DENVER -- Democrats may be confabbing here (and pumping lots of money into the area's economy), but just-released Time/CNN polls of four key swing states show Barack Obama still has his work cut out for him in Colorado.
That's the semi-bad news for him and his party. The good news: he's got a solid lead over John McCain in one of the other battlegrounds (New Mexico) and a slight advantage in two others (Pennsylvania and Nevada).
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Robin Leach isn’t your usual political pundit. But the former champagne-toasting host of the TV hit of the mid-'80s to mid-'90s, "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," may be more qualified than most to opine on John McCain's now-infamous inability to remember how many homes he owns.
In an early morning phone call Friday from his fabulous crib in Las Vegas, Leach told The Times that he isn’t really surprised at McCain's odd memory lapse given the complex lives that the super-rich lead.
"He probably was confused as to which homes are in his name, his wife's name, or corporate names," Leach explained in his familiar, deep British baritone. "In his attempt to be honest, he put his foot in his mouth."
Indeed, McCain’s four homes and at least four other residential properties are held in the name of his wife, Cindy, and her dependent children through a series of partnerships and trusts. Their combined value is nearly $14 million.
Leach said McCain "tends to answer questions very rapidly without thinking of the correct answers. ... I would call it honest confusion."
The British-born Leach isn't a U.S. citizen and thus can't vote. But for a man famous for focusing on froth, he took a serious view of America's latest political fracas.
"This has nothing to do with the issues candidates should be discussing," he said. "Let’s talk about real things, not silly things. It’s irrelevant whether the future president has one home or ten."
"It’s nothing to get into a kerfuffle about," he added. "It’s silly and ridiculous."
As host of "Lifestyles," Leach served as an always-enthusiastic tour guide to the extravagant homes of wealthy entertainers, athletes and business moguls. He ended each segment with his signature sign-off: "Champagne wishes and caviar dreams!"
Now 66, Leach writes books and a blog, travels widely, and owns an HDTV studio in Las Vegas.
As more and more attention is paid to Barack Obama's failure to stake out a solid, sustained poll lead in the presidential race (as of Sunday, the Gallup daily tracking survey pegged the contest a flat-out tie), more and more attention focuses on the often unspoken -- race -- as a key factor.
"Call me crazy, but isn’t it possible, just possible, that Obama’s lead is being inhibited by the fact that he is, you know, black? ... The desire to ignore the elephant in the room is easy to understand, but Obama will not have that luxury."
David Paul Kuhn, examining the same dynamic at Politico.com., wrote:
"Shanto Iyengar, a Stanford University political scientist, notes that several political forecasting models today predict the Democratic candidate winning a clear majority of the vote, a threshold that has thus far escaped Obama in polling. But he adds that those predictions are for a generic Democrat under 'normal circumstances' in a year where the Republican Party is in dire straits."
“ 'The real question is: Why is Obama, then, underperforming?' Iyengar added. 'There is something about Obama that is causing something of drag.' Iyengar believes that something is Obama’s race."
None of this will come as any surprise to Mary Bruns, a 65-year-old grassroots worker for Obama in Nevada who, as The Times' Seema Mehta reports, was among those attending an appearance Sunday by the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in Reno.
Bruns confided to Mehta that comments she hears as she goes door-to-door on Obama's behalf has her worried that simple, old-fashioned prejudice will derail Obama's presidential bid.
Older people in particular, she says, make comments such as, "We can't vote a black person in there; they'll think they rule the world."
Wrote Mehta:
"If people will say that to her face, the retired nurse wonders what they say behind closed doors. 'I think a certain segment of the American population is just ignorant,' she said. 'I don't give them the time of day.'"
Bruns told Mehta she is pinning her hopes on a large turnout of young voters, such as her son, who switched his registration from Republican to Democrat to support Obama.
“I have a great faith in the young people; they’re color blind,” she said.
Now we realize where the donations come from does NOT mean that the votes will follow. But it's still interesting to take the measure of it. Below is The Times' interactive map of states, with the battleground states defined as those in which the margin of 2004 victory was less than 8 percentage points.
