Big loser in Rasmussen/Fox9 Minnesota survey: Pawlenty
There are no surprises in the presidential preferences expressed by Minnesotans in the pre-Super Tuesday poll unveiled by Fox9 last night. The Rasmussen survey of “likely voters” shows McCain and Obama surging here, as they have in most surveys of other states holding primaries tomorrow. But how those preferences will translate in a state where people have to spend an evening at the caucuses rather than having all day to vote at their leisure puts a premium on ground organization. We’ll see.
The eye-opener involves the two survey questions about Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Back in October, a couple of months after the 35W bridge collapse, a Strib Minnesota Poll showed Pawlenty with a 59 percent approval rating, his highest in four years. Three months later, Rasmussen says that 45 percent of Minnesotans call Pawlenty’s performance excellent or good, while 53 percent term it fair or poor. The real shocker concerns Pawlenty as a prospective Republican VP candidate: While 29 percent say it would make them more likely to vote for the GOP ticket, 35 percent say it would make them less likely to cast their votes for the Republicans. This suggests not only that MnDOT-related scandals and the economy have cost Pawlenty more than anyone has realized, but that the governor has become a more polarizing figure in Minnesota over time.
The Republicans have already invested a lot of political capital in this swing state by choosing to hold their convention here. It’s hard to think that John McCain or the chieftains of the national GOP will find much savor in the prospect of spending more political capital here by choosing a VP for the ticket who looks like a net liability in his own state.
Here’s the Fox9 report, with video, text results, and crosstabs.
Video op-ed: The Angry Clown offers his presidential endorsement
As Super Tuesday approaches, the Angry Clown grapples with the question that Americans everywhere are trying to answer: Among the major party presidential candidates, who seems least crazy and/or evil?
Coke ad during Super Bowl lays bare truth about American politics
In a scant one minute, this crypto-subversive Coca Cola spot starring Republican Bill Frist and Democrat James Carville flaunts an aspect of American electoral politics both parties typically shy from discussing: that whatever their putative differences, they a) generally wind up saying the same thing in the end, and b) can always find common ground in the interest of mutual self-enrichment.
Obama Girl: Here she comes to save the day…
Via TechCrunch, a new Obama Girl video premiered yesterday. If you haven’t heard about Obama Girl before, her first video (which came out seven months ago and has racked up over 5 million YouTube views) is below the jump.
Update: Though he’s far less popular than Obama Girl, Minnesota Rep. Jim Oberstar today endorsed Obama.
“Super Obama Girl” (new)
Campaign ‘08 ads: Clinton goes with the economy on eve of Super Tuesday
In the final weekend before 24 states vote on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton rolls out two ads about the economy. Serviceable if not exactly rousing, but it’s doubtful how compelling they’ll prove to former supporters of John Edwards, who made these issues the centerpiece of his campaign. As David Schultz noted on the Molecast yesterday, one of Edwards’s greatest strengths lay among white male Democrats, and there are a great many white male Democrats who just don’t like her.
Free Fall
Can Do
Molecast audio: David Schultz says Super Tuesday may slow Clinton and McCain
In this week’s Molecast Campaign ‘08 discussion with David Schultz, we focus on Super Tuesday. In looking over polling data and demographic trends, Schultz takes exception to the pundits’ chorus that has increasingly portrayed Hillary Clinton and John McCain as solid frontrunners heading into February 5.
He’s struck instead by how thin the public appeal of some of the remaining candidates appears to be. “We’re moving down the line with a series of choices in Clinton, Romney, and McCain who don’t really have a lot of support among independents, Democrats, or Republicans,” Schultz notes. “If you just asked, would you prefer any of these three or an unnamed candidate?, the unnamed candidate would probably win. For a year where ‘change’ seems to be the buzzword, we’re producing an awful lot of candidates who don’t seem appetizing to a large percentage of the American population.”
Molecast audio: David Schultz looks ahead to the Super Tuesday states (14:06)
Below the jump: excerpts of Schultz’s remarks
Audio Barack Obama Campaign 08 David Schultz Hillary Clinton John McCain Mitt Romney Molecast News Politics Campaign ‘08: The Rapping Pizza sings the praises of the Bush and Clinton dynasties
This is brilliant:
Bush for four years and Clinton for eight,
Then Bush for eight and that was just great,
So if Hillary serves for another eight years,
That’s how many years? That’s 32 years!
