Campaigns & Elections

Does a former GOP congressman who voted to impeach President Bill Clinton now support a third term for him? MSNBC's Joe Scarborough lauded Clinton on Tuesday's Morning Joe and asked him why he shouldn't be able to run for office again. However, he didn't once bring up Clinton's impeachment for lying under oath about his sexual misconduct while in office, during Tuesday's media firestorm over…

In only eight and a half days, NBC, CBS and ABC have devoted a staggering 99 stories to sexual harassment charges against Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain. In comparison, eight days into Bill Clinton's scandal's with Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick, there were a combined eight reports. Additionally, the three network newscasts on Monday offered scant…

In 2007 when she was running for president, Hillary Rodham Clinton told a fundraising event in Carson City, Nev., "I sure don't want Democrats, or the supporters of Democrats, to be engaging in the politics of personal destruction. I think we should stay focused on what we're going to do for America." Clinton's husband, the former president, used the phrase at the time of his impeachment…

Updated : More analysis and full transcript added. In a fawning interview with Bill Clinton on Tuesday's NBC Today, co-host Ann Curry played an ad from the former president's 1992 campaign and remarked: "First of all, how cute were you and your hair hasn't changed. But number two, but number two, you talk about vision there and leadership. So what is President Obama's vision on the economy…

Chuck Todd didn't cautiously couch his prediction.  On today's Morning Joe, NBC's political director flatly forecast that third and/or fourth party presidential candidates will emerge in the Spring.   Todd based his bold prediction on the theory that there is a hunger for populist candidates, and that populism is not the way Obama or Romney [his presumed Republican candidate] "roll." Video…

CNN on Monday provided a rosy look at President Obama's efforts to campaign for re-election, touting that the President is distancing himself from Washington in an "anti-Rose Garden" campaign. Ironically, a few minutes later Obama was scheduled to speak in the Rose Garden itself. In reporting on Obama's efforts to wash his hands of Washington, CNN had ignored his harsh partisan rhetoric…

On Monday's Early Show, CBS's Jan Crawford spotlighted conservative criticism of the broad media coverage of the Herman Cain sexual harassment charges. Crawford stated that Cain's "testy exchange" with reporters "could help...because a lot of conservatives...think there's this huge liberal bias against conservatives. You know, the media didn't cover Bill Clinton...like they're doing Herman Cain…

From Friday night through Monday morning, the big three networks devoted an additional 21 stories to the Herman Cain sexual harassment story, bringing the networks' grand total to 84 in one week. Even as they continued to pile on, these same networks defensively chided Cain for daring to criticize their coverage. On Sunday's Good Morning America, David Kerley hit Cain for "lashing out" at…

Appearing on Monday's NBC Today, Newt Gingrich took co-host Ann Curry to task for grilling him on allegations against Herman Cain: "...when the news media goes and finds an anonymous report about an anonymous incident...and you decide that matters more than every other issue in the campaign, that may put your judgment in doubt, as you, being the institutional news media." [Audio available here…

With a number of news organizations labeling former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney "inevitable", a group of conservative bloggers and activists has banded together to demand a different Republican nominee. Their website, Not Mitt Romney, launched yesterday to encourage conservative primary voters to select a different nominee that conservatives are enthusiastic about supporting. Do you…

If the liberal media were allowed to select the Republican presidential nominee, there's little doubt who he'd be: come on up, Jon Huntsman! On today's Morning Joe, Mark Halperin claimed Huntsman "has as good a chance as any of the other candidates to test Mitt Romney" in New Hampshire.  Mika Brzezinski took the Huntsman-love a large step farther, flatly proclaiming that Huntsman "has all…

Call it Niall Ferguson's Pauline Kael moment . . . During the roundtable segment this morning on ABC's This Week, Ferguson, an academic with appointments at Harvard, Stanford and Oxford, said that "all the Texans I know" can't stand Rick Perry. Ferguson was reacting to host Christiane Amanpour's question about Perry's highly-animated New Hampshire address.  Ferguson professed to like the "…

On the PBS NewsHour Friday, there was the typical agreement between "conservative" David Brooks and liberal Mark Shields on the sour state of the economy, and that despite that, Brooks said President Obama's "hanging in there reasonably well," and Shields agreed he's "defied gravity." Brooks slammed Herman Cain's response to the incredibly vague Politico story: that he "didn't do kindergarten…

On Friday night's All Things Considered, the Week in Politics segment could have been titled "Another Horrible Week for Republicans." Helping out enthusiastically was New York Times columnist David Brooks, who is billed as the conservative half of the political analyst team with ultraliberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne. But the two end up agreeing so much you can't tell which one is…