With official announcements from Herman Cain on Saturday and Tim Pawlenty this morning, and news of Sarah Palin buying a new house surmised to be potential campaign headquarters in Arizona, do you think a GOP frontrunner will emerge from the pool of candidates any time soon?
Check out a roundup of this weekend's GOP announcements and speculation below, and give us your thoughts in the comments:
Experience tells us that the Republican presidential candidate the media prefer is the one they believe is most easily defeated.
On this weekend's "Chris Matthews Show," seven of the twelve regulars said Mitch Daniels "has the best shot to overcome his obvious flaw" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
During Thursday night's Republican presidential debate in South Carolina, Fox News contributor Juan Williams moved away from the pressing issues of national security and the economy to ask former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty: "Do you equate the teaching of creationism with the teaching of evolution, as the basis for what should be taught in our nation's schools?"
Perhaps Williams had caught the end of Thursday's Hardball on MSNBC only hours earlier, when, as NewsBusters Scott Whitlock reported, host Chris Matthews listed some of the questions he would like to ask the Republican presidential hopefuls, including: "Question to Mr. Candidate, do you believe in evolution? Are you a fundamentalist who believes in the Bible as written? Has man been around millions of years or, say, just about 6000?"
Interviewing presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty on Friday, George Stephanopoulos lectured the Republican that Barack Obama can say I've "kept my promises" for the war on terror. The Good Morning America anchor ignored examples such as the failure to close Guantanamo Bay.
Stephanopoulos added, "Our troops are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. And a weakened al Qaeda has not succeeded on a major attack on our homeland. When President Obama makes the case that America is safer on his watch, how will you respond?"
(That comment would also skip the Fort Hood shooting in 2009.) The morning show anchor began by touting White House talking points: "So, I wonder what you say in a debate with President Obama when he comes out and says when it comes to protecting America, I've kept my promises."
For weeks MSNBC's Chris Matthews has been complaining about the lack of declared GOP presidential candidates.
On Tuesday's "Hardball," former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele exposed Matthews' hypocrisy concerning this matter marvelously demonstrating that once any of the possible candidates formally enters the race, the avowed liberal commentator is just going to trash him or her (video follows with transcript and commentary):
I'm regularly amazed by the economic ignorance of today's television commentators.
Consider MSNBC's Chris Matthews who on Monday's "Hardball" actually said, "Nobody thinks this country can drill its way out of high gas prices" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
CBS's Jan Crawford spotlighted the Tea Party movement on Monday's Early Show, but also played up how it might present a "challenge" for potential Republican presidential candidates due its apparent unpopularity: "Recent polls show 47% of Americans have an unfavorable view of the movement. So candidates looking for Tea Party votes have to be careful not to alienate moderates."
Midway through her report, after noting the would-be GOP presidential candidates, such as Tim Pawlenty and Donald Trump, who showed up at some of the weekend rallies, the correspondent turned to possible downside that these politicians might face in appealing to the Tea Party, playing up a result from a recent CNN/Opinion Dynamics poll:
As NewsBusters reported, MSNBC's Chris Matthews went on quite a Republican-hating rant Monday linking murder and violence in Afghanistan to GOP "zealots at home."
Such conservative bashing continued till the end of "Hardball" when the host finished with a two minute segment excoriating the Republican Party as one where "you can't say you believe in science, you can't say you believe in evolution or in climate change or in gay rights, or even in separation of church and state" concluding "Maybe this is God's will, that Obama not have a reasonable opponent out there" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
The liberal media are on a full-court press to make the entire GOP presidential candidate field look hapless and unelectable.
Doing his part Friday was New York magazine's John Heilemann who on "The Chris Matthews Show" said the Obama campaign thinks their guy has "more talent in his little finger than any of these Republicans" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
New York Times columnist David Brooks Thursday took quite a swing at former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.
During a videotaped interview with Time magazine, Brooks said, "I wouldn't let that guy run a 7-Eleven let alone a country" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
On Monday's Hardball Chris Matthews, who devoted much of last week's shows to Egypt, got caught up on some conservative bashing as he mocked those who attended CPAC as "zany" and likened the conference to a "carnival act." The MSNBC host, joined by fellow liberals David Corn of Mother Jones magazine and Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, led the show by describing the event as a "right wing jamboree that puts the zany in the same room as the zanier."
NBC's Meredith Vieira, on Thursday's Today show, challenged former Minnesota Republican Governor and potential presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty for daring to call Barack Obama a fiscal "chicken" as she (citing his Democratic successor Mark Dayton) accused him of not being a fiscal conservative. After Vieira initially questioned if Pawlenty had the requisite "star quality" to run for President, she then threw the words of the current Democratic governor of Minnesota in his face, as seen in the following question:
VIEIRA: Let's talk about, you know you're a self-proclaimed fiscal conservative and you criticized the President after his State of the Union Address. You basically called him a chicken, that's the word you used, for failing to address real fiscal issues in this country. But your successor in Minnesota, Governor Mark Dayton, has criticized you for leaving a $6.2 billion deficit. Last night in his State of the State Address, he said that he was left with a horrendous fiscal mess and state agencies poorly managed. So what makes you better-equipped to run the nation's economy, if you left your own house in such disarray?
For his part, Pawlenty responded that the Cato Institute had just given him a grade of "A" for his financial stewardship of Minnesota, to which Vieira followed up by asking if the GOP was in need of reconciliation because of the Tea Party's demands for "even more severe budget cuts."