Campaign ‘08: Super Tuesday polls
The site USA Election Polls has a handy rundown of current state-by-state poll standings for both parties–though of course none of them measure the impact of John Edwards’s and Rudy Giuliani’s dropping out–and here are some links to polling analysis pieces:
- “Super Tuesday Looks Close for Democrats,” LA Times
- “Is Romney Fighting the Last War?,” Time
- “In Campaign 2008, Pollsters Are Biggest Losers,” Wall Street Journal
City Hall: Mayor still has “full confidence” in police chief and civil rights director; Keefe’s attorney mum
This morning I phoned (and wrote) the office of Minneapolis Mayor RT Rybak with two questions stemming from the recent controversies at the Minneapolis Police Department and the city’s Civil Rights Department:
- Does Police Chief Tim Dolan still have your full confidence?
- Does Civil Rights Department Director Michael Jordan still have your full confidence?
I received this reply, via email, from Jeremy Hansen in the mayor’s office (emphasis added):
“Mayor Rybak is in Washington, DC today, so I’m not sure I’ll get a chance to connect him with you. Nonetheless, the answers to your questions are:
“Does Police Chief Tim Dolan still have your full confidence? Yes.”
“Does Civil Rights Department Director Michael Jordan still have your full confidence? Yes.“
I also phoned Mark Larsen, the attorney and former federal prosecutor (he handled the Joe Biernat prosecution in 2003) who is representing Lt. Michael Keefe in the wake of accusations by MPD brass against Keefe that were made public last week. Practically every media person and City Hall watcher I’ve spoken to believes there will be a defamation lawsuit forthcoming from Keith, so I asked Larsen if he and his client were weighing the possibility.
His answer was not exactly a surprise: “I can’t comment on that.”
Mark Larsen Michael Jordan Michael Keefe Minneapolis Civil Rights Department MPD News RT Rybak Tim Dolan Who screwed up in disclosing the Keefe/MPD controversy? A (very short) Q&A with Minneapolis deputy city attorney Peter Ginder
Here’s one question on the minds of City Hall watchers a day after the story broke concerning the allegations and counter-allegations being lobbed between the Minneapolis Police Department and Lieutenant Michael Keefe: How did a city attorney’s case memorandum to the Civil Rights Department that contained extremely damning accusations about a Minneapolis cop get forwarded in its entirety to the complainant in the case, Ron Edwards? It’s difficult to believe that assistant city attorney Caroline Bachun’s letter was intended for any kind of public release, as it discusses claims of wrongdoing not only against Lt. Michael Keefe but also against another officer whom Keefe accused of using racial epithets.
This morning I reached both Bachun and the deputy Minneapolis city attorney who heads the civil division, Peter Ginder, to ask whether Bachun’s letter was written with the expectation that it would simply be forwarded to the complainant. Bachun immediately declined to answer and referred me to the city communications office. I then phoned Ginder and had the following exchange:
Daily Mole: Can you tell me whether the letter from your office to the Civil Rights Department was written in the anticipation that it would be shared with the person who filed the complaint?
Peter Ginder: There are certain questions I’m not going to answer, and that’s one of them.
DM: Was it legally proper for the Civil Rights Department to have sent that letter in its entirety to Mr. Edwards?
Ginder: I’m not going to comment on that.
DM: Can you tell me whether, as a matter of city policy, letters from your office to the Civil Rights Department are released to people who file civil rights complaints?
Ginder: That’s not a policy question, that’s a legal question, and I’m not going to answer it.
Obama the war candidate: His Wilson Center speech
Barack Obama has gotten lots of mileage from his putative opposition to the Iraq War, and it’s been highlighted in his stump appearances and in his advertising, like the “Unify” spot below.