Now we go over to Open Secrets and look at its tables of states and political contributions. For the purposes of these tables, we're leaving out the withdrawn candidates. And the totals include primaries, which skews the results a bit for Obama since the Democratic fight was more protracted than the Republican fight. But it's still interesting to mull.
What coverage there was of Clinton's speech in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson, Nev., underscored that the reconciliation between the two camps that competed so mightily for the Democratic presidential nod remains a work in progress.
And, at this stage in that process, greater attention to the image of her standing behind a podium emblazoned with Obama's campaign slogan may have proved more aggravating than anything else to many Clinton partisans across the nation.
The Times' Ashley Powers covered Clinton's appearance and, in her dispatch, noted that it was clear the New York senator "was speaking to a crowd still lukewarm toward" Obama.
The Associated Press story reported: "The crowd let her know they still held her in high regard. They cheered Obama's name and waved his campaign signs, but no mention of him won as loud a roar as Clinton's introduction."
But if the effort to meld Clinton supporters into Obama backers is proceeding fitfully in Nevada, as elsewhere, a different trend is evident at the purely grassroots level in the state. According to Sunday's "Political Memo" column in the Las Vegas Sun, the Obama forces are creating nothing less than an "organizational juggernaut" in the fight for the state's five electoral votes.
Eric Herzik, a political scientist at the University of Nevada-Reno, says in the piece that Obama's "on-the-ground organization looks real good. (John) McCain’s is very quiet up here. If I’m a Republican strategist, it would scare me."
Herzik, a registered Republican, cautions that it remains unknown whether impressive registration gains by Democrats in Nevada translate into strong turnout by these new voters on election day. And the article points out that Obama "will have to overcome his fairly conventional liberal voting record in a state with an electorate that detests gun control and higher taxes."
Still, it's worth remembering that organizational prowess is a key reason Clinton was speaking on Obama's behalf last week, and not vice-versa.
Reporters on John McCain's campaign plane were stunned Friday to learn that the presumptive Republican nominee had scheduled a private meeting with Tony Alamo this weekend in Las Vegas. A quick Google search finds:
In 1985 Alamo targeted the Pope and then-president Ronald Reagan. "Did you know that the Pope and Ronald Reagan are a couple of Anti-Christ Devils and that they are selling us all down the drain?" asked a tract entitled "Genocide." A federal grand jury in Memphis, Tennessee, charged Alamo with filing a false income tax return in 1985 and he failed to file returns during the following three years... Alamo was ultimately arrested on tax-related charges and was convicted in 1994. He completed a six-year federal sentence, and then went to a halfway house in Texarkana [Texas].
McCain's campaign aides quickly batted down that salacious story, however. McCain will meet a different Tony Alamo, this one the general manager of the Mandalay Bay hotel and casino in Las Vegas, they said, not the renegade preacher.
Still, the meeting might have an awkward moment or two. According to a report published on Feb. 21, 2003, in Boxing News, McCain injected himself into an ethics dispute involving the Alamo family, and sent a letter (pasted after the jump) to then-Gov. Kenny C. Guinn urging a review of the appointment of Alamo's son to the Nevada State Athletic Commission.
The nation’s most exclusive club didn’t get its reputation for nothing.
Ted Stevens, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell and the 97 other U.S. senators count on the rest of us to use computers to file income tax returns. But senators themselves haven’t entered the computer age, at least not when it comes to the basic sunshine requirement that they identify their donors.
As we wrote more than a year ago, senators are Luddites when it comes to using newfangled computers for public disclosure. They direct their aides to deliver campaign finance reports -- the documents can run thousands of pages -- by hand or snail mail to the Senate, which in turn delivers them to the Federal Election Commission.
The Federal Election Commission spends millions annually on couriers, an old-fashioned copy machine, and key-punchers who type names of donors into computers so that senators’ reports can be displayed on the Internet.
The process can take months.
As happens in each election, donors giving to senators in the closing weeks of the 2008 campaign won’t become public in any meaningful way until long after votes are counted.
