Campaigns & Elections

Chris Matthews was back at the helm of Hardball today after a week's vacation, and, fortuitously for him, the very same day his bête noire, Ted Cruz, announced for president before a supportive crowd at Liberty University. From start to finish Matthews did not disappoint his audience, spewing out hateful invective about the junior senator from Texas.

The New Yorker’s Borowitz and Esquire’s Pierce trash the Texas senator (Pierce claims that Cruz “represents politics and a vision of government that was out of date in 1860” and that he’s “connected, rhetorically for the most part, to the darkest manifestations of the American political Id”).

Appearing on Monday's NBC Today, Bloomberg Politics managing editor Mark Halperin saw problems for Hillary Clinton running unopposed for the 2016 Democratic nomination: "...the Republicans are running in a field of thirteen or fourteen, she's running against herself and right now she's kind of losing."  

On Monday, the co-hosts of The View had a vigorous debate surrounding Ted Cruz’s presidential bid and guest host Michelle Collins took the discussion one step further by declaring to be a “Ted Cruz birther” and asked to “see the birth certificate.” 

Today the U.S. Supreme Court, as the Associated Press's Scott Bauer reported, "turned away a challenge to Wisconsin's voter identification law," meaning that "the state is free to impose the voter ID requirement in future elections." Bauer then focused on the impact of the state's off-year primary elections on April 7. Bauer's relatively tolerable (for him) report tagged the law as "a political…

MSNBC journalists on Monday reacted predictably to Ted Cruz's announcement that he is running for President. Former Newsweek senior editor Jonathan Alter summed up the Republican's vision by comparing Cruz to Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign. Connecting the two, Alter concluded, "So, that's the Ted Cruz message, 'extremism is good.'"  

On Monday's NBC Today, while discussing Senator Ted Cruz's announcement of his presidential candidacy, co-host Savannah Guthrie described the Texas Republican as "whip smart, a real conservative firebrand, knows how to throw those rhetorical bombs that the base loves."

Warning: readers are advised to hide the sharp objects before viewing the clip of Morning Joe's review of the Middle East today.  The picture painted is one of the utter failure of US foreign policy, leaving a devastated, deadly region in its woeful wake. We open with President Obama's "mission accomplished" moment from last year in which he called US policy in Yemen "successful." Cut to Jim…

ABC's Jon Karl announced Ted Cruz's entry on Monday into the 2016 presidential field by warning that the Republican is "trying to be the man to the right of just about everybody." According to Karl, "Cruz jumps into this race as the conservative's conservative, somebody who delights not just in fighting liberals but mainstream Republicans, too." 

On Monday, CBS This Morning previewed Senator Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential bid by proclaiming that he “first grabbed the national spotlight in 2013 when he held the Senate floor for more than 21 hours and helped shut down much of the government all in protest of President Obama's health care law.” 

Appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Monday, Donny Deutsch viciously attacked Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) following his announcement that he will be running for president, calling the Tea Party favorite “scary” and “dangerous.” 

Writing for the March 23 Time magazine, writer David Von Drehle delivered a 2400 word essay on just how the Clintons seem to perpetually survive scandal after scandal. He began by declaring, "The Clintons play by their own set of rules" and went on to describe why Hillary Clinton might survive the e-mail controversy. 

Ahead of Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s expected Monday announcement declaring his candidacy for President of the United States, NBC’s Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd on Sunday teed up California’s Democratic Governor Jerry Brown to blast the Republican as “absolutely unfit to be running for office.”

Bloomberg’s Jonathan Allen sounds a little desperate to make a controversy for Scott Walker with Second Amendment voters. His headline was “Scott Walker Once Backpedaled After Supporting Wisconsin Gun-Control Bill: His flirtation with the issue could create an opportunity for competitors.” Briefly, Walker backed a bill that “could have jailed gun dealers who sold weapons without trigger locks—…