But last August Obama gave a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center–little noted outside the conservative press–that put quite a different spin on his “anti-war” stance. To the assembled foreign affairs crowd at Wilson, Obama demurred that he only wanted to get out of Iraq to wage war on worthier fronts, even if it means sending missiles or missions into the nuclear-armed, and unstable, state of Pakistan:
“The first step must be getting off the wrong battlefield in Iraq, and taking the fight to the terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan… I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges. But let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”
In a post at Black Agenda Report that I linked here last week, editor Glen Ford elaborates: “Listen to him: He has ‘a goal of removing all combat brigades by March 31, 2008.’ Sounds like withdrawal from Iraq, right? Wrong. There are 180,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, most of them not in ‘combat brigades,’ and about 100,000 mercenaries in the country. It is thoroughly occupied. Obama would do a cosmetic withdrawal, and then move the ‘combat’ troops to a far more dangerous war, in Waziristan [the Pakistani province where Osama bin Laden is believed to be holed up], that would quickly spread to all of Pakistan and threaten the survival of our great cities.”
Below the jump: the transcript of Barack Obama’s August 1, 2007 speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Campaign ‘08 weekend notes: Obama more firmly branded as “the black candidate,” McCain gets Florida boost
In South Carolina, Barack Obama won by nearly 30 points in a race where 55 percent of primary voters were black, a circumstance that was clearly bound to spawn more of the racialized punditry about his popular appeal that the Clinton campaign has been trying to stoke for weeks. A representative lede, from the Associated Press’s Alan Fram (emphasis added):
“Landslide margins among black voters powered Barack Obama to his win Saturday in South Carolina’s Democratic presidential primary, allowing him to overcome the telling edge Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards had among whites.”
“Telling”? What does it tell, exactly? That a black candidate cannot in the end be more than a “black candidate”? I thought the biggest surprise in the South Carolina numbers was that Obama won 25 percent of the white vote–about two and a half times the 10 percent or so he was expected to receive–in a state where, just a few years ago, they were still arguing about whether to fly the Confederate flag at the Capitol.
- We wrote about Obama-as-JFK mythology a couple of week ago, and that buzz is bound to increase after Caroline Kennedy’s Sunday op-ed in the New York Times, “A President Like My Father,” and the announcement that her uncle Ted Kennedy will endorse Obama.
- A new Quinnipac poll (via MSNBC) indicates that a) John McCain and Mitt Romney are in a dead heat in Florida, and b) Rudy Giuliani’s campaign is over. But McCain won key endorsements over the weekend from Florida Senator Mel Martinez and Governor Charlie Crist. The Martinez endorsement is likely to carry real weight at the ballot box, as he’s influential with Florida’s large bloc of Cuban-American voters.
Molecast audio: City Council member Ralph Remington tries to get to the bottom of overtime and budget troubles at MPD
Chances are you have not heard anything about the issue of overtime pay and the Minneapolis Police Department. But OT was a budget-buster in 2007, and in fact things turn out that way nearly every year. It’s a source of controversy and worry not only to budget overseers but to critics of the department’s good-old-(white)-boy establishment and the way it dispenses perks and patronage.
The only mainstream media coverage it’s received recently was in KSTP-TV report that I linked up at the Mole last week. In that broadcast, reporter Nicole Muehlhausen noted that “three officers earned more than $60,000 in extra hours. Four made more than Chief of Police Tim Dolan. And eight officers made more than Gov. Tim Pawlenty. Lt. Robert Kroll was the highest paid member of the MPD–earning more than $144,000 including overtime–running a sector on the city’s northeast [side].”
Last month Minneapolis City Council member Ralph Remington, who represents the south side’s 10th Ward, obtained a list of all overtime claimed by cops at the MPD between December 24, 2006, and October 27, 2007.
The report contains some seemingly absurd numbers–like the lieutenant (Bob Kroll) who claimed the equivalent of roughly 7 hours of overtime for every day on the calendar between August 1 and October 27 of last year, and the sergeant (Pat King) who claimed 1383 hours during the 10 months reported (about 30 hours of overtime for every week in that period).
“You know,” says Remington, “those are the kinds of numbers that, when I looked at it, I said wow. I don’t know. It boggles the mind. It really does. I guess somebody could physically do that, but are they doing it? I don’t know. I doubt it. This is, to me, one of the most troubling aspects of this. It’s not that I have anything against good police working overtime. That’s fine. What I do have something against is lieutenants and above making overtime. I do have something against the fact that we have 800-something sworn officers, and in my mind, I think we need 1250 sworn officers on this police department. So I would like to see more of that overtime money, as would the [Police] Federation–we’d like to see more of that overtime money going into putting officers on the street.”
