Hurricane Gustave, Bobby Jindal the governor of Louisiana, keeps appearing making calm, clear statements. Jindal was at one point regarded as McCain’s most likely out of the box VP pick and his impressive performances today makes one think about what might have been.
Jindal like Palin is a rare figure who could both excite the Republican base and...
From Michelle Obama’s speech on Monday night to Barack Obama’s acceptance address the ‘dignity of work’ was one of the key themes of this convention. This emphasis on work is an attempt to say I share your values to blue collar voters, a group with whom Obama has had particular difficulty.
Obama’s life-story is hard for a lot of voters to relate to. He grew up outside the contiguous United States and struggled with the kind of identity issues that most people have never had to think about. All this...
It seems rather Jo Mooreish to be discussing the political implications of Hurricane Gustav as people are forced to evacuate their homes but with the hurricane expected to make landfall as the Republican convention gets under way and with the legacy of Katrina there is an unavoidable political angle to this story. As Fraser notes, the Republicans cannot in the current circumstances have a typical convention. It would be wrong both stylistically and substantively to have speakers indulging in partisan rhetoric as a natural disaster strikes.
At first blush, this appears...
I’m in Denver airport waiting for what a Republican friend in St Paul has just informed me is likely to be a one- or two-day convention. Even if Hurricane Gustav does not cause the destruction expected, it may yet blow away McCain’s chance of victory. The Republicans are acutely aware that this brings back memory of the Bush administration’s disastrous handling of Hurricane Katrina. Bush and Cheney are the last people the Republicans want on stage, and they have both pulled out. McCain knows he will be judged more by his response to...
The McCain campaign just sent round this clip of McCain on Fox News Sunday. The headline on the clip? 'McCain: Gov. Sarah Palin is the change we need'.
It is hard to over-state how much the Palin pick has taken folk by surprise. The Obama campaign has after an ill-judged initial effort shied away from instantly trying to define her but as the New York Times reports that might be because of a simple lack of information:
Mr. Obama’s advisers said that compared with the mountains of data they had gathered on Mr. Pawlenty and Mr. Romney, they had far less information on Ms. Palin. Their dossier consisted of a thin document based mainly on her run for...
At first blush the selections of Joe Biden and Sarah Palin appear to have little in common. Obama went for an experienced Washington insider with a ton of national security experience, McCain went for a first term governor whose previous statements on foreign policy hardly suggest a great deal of knowledge about the subject. But the two picks do have something in common: they’re the picks you would have advised the candidates to make if they were running in 2000.
In 2000, with the misguided holiday from history still in full swing,...
Talking to those Democrats who didn’t get the first flight out of Denver one picks up two conflicting emotions about the Palin pick: relief and fear. They are all happy that McCain has so neutered his attack on Obama’s experience; yes Obama was a state senator just four years ago but the person that John McCain—a 72 year old cancer survivor—has chosen to put a heart beat away from the presidency was the Mayor of a small Alaskan town then. But there is also real concern that John McCain might have finally...
It says something about what a shock pick Sarah Palin was that less than 24 hours after Barack Obama’s historic acceptance speech we are not talking about it. But it is worth noting that his speech last night was watched by 38 million Americans, that’s a record for a convention address. As I’ve said before, this focus on Obama is a double-edged sword for him. But his decision to go after McCain so hard in the speech did go some way to prodding voters to think of the election not as a referendum on Obama but as a choice between...
Sarah Palin just passed her first test, delivering an impressive speech at the event unveiling the Republican ticket. The challenge for her is that because of her lack of experience any flub is going to be a big story; she is going to face a lot of gotcha questions from journalists about foreign policy.
The Palin pick suggests a change in emphasis in the McCain campaign’s message, with reform taking centre stage and the McCain campaign running against Washington. Palin’s reputation on the national stage, to the extent that she has...
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