Whatever happened to their day jobs?
Dennis Kucinich, who is quitting his Democratic presidential campaign, may be getting out while the getting is good. He's already been running for reelection to the 10th Congressional District seat he has held in northern Ohio for six terms, where he's facing intra-party competition with at least two challengers.
And as a local blog points out, one of his competitors has gone all Bill Richardson on him over missed votes while he was chasing the presidential nomination.
It's unclear how vulnerable Kucinich might be in his home district, but you have to think that a rival campaign built on attacking Kucinich's work ethic would gain traction in a blue-collar region like Cleveland.
While campaigning for president, Kucinich missed 11.5% of the House votes, well above the 4.2% miss rate for the House overall. But that's much better than the track record his rivals Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have left in the Senate, where they've missed 23.6% and 37.8%, respectively, well above the Senate average of 5%.
On the other side of the aisle, Republican Ron Paul is also hedging his bets and running for the District 14 seat he seems to have held since Texas was its own country. His missed-vote rate while running for the White House: a whopping 28.2%. John McCain, it should be noted, has missed 56.1% of the votes in this session, second only to South Dakota's Tim Johnson, who is recovering from a brain hemorrhage.
-- Scott Martelle
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Andrew Malcolm's immigrant parents repeatedly stressed the importance of active participation in a democracy. Early lessons included learning the alphabetical list of states by watching televised roll calls of national political conventions. That childhood exposure led to a lifelong fascination with politics, including 40-plus years of covering them and a brief stint practicing them as press secretary to Laura Bush in 1999-2000. A veteran foreign and national correspondent, Malcolm served on the Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004. He is the author of 10 nonfiction books and father of four.
Johanna Neuman is a veteran Washington correspondent for both The Los Angeles Times and USA Today, having covered presidents and politics as far back as Ronald Reagan. A former president of the White House Correspondents Assn., she authored a book on media and foreign policy, “Lights, Camera, Wars.” Most recently she was co-author of the 
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