Campaigns & Elections

The two major-party Texas gubernatorial candidates, Democrat Wendy Davis and Republican Greg Abbott, debated Friday night. I knew it didn't go well for Davis, once a national media darling, when I searched on "Wendy Davis Abbott debate" (not in quotes) and found no coverage of the event at the Associated Press's national web site, the New York Times and the Politico. Davis, trailing…

Like every other group of Democratic boot-lickers, NBC stars are moving the eye of their adoration from Obama to the next alleged president, Hillary Clinton. The Washington Post reported Tuesday that NBC late-night star Seth Meyers hosted the opening of the annual Clinton Global Initiative on Sunday night. “President Clinton is here! And so is Bill!” Meyers joked after Hillary opened the glitzy…

Politico's Kenneth Vogel and Byron Tau filed a long Friday article moaning about how influential opposition research has become in the conduct of this year's political campaigns. My takeaway is that they really don't like it this time around — not because the money involved has increased, and not because supposedly lax campaign-finance laws have accommodated this increase. No, they're really…

D.R. Tucker alleges that Christie’s opposition to cap-and-trade shows he’s a "slave" of the Koch brothers and “no longer a man in any real sense of the word.” What set Tucker off was Christie’s opposition to New Jersey’s rejoining a regional cap-and-trade program, supposedly because Christie doesn’t want to displease righty anti-cap-and-trade groups such as the Koch-backed Americans for…

The hosts on NBC's Today spent over a minute of air time on Monday applauding Louisiana Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu for helping a fan tailgating at an LSU football game do a keg stand. Co-host Matt Lauer touted how Landrieu "may do just about anything to get your vote" given that she was "in the middle of a really tough reelection campaign."

Should Fauxcahontas be flattered . . . or furious?  The title of Elizabeth Warren's new book is "A Fighting Chance," a "rabble-rousing" rant by the populist from the Harvard faculty lounge. So here comes Hillary Clinton, who in a speech this week just happened to say "I want every one of our children to feel that they are inheriting the best of America ... that this country is on your side; that…

On Sunday, CBS's "60 Minutes" will broadcast Scott Pelley's recent interview of former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. In CBS's promotional tease, which was broadcast on Friday, in response to Pelley's question about whether he was confident that the U.S. troop withdrawal "was the right thing to do" at the time it was done, Panetta said, "No, I wasn't." That's big news. How big? So big that,…

The real problem with Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke's "jobs plan," the detailed version of which appears to be no longer available at her campaign's web site, isn't its plagiarized material. It's the content. The presence of certain obviously wrong facts and patently pathetic assertions indicates that Ms. Burke, a successful entrepreneur who one would think should have…

On her 12 p.m. ET hour MSNBC show on Friday, host Andrea Mitchell noted that "Chris Christie has been cleared by the federal investigators of any allegations" in the George Washington Bridge closing scandal. However, MSNBC political reporter Kasie Hunt quickly dismissed the development: "But, there's a lot of damage that's been done in the interim. And there's going to be a lot of questions still…

Talk about tone deaf at National Public Radio. On Thursday’s All Things Considered, NPR reporter Don Gonyea ran a segment on Governor Chris Christie (R-N.J.) traveling to New Hampshire to campaign with Scott Brown as he seeks to become the next senator from there.  Unsurprisingly, the NPR reporter did his best to play up the “Bridgegate” controversy despite the Department of Justice clearing…

On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice told NBC News that Governor Chris Christie (R-N.J.) was innocent of any wrong-doing relating to the closure of lanes on the George Washington Bridge. Despite Governor Christie’s reported innocence, ABC and CBS have yet to cover the NBC story, but when the story originally broke in January, all three networks eagerly jumped on it. So far NBC has devoted…

On Thursday morning, CBS continued to ignore key results of the latest CBS News/New York Times poll, which show President Obama’s approval rating at 40 percent and his foreign policy approval rating at only 34 percent.  In contrast, the front-page New York Times article by Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Dalia Sussman included dire statistics about the President’s low domestic approval rating: “The…

During a segment on Thursday's Andrea Mitchell Reports on MSNBC, fill-in host Kristen Welker noted Joe Biden making a string of gaffes – which included using an anti-Semitic slur – during a trip to Iowa, but then she and her guests proceeded to excuse his offensive remarks as merely being part of his charm. [Listen to the audio] The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza observed: "Joe Biden is…

Though things could always change, and often do, it appears that the Democratic Party is on track to lose majority control of the U.S. Senate in the fall elections, and to make little if any kind of dent in the Republican Party's majority in the House of Representatives. Since the left never blames any of its own policies and positions for its woes, it must, Alinsky-style, find someone to…