Sunday, 10th February 2008
James Forsyth 8:55am
Barack Obama tilted the Democratic presidential contest in his favour on Saturday with a string of commanding victories. He won both the Nebraska and Washington caucuses with more than two thirds of the vote and beat Hillary Clinton by 21 points in the Louisiana primary. He also triumphed in the US Virgin Islands taking almost 90 percent of the vote.
Obama was expected to win all these contests but his margins of victory were impressive and ensured that even with the Democrat’s proportional distribution of delegates he takes the lion’s...
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Saturday, 9th February 2008
James Forsyth 11:53pm
It isn’t a major blow but the McCain camp will be irritated by losing so badly to Mike Huckabee in the Kansas caucuses. Huckabee’s 60 percent to 24 percent victory shows both the support that he has among evangelicals and other Christian conservatives and the task that McCain has ahead of him in winning them round. It also means that Huckabee is unlikely to drop out of the race anytime soon meaning that McCain will have to wait a while to get his general election campaign underway.
This result crowns...
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James Forsyth 6:44pm
Mike Huckabee is staying in the race but his refusal to attack John McCain is convincing more and more people that he is really running for the number two slot on the ticket. It turns out that Huckabee has previous experience of a McCain Huckabee double act: his wife is a McCain. The quick-witted Huckabee has now taken to joking that: “Almost 34 years ago, the Huckabee McCain ticket became one -- the Huckabee ticket.”
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Rory Sutherland 6:19pm
If Hillary loses narrowly to Barack Obama in the next few weeks, she can reasonably lay the blame on ethnic politics. And, in particular, on North America’s most ineffectual and uninfluential ethnic group: the Welsh.
Hillary, it seems, may be almost as Welsh as Obama is black. The Rodhams are of Welsh ancestry; her mother was born a Howell. How many votes was this worth? I’d estimate not far north of nil.
What’s extraordinary about Welsh Americans is not how insignificant they are: quite the reverse - their contribution to the...
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Friday, 8th February 2008
James Forsyth 8:16pm
This story is going to run and run. An MSNBC reporter wondered on air if Chelsea Clinton was being “pimped out” on behalf of her mother’s campaign. The Clinton machine has gone into outraged over-drive and is now planning to walk away from an MSNBC sponsored debate.
The reporter’s choice of words was poor and he owes both Chelsea and Hillary an apology, he reportedly plans to apologise on air tonight. Politically, though, the whole flap is beneficial to the Clintons as it will generate considerable sympathy for them. One also wonders about how upset they would be at walking away from a debate in a state, Ohio, where Hillary is apparently ahead by a comfortable margin.
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James Forsyth 7:24pm
John McCain is stressing that he isn’t counting Mike Huckabee out yet but the party is now rallying around McCain. Karl Rove has donated the maximum amount allowed to the campaign and President Bush implicitly endorsed McCain today. Huckabee will likely fight on for a while as the happy, anti-establishment warrior but it is virtually impossible to see how he can actually force this thing to the convention.
Attention is now turning to who McCain picks as his VP with various names being floated. My hunch, and a...
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James Forsyth 11:58am
With Mike Huckabee and John McCain the only men left standing in the Republican race, Huckabee faces a dilemma. Up to now, Huckabee has been nothing but respectful of McCain; hence all the talk that he is running to be McCain’s VP. But in this new landscape, Huckabee’s best chance of getting on the ticket is to win a bunch of the upcoming contests so that McCain can be prodded into picking him on a unity ticket. The only way he can hope to win in these places is to do some contrast...
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Thursday, 7th February 2008
James Forsyth 9:59pm
The McCain camp will be relieved as his appearance at CPAC, a gathering of hard core conservatives in Washington, went as well as could be expected. There was much talk beforehand that McCain might have been booed by the crowd but instead he received a fairly warm reception. The only time when the crowd booed, and even then it was mild, was when the topic of illegal immigration came up.
With Mitt Romney pulling out it is clearer than ever that McCain will be the nominee and these activists decided against...
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James Forsyth 8:07pm
The failure of Mitt Romney’s presidential bid shows how the perfect can be the enemy of the good in politics. Romney’s campaign team tried to construct the perfect Republican primary candidate and in the process destroyed a good one.
Romney’s people believed that the only way he could win the nomination was to create unstoppable momentum by winning the early contests. So, Romney was remade as a hard-line social conservative to appeal to the conservative Christians who dominate the Iowa caucuses. This strategy backfired as Mike Huckabee, a sincere and lifelong social...
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