For years, senators have bottled up efforts to force themselves to place their reports on the Net. It's an anachronism, particularly given candidates for the presidency, the House and most state offices file their reports online.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein vowed to press the issue last year when she took over the Senate Rules Committee. Forty-five senators have endorsed the idea.
John McCain long has backed online disclosure, said Stephen Weissman of the Campaign Finance Institute, a nonpartisan group that pushes the issue. Barack Obama also endorses it, though he came rather late to the issue, said Weissman.
More than a year later, however, online disclosure is not a reality.
Weissman spreads the blame: Republican leader McConnell and Nevada Republican Sen. John Ensign, who have balked at the concept. Reid shares responsibility for failing to push the measure to a vote, Weissman said -- an idea that Reid spokesman Jim Manley disputes.
Manley points the finger at Reid's Republican counterpart from Nevada, saying Ensign "repeatedly has blocked Sen. Feinstein's effort to bring this bill to the floor." No word yet from Ensign.
A new report by the folks at the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project says the campaigns and the RNC aired more than 100,000 ads from June 3 to July 26, far outpacing the 77,000 ads John Kerry and George Bush put up over a similar period four years ago. The report says McCain's ads have been a bit nastier than Obama's, and that the Democratic National Committee -- which hasn't had nearly the fundraising success as the RNC -- so far has sat this one out.
And the significant nugget is where the ads have been airing. Here's the top 10 list, as tallied by TNS Media Intelligence/CMAG, and analyzed by the Wisconsin Advertising Project:
Note how heavily weighted the list is to the Midwest. In its analysis, the report says Democrats have the advantage this year, given how low Bush's approval ratings have sunk (think whale dung, and keep dropping). But to make it work, Obama has to impress upon voters that he is a credible candidate. McCain, conversely, has to persuade voters that Obama is not -- which helps explain the negative tilt in the tone of McCain's ads.
Interestingly, at this point, the report says, Obama is on the air alone in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Indiana, Montana and Arkansas -- all red states. And with Florida fourth on the total spending list -- all of it in Obama dollars -- he's making his biggest push there. But he's alone in many local markets, too. "To date, Senator Obama is airing ads in 37 markets where McCain has not aired a single ad, while McCain is advertising in only two markets where Obama is not."
And another bit of good news for Democrats with whom the 2004 loss still echoes -- Obama ain't no Kerry (flashback offered at the end of the post).
"Barack Obama has exhibited much greater overall message discipline in his campaign than John Kerry did in 2004. One of the biggest critiques of the way John Kerry ran his campaign was that he dealt with too many different issues in his television ads. Barack Obama, by contrast, is dealing with fewer issues in each ad, presenting a clearer, more consistent message to the voting public. In 2004, Kerry talked about 25 different issues between June 3rd and July 26th, while during a comparable period Obama has only mentioned 14 issues."
Now, before the Democrats begin counting their chickens, they need to think back to what the presumptive lay of the land was three months before the start of the primary and caucus season. Remember Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani?
John McCain came face to face Tuesday with the "passion gap" in this year's presidential race. It came in the form of Doug Englekirk, a wiry 46-year-old contractor from the Lake Tahoe area.
Repeated polls have shown great gusto among Democrats excited about November’s election and the prospect of voting for the party’s presumptive nominee, Barack Obama. For many Republicans who are pondering their choice ... well, not so much.
Or, as Englekirk told McCain at a town hall session in Sparks, Nev.: “I speak for a lot of conservatives. I’m not very excited about this election.”
To a smattering of applause, Englekirk asked McCain what he might do or say to kindle a bit more enthusiasm from the right.
The Arizona senator responded with a question of his own: What (in so many words) was Englekirk’s beef?
He responded with a litany: McCain’s stance on illegal immigration -- which Englekirk dubbed “amnesty” -– his support for campaign finance reform, his opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, his running with “the global-warming crowd” and his membership in the Senate’s so-called “Gang of 14.”
McCain addressed two of the complaints, starting with the “gang” -- a bipartisan group of senators who worked in 2006 to avoid a legislative meltdown over the appointment of federal judges.