Molecast: Council member Ralph Remington talks about budgets, patronage, and overtime at the MPD (14:42)
Below the jump: Read the interview transcript
Campaign ‘08 in Minnesota: Pawlenty checks two more items off his VP-wannabe to-do list
As we already noted in TC Morning Roundup, Tim Pawlenty took time from his busy schedule yesterday to tell a Burnsville Chamber of Commerce gathering that the state needs to make deeper cuts in its welfare and social service spending, thereby signaling one of the battle fronts for this year’s session of the Legislature and adding one more line to the vice-presidential campaign biography he’s amassing for John McCain’s consideration.
And Tom Scheck reports at Polinaut that Pawlenty will take more time from his busy schedule to make his fourth trip out of state to stump for McCain, this time in Florida, where he’ll be spending today and the weekend.
More Minnesota notes from the presidential race:
- The Strib runs down the list of presidential endorsements from Minnesota politicos so far. Among the Big 10 (Minnesota’s two senators and eight US representatives), four have made endorsements–Coleman for Guiliani, Oberstar for Edwards, McCollum and Ellison for Obama–and six are waiting.
- And the Pi Press notes that Hillary Clinton picked up endorsements from a group of not exactly big name DFLers.
Molecast audio: David Schultz talks about the growing rancor between Obama and the Clintons
Most of today’s Molecast politics chat with political analyst David Schultz is devoted to the escalating war of words and deeds between the Obama and Clinton camps. Monday night’s Democratic debate on CNN “was ugly,” he says. “If the Democrats have another debate like that on national television, there’s not a prayer that either Clinton or Obama are going to get elected in November.”
Hillary and Bill Clinton have succeeded in putting Barack Obama “off his game,” Schultz notes, “but think of where this puts us down the line, though. Clinton may be able to win the nomination because she does well with women and relatively well with Hispanics.” It doesn’t augur well for the general election, in his reckoning: “She doesn’t do well with blacks, with white males, with Republicans, or with independents.”
Molecast: David Schultz talks about the increasingly vitriolic Clinton/Obama battle (12:59)
Below the jump: excerpts of Schultz’s remarks
New Obama ad tries to pry pro-choicers away from Hillary
This “I switched to Obama” spot featuring former Chicago NOW chapter president Lorna Brett Howard, comes via Liberal Media Elite, and we like the gloss Bill at LME put on it: “This is where dirty campaigning gets you.”
Campaign ‘08: Women backing Hillary–but with an asterisk
Later today in our weekly campaign Molecast, David Schultz will talk about the divisions of gender and race that are becoming a more prominent part of the Democratic presidential primaries. But he also pointed us to some post-New Hampshire polling data about Hillary Clinton’s support among women.
It’s barely been mentioned in American media as far as I’ve seen, but it’s quite interesting: While older women have gone for Clinton in large numbers, her support among younger women varies according to education level. Clinton does not do nearly as well with well-educated women. The Guardian (UK) noted as much in a New Hampshire analysis piece published back on January 12:
“As has been the pattern since the launch of her campaign nearly a year ago, she performed best among women with lower incomes and less education. Half of women earning between $15,000 and $30,000 a year voted for her, compared with 29% for Obama. She also did well among single women.”
And a Pew Research Center survey conducted from January 9-13 contains this note:
“The gender gap is fairly small among college graduates. However, among those who have not attended college, 57% of women favor Clinton compared with 45% of men. There is no gender gap among people in households with annual incomes of greater than $50,000; among lower-income Democrats, Clinton draws much greater support among women than among men (57% vs. 44%).”
Read the Pew survey (PDF link).
Anyone out there have an explanation?
Campaign ‘08: Black writers and publications on Obama
And while we’re on the subject of Barack Obama…
Everyone, by now, has absorbed the new conventional wisdom: Whether Obama likes it or not–and he certainly does not like it–race will soon become a bigger issue in the Democratic presidential campaign. Mainly that means the Clinton campaign will begin doing its genteel, surreptitious best to remind white America that Obama is, how you say, black.
On the other side of the race chasm, there’s no question that black voters are embracing Obama by overwhelming margins at the moment–and will likely continue to do so for as long as he looks “viable,” regardless of what Obama may so or do. But I was curious to see how Obama’s studiously color-blind “uniter” campaign has been playing lately in the eyes of black writers and publications. So yesterday afternoon I spent some time tracking down what a sampling of African-American journalists, writers, and thinkers have had to say recently. Some excerpts and links follow.