McCain noted that he has voted for plenty of conservatives judges, including Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito, and said he would appoint to the bench only judges “who will strictly interpret the Constitution.”
McCain also said “global warming is real” and needs to be seriously addressed -- a position he staked out early in this campaign and one widely seen as an effort to distance himself from President Bush.
Wrapping up his response to Englekirk, McCain said: “I’m a conservative. Unabashed conservative. But I also believe I am in keeping with the vision of one Ronald Reagan. It’s healthy to have disagreements.”
Afterward, Englekirk said McCain had sold him -- up to a point.
He appreciated the candidate's answer about the Gang of 14, but worried the federal government would just use the global warming issue as an excuse to pick taxpayer pockets.
“I can’t vote for Obama,” Englekirk said, a baseball cap pulled low on his brow. “I’m going to vote for McCain. I’d just like to be excited about it.”
Nevada's vote in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections was relatively stable -- good news for Republicans.
Its party registration figures, though, have been undergoing a transformation, which this November might translate into glad tidings for Democrats. Emphasis on "might."
Eight years ago, George W. Bush carried the Sagebrush State against Al Gore by 21,597 votes out of about 609,000 cast (giving him a winning margin of roughly 3.5 percentage points).
Four years ago, Bush won Nevada over John Kerry by 21,500 votes; with almost 830,000 cast, the president's margin was reduced a bit, to about 2.6 percentage points.
Democrats could at least take solace in the trendline. But they are finding much greater joy in a new set of numbers -- the voter registration breakdown, as of June, from the Nevada secretary of state's office.
On its list of "active" voters, Democrats outnumber Republicans by 55,560 -- an edge of about 5% among this entire pool of registrants, which numbers a bit more than 1 million.
Especially encouraging for Democrats, as state Democratic Party official Kirsten Searer pointed out to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, is that at this point in 2004, the GOP had a 1% advantage in voter registration.
We've got to give credit to Zac Moyle, executive director of the Nevada Republican Party; he didn't try to sugarcoat the matter, saying, "We're disappointed by the numbers."
Don't you hate it when old Navy guys just can't get along? John McCain took a swipe at Jimmy Carter the other day in an interview, with the transcript getting posted over at the Las Vegas Sun earlier today. As the folks at CNN's Politicker point out, it's not just a gratuitous political shot, since McCain has been trying to tie Obama to Carter, generally considered by the right (and quite a few centrists) to have been an ineffectual president.
But the comments are a bit jarring. McCain was asked by interviewer Jon Ralston, a Nevada political observer and blogger, about Yucca Mountain and nuclear waste and Carter's decision to end reprocessing, which McCain held up as a possible solution to the nuke waste problem.
"Q: You know why he did that then? "A: Yes, because Carter was a lousy president .... This is the same guy who kissed Brezhnev ...."
Ralston also asked McCain whether his call for a gas tax holiday for the summer amounted to pandering. "I don’t think so. When I meet a guy who owns two trucks that run on diesel, who says he's going out of business, but may not have to if he is spared the 24-and-half-cent tax, which goes to things like a bridge to nowhere in Alaska." Ralston pointed out a Republican (actually it was two, Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young) proposed that bridge. "As you know," McCain replied, "I've taken on Republicans and Democrats. Some of them dislike me intensely and some of them still won't endorse me."
The Barack Obama for president campaign rolls into Las Vegas today.
And the candidate revealed he's collected a whole slew of good luck charms, not for the tables but for the election. He told reporters he's got maybe 100 lucky trinkets of one kind or another. And each day he makes a selection to carry with him.
On this, the first anniversary of our Top of the Ticket blog, we are reminded of the mercurial, unpredictable nature of U.S. politics -- part of what makes what we do so fascinating.
Our goal -- one of us on the East Coast and the other on the far more important or at least less humid West Coast -- was to write about Campaign '08 virtually around the clock.
Our second-ever posting, 12 months ago today, previewed an upcoming L.A. Times/Bloomberg Poll; later in the day, we detailed the results of the nationwide survey. The findings were in line with other polls of the time.
In the Republican presidential race, which then seemed the most likely to last deep into the primary season, Rudy Giuliani was perched in first place. His lead wasn't overwhelming, but it was strong enough that he appeared certain to remain a major contender.
His liberal record on social issues loomed as an obvious liability within his party, but his tough-on-terrorism message was attracting substantial support from moderates and GOP-leaning independents.
His major headache among rivals last June was an as-yet-undeclared candidate who was riding a wave as the great conservative hope -- Fred Thompson. He ran a strong second in the poll.
Lagging far behind were John McCain and Mitt Romney, each barely with double-digit support. In our preview posting, we were especially scornful of McCain, noting sarcastically (and foolishly, as it turned out) that in the poll, he found himself "in heated competition with the 'Don't Know' category."
Meriting no mention from us was Mike Huckabee, one of several back-of-the-pack candidates barely earning any support across the country.
The Democratic race, at that point, seemed so much more cut-and-dried.
Let's see: It's June 11, election day is Nov. 4, that's just under five months away.... Yep -- time to start watching the polls!
Not really. There will be more lead changes than in a Lakers-Celtics game before this thing is done, but some numbers have cropped up in recent days that are interesting to ponder. First, there are the dueling tracking polls. Gallup today gives Obama a "statistically significant" six-point lead in the national head-to-head matchup, a lead the pollsters describe as "stabilizing" after holding in that neighborhood for a couple of days.
Over at Rasmussen , the lead for Obama is five points, 46% to 41% -- "a slight decline for Obama who had attracted 48% support for each of the preceding three days. For McCain, the results are little changed. For the past week, his support has stayed between 40% and 42%."
So it looks as if Obama still is getting a bit of a bump -- on the back side of it -- from the attention surrounding his sealing of the nomination, a cycle in which McCain didn't get a whole lot of free media time. Now that they're one on one, expect the coverage to balance out more and those numbers to yo-yo.
More interesting is to look at the polls in some of the battleground states, where things are much tighter. In Michigan, Obama has been holding a slight lead within the margin of error, as he has in Wisconsin and Ohio (note, though, that some of these polls are a week or more old). The Obama campaign has made some noise about maybe being able to put Georgia into play. So far, that's not happening.
In the Western states of Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico? There hasn't been any polling there in at least three weeks, so it's anybody's guess what's going on. But you can usually get a sense of where the campaigns believe the close contests are by where they're spending time and energy. So far, not a lot of either has been happening in the Western states.
You know that unidentified estranged wife of a Reno doctor that the governor of Nevada is not having an affair with?
Well, during one month last year he exchanged 850 text messages with her phone from his official state phone, at 15 cents per.
It's all part of an increasingly messy divorce after 22 years between the 63-year-old Gov. Jim Gibbons, a former military and commercial pilot, and his wife, Dawn, 54, who formerly ran two Las Vegas wedding chapels. She's also served in the state legislature. Hey, it's Nevada remember.
The Times' Ashley Powers has all the background in her story here this morning.
Anyway, Dawn's original divorce papers included references to her husband's infatuation and infidelities with a marital intruder who was the estranged wife of a Reno doctor. (Are there any other kinds?)
Today, the Reno Gazette-Journal published Nevada....
Most everyone in the field of politics and those of us watching from the grandstands have focused on the Democratic family soap opera in recent days and weeks. And we've anticipated the compelling season finale that will unfold before our televised eyes in Washington this morning.
There, Sen. Hillary Clinton will officially admit defeat -- well, maybe she won't go quite that far.
But she will, as promised, appear to graciously and heartily endorse this upstart freshman senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, whose eloquence, quick learning and charisma prevented her from gaining her rightful White House political inheritance -- this time.
And if, God forbid or at least look the other way, Obama should not win the White House Nov. 4, her dutiful campaigning for the party ticket starting today won't hurt her chances come 2012. God help us, we're typing that date already.
Many of us have been debating Clinton's Tuesday night non-concession speech that was nearly downright defiant and if, when or how she'd accept the No. 2 spot or if it will even be offered (of course not).
Meanwhile, that wily old-timer from Arizona, who last summer said he'd "out-campaign" all his better-funded Republican rivals and then did just that, has been very busy.
Campaign sources tell The Times' political finance expert Dan Morain that Sen. John McCain had the best fundraising ...
Rudy Giuliani's rapid descent from leader in the national polls among the Republican presidential candidates to virtual non-factor when caucuses and primary voting actually began this year did not provide a political template others will want to follow.
Be that as it may, the Republican National Committee has signed up several survivors from the Giuliani fiasco as it gears up field operations in a number of states for the fall election.
RNC Chairman Mike Duncan today unveiled a list of operatives expected to lead the party's efforts in nine states, and fully five of the appointees were part of the Giuliani campaign.
Charged with helping deliver the "positive message" from presumptive GOP presidential nominee JohnMcCain and "energizing voters to elect Republican candidates up and down the ballot in November," the Giuliani refugees will be at the helm in Ohio, Arkansas, Colorado, Washington state and Nevada.
Party partisans can only hope that these aides -- especially those assigned to the expected battlegrounds of Ohio, Colorado and Nevada -- did not pick up too many bad habits while working for a presidential campaign that tanked so dramatically.
As if Antoin "Tony" Rezko didn't have enough to worry about, now a Las Vegas judge apparently has issued a felony arrest warrant against him in connection with $472,000 in alleged unpaid gambling debts at Caesars Palace and Bally's.
Rezko, you'll recall, is the Chicago friend who has given Barack Obama some headaches already in the campaign cycle, including questions about Obama's purchase from Rezko of a strip of land next to his Chicago home. And with a federal jury still deliberating Rezko's fate on corruption charges in Chicago, a fresh batch of legal charges from Vegas will probably put Obama's relationship with the onetime political fundraiser back in the political spotlight.
The image folks inside the Obama campaign have to be wincing over the timing after Obama this week in North Las Vegas cracked wise about TV news cameras making it impossible for him to sit down at a Vegas blackjack table himself.
Barack Obama today visited a Las Vegas couple with two main objectives in mind: 1) to spotlight the strain they're experiencing making mortgage payments as a larger national problem that he would aggressively confront; 2) to win some positive coverage in a key Western battleground state.
Also, when the Obama campaign set about conceiving the event, the ethnicity of Felicitas Rosel and Francisco Cano surely helped seal their selection as his hosts, given the difficulties he's had attracting the Latino vote in several primaries.
Still, for all the artificiality and political calculation surrounding Obama's kitchen-table chat with the two, the presidential candidate may actually have gotten a life lesson from the encounter.
As the session was coming to a close, Obama praised the Bellagio hotel and casino, where Rosel works as a maid and Cano as a porter (and where Obama campaigned back in the winter, trolling for votes in the Nevada caucuses). Then he added, “The only problem with me is when I come to Las Vegas, I’m not allowed to have fun. Everybody knows me. If I start playing blackjack, I’ll get in trouble."
Pointing to a nearby television crew, he continued, "All these cameras will follow me.”
To which Rosel, who no doubt has heard her share of woe after bad nights at the tables, replied, "You're lucky."
Yes, there are still states -- and a territory -- to vote, Democratic delegates to select, superdelegates to decide and conventions to be held, but it's hard not to peek ahead to the fall matchup. You can make your own presumptions about whether the Dems will go with Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, but for the sake of argument, we'll presume it's Obama.
And polls, fickle though they may be, show that the general election could be just as tight as the Democratic primaries in crucial swing states where Obama's race and perceived class work against him (witness Kentucky). The tallies maintained at Real Clear Politics give a broader sense of the challenge for Obama and for John McCain.
You can go over there and play, but the overview is the latest state poll aggregates give the current advantage (some of these are within the margin of error) to McCain in Ohio, Florida and Missouri and the advantage to Obama in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin (though McCain led in the most recent poll) and Iowa with Michigan essentially a dead heat.
Now take those poll numbers over to an interactive electoral college map and the advantage is: Nobody. Under that scenario, with Michigan a virtual tie and polls too erratic in New Mexico to count, Obama and McCain would be separated by four electoral votes and both would need Michigan to put them over the 270 threshold.
If anybody thought the Ron Paul Revolution had expired, they need to rethink that one.
Clearly, the 72-year-old libertarian-minded Texas representative was not going to win the Republican Party's nomination this year with his 12, 20 or 42 delegates, whomever you believe. Sen. John McCain already has enough to win the GOP nod in St. Paul in September. So Paul has taken his well-funded campaign and gone rather underground to the local level where his loyal Paulunteers are organizing and taking over numerous county party operations in several states.
Quietly, beneath the political radar of the Republican Party establishment and mainstream media, they're laboring at the local level. Last month Paul forces read the party rule book in Missouri and elected about a third of the delegates to the state convention that will pick the delegates to the national convention.
Last weekend in Nevada they drove through a rules change in the state party convention that halted the approval of pre-approved slates of convention delegates as a means to eventually substitute their own supporters to travel to St. Paul and boost Paul's delegate totals for platform and other struggles this fall.
Using sophisticated communications techniques on the Nevada convention floor in Reno, Paul supporters transmitted mass text messaging to maneuver and direct their troops. When Paul appeared to speak, the ovation was thunderous.
At other times they shouted down the convention chair, Sen. Bob Beers. Taken by surprise the convention organizers and the McCain camp, which for instance had no supply of campaign signs to compete with the blizzard of Paul signs, eventually adjourned the convention in chaos without electing any delegates.
The excuse was the expiration of the convention's contract with the host casino. No new convention date was announced. The Ron Paul crews move on to their next target.
A move to force a recall vote of Democratic Sen. Harry Reid by some of our neighbors in Nevada upset over his political stances fell apart over a small but troublesome point: The state has no legal mechanism for recalling a U.S. senator.
For sports junkies, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar saved the best for last in his L.A. Times blog posting earlier today featuring an e-mail exchange between the basketball great and a longtime hoop-aholic, Barack Obama.
The Democratic presidential contender answered a few serious questions that Abdul-Jabbar pitched him, which you can read here. But the end of the post contained this revelation: If Obama ends up moving into the White House early next year, some sort of b-ball setup will be added to the grounds (actually, given D.C.'s often wretched weather, we'd recommend an indoor court).
Obama's passion for the sport evolved into a bit of a superstition back in January.
He relaxed the day of the Iowa caucuses by playing some hoops and, of course, ended the night by celebrating his win in that contest. But he skipped a shoot-around on the days of the New Hampshire primary and the Nevada caucuses, both of which he lost to Hillary Clinton. So when the South Carolina primary -- an obvious must-win for him -- rolled around on Jan. 26, he made a point of playing (and later basked in an overwhelming victory in the Palmetto State).
Here in the wonderful world of blogging, time is truly relative -- as in the past fades fast, the future is amorphous and the present is all-consuming. But for the rest of you, well, we know you're studiously staring at the computer screen trying to show the boss in the corner office how hard at work you are.
So waste some time with this: Slate's candidate tracker, which graphically shows where the candidates have been busy with appearances. It took forever to load on our workhorse of a laptop but once it does fire up it's fun to see how far this campaign has come. Especially when you look at the lists of the fallen on the right hand side, running alphabetically for the Democrats from Joe Biden to Bill Richardson, and for the Republicans from Sam Brownback to Fred Thompson. And note that the tracker still shows Ron Paul slogging away, even if he seems to have sent the horse back to the barn.
An unusual personal, political and media drama is unfolding in Nevada this evening, which is called the Silver State because the Golden State name was taken.
Until this afternoon hardly anyone knew or at least talked openly about the strained emerging relationship between Gov. Jim Gibbons and his wife Dawn.
The pair, pictured here, are each successful politicians in their own right. A former combat pilot in both Vietnam and the first Persian Gulf war and then a commercial pilot and lawyer, Gibbons spent eight years as a state assemblyman before being elected to five terms in the U.S. House in 1996. He's Mormon; she's Presbyterian.
Dawn Gibbons, who is 10 years younger than her husband, won her husband's old state seat when he went to Congress and unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination to fill Gibbons' House seat when he became governor two years ago. The couple met on a blind date and have three children: Chris, Jennifer and Jimmy and three grandchildren. But neither of their official biographies provides a marriage date.
For the last week, muffled rumors about the marriage have swirled....
Unlike Democrat John Edwards, we don't see the Republican presidential race as near clear enough to tap John McCain as the GOP's likely nominee. But a new L.A. Times/Bloomberg poll of voters nationwide does back up an argument the McCain camp likes to press: as of the moment, he would be the most competitive rival to either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in the general election.
We're not quite ready to reveal the numbers yet; for that you can check our home page at about 4 p.m. PST.
But the survey, conducted Friday through Monday, found McCain holding his own in matchups with either of the two likely Democratic nominees. By contrast, Obama and Clinton both enjoy solid leads over Republicans Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee.
Our apologies to candidate/pundit Edwards, his distant third-place finishes in the New Hampshire primary and the Nevada caucuses -- and the lack of any sign he can vault out of that also-ran position -- made him matchup-unworthy.
Republican Fred Thompson dragged his feet getting into the presidential race, much to his detriment. He moved more expeditiously getting out of it, issuing a simple, three-sentence statement today announcing -- to no one's surprise -- that he was ending his candidacy.
Thompson bowed to what became inevitable after his third-place showing in Saturday's South Carolina primary. Less than an hour after the polls closed that night, when it was already evident he would be an also-ran, Thompson addressed his supporters in the state -- remarks that walked right up to a withdrawal but stopped just short of it. Since then, he has been absent from the campaign trail.
Some of his higher-profile backers had jumped ship before Thompson officially abandoned it. Earlier today, ex-New York Sen. Al D'Amato -- who like many Republican leaders had not so many months ago viewed Thompson as the candidate who could magically cure what ailed the GOP presidential field -- switched allegiance to John McCain. (D'Amato seems mainly motivated this campaign season to sidetrack fellow New Yorker Rudy Giuliani, long a political foe.)
Thompson entered the White House race with a semi-splash, you'll recall, using the couch on "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" to proclaim his candidacy in early September. But by that time, the bloom was already off his rose. His clear interest in running -- and efforts to generate support for such a bid by his longtime political mentor, Howard Baker, and other respected Republicans -- had been a hot topic ...
LAS VEGAS -- Amid all the confusion of the Nevada Democratic caucuses, from people leaving in frustration to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama each claiming separate victories, an interesting pattern emerged. And building on what happened in the "non-primary" that Democrats conducted in Michigan, it is going to make next weekend's South Carolina primary "verrrrry interesting," as Arte Johnsonused to say.
Nevada's caucus was the first full Democratic presidential nominating contest to include a significant number of black voters, and Obama won overwhelmingly here in predominately black Precincts 4028 and 4461, reflecting what national polls show has been a significant shift in support by black voters from Clinton to Obama.
Obama was similarly strong in in last week’s Michigan primary. "Uncommitted" –- seen largely as votes for Obama and John Edwards, whose names were not on the ballot –- took 68% of the African American vote, with Clinton getting 30%, according to exit polls. But those results came in a race in which only half the candidates were on the ballot and no one was awarded any delegates, dampening turnout.
On Saturday, the votes mattered. Obama’s success among black voters wasn’t enough to give him the win. About 8% of Nevada residents are African American, compared with nearly 13% nationally. But Obama’s growing support among African Americans could shape ...
LAS VEGAS -- Not sure what today's results from the Nevada caucuses and South Carolina Republican primary mean? Well, that's why they make the Sunday morning shows (and no, there is not a movement in Congress to rename it "Spinday").
On CBS' "Face The Nation," you get John Edwards and, in a lovely moment of irony, David Axelrod, who was one of Edwards top advisors four years ago but is working for Barack Obama this time around, along with Politico's Roger Simon to keep them honest.
"Fox News Sunday" has Mitt Romney, and "ABC This Week" has Rudy Giuliani. "