Author and activist Kevin Gray writes in yesterday’s Counterpunch:
“I hesitantly step into the Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama family scuffle over South Carolina’s black vote. Both candidates are products of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the conservative wing of the Democratic Party. Clinton is a DLC star, chair of its American Dream Initiative touting free markets, balanced budgets and middle-class know-how, while Obama’s political action committee, the Hope Fund, has raised money for half of the DLC’s representatives in the Senate. This is how America measures progress: The DLC, founded as a vehicle for pro-business Southern white men, is now the arena advancing a black man and a white woman who talk as if the more populist Southern white man in the race were invisible.”
–Kevin Alexander Gray, “Playing the Race Card”
Editor Glen Ford’s Black Agenda Report is the best African-American political site I know, and it likewise contains the most detailed critiques of Obama from the left I’ve found anywhere.
Of Obama’s foreign policy, Ford writes,
“Barack Obama reacts to the world’s response to imperialism in precisely the same way as his white counterparts; he proposes more war. Obama wants to add almost 100,000 new troops to the U.S. military, to alleviate the shortage of manpower that Iraq attrition has wrought. In his speech to the Woodrow Wilson Center, Obama gave away their destination: Waziristan [the Pakistani province where Osama bin Laden is believed to live]. Obama wants a more aggressive approach to the so-called ‘war on terror,’ to take ‘the fight to the terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan.’
“So what we have in Barack Obama is an alternative War Party, planning an alternative War. He has told us so, and we should believe him. He is no peace candidate, and goes out of his way to prove it. The problem is, Osama bin Laden does not have The Bomb, but the Pakistani military does. Senator Obama would destabilize a regime that is a nuclear power, and has nothing to say except that he would establish schools to replace tens of thousands of maddrassas. What a fool.”
–Glen Ford, “Barack Obama the War Monger”
Also from BAR (though the writer here is white), this summary of Obama’s remarks last year at a civil rights commemoration in Selma, Alabama:
“Obama’s indifference to the depth and degree of racial inequality in the U.S. was reflected in his Brown Chapel claim that 1950s and 1960s civil rights activists — who he referred to as ‘the Moses Generation’ — had brought black America ‘90 percent of the way’ to racial equality. It’s up to Obama and his fellow ‘Joshua Generation’ members to get past ‘that 10 percent in order to cross over to the other side.’
“Ten percent? Maybe that’s how it looks to Obama and his corporate-jet-owning friends in the black super-bourgeoisie. By the latest count of the leading academic wealth gap-expert Tom Shapiro, however, it appears that black America still has 93 percent of the way to go. ‘In 2002,’ Shapiro noted for the mainstream Center for American Progress, ‘a typical Hispanic family owned 11 cents of wealth for every dollar owned by a typical white family, and African-American families owned only 7 cents.’
–Paul Street, “The Pale Reflection: Barack Obama, MLK and the Meaning of the Black Revolution”
More: Author and academic Michael Eric Dyson (pro-Obama) debates BAR’s Glen Ford (anti-Obama) on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! broadcast (w/ audio and transcript)…. Novelist and critic Ishmael Reed files a long dispatch about the Clintons’ attacks on Obama that turns into a rambling rehearsal of the longstanding fight between black civil rights advocates and white feminists. But if you think he’s veering off point by going there, then it’s probably you who’s missing the point; the antagonism between black men and white feminists at large isn’t something Reed made up, and it’s hard to see how it can fail to be a factor in a Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama fight.
Campaign ‘08: Obama rolls out his first national ad
It’s currently airing on the non-denominational cable news channels, CNN and MSNBC. It’s a one-minute spot. It’s called “Inspiring,”–and, honestly, it’s not.
More about gusset plates, governance, and MnDOT
Both dailies featured some notable coverage of MnDOT and the 35W bridge collapse over the weekend.- The must-read, once again, is by Jason Hoppin of the Pioneer Press. Hoppin puts the lie to NTSB chairman Mark Rosenker’s observation last week that the failure of the 35W bridge likely constituted a unique, “one-off” set of circumstances. In fact, a very similar failure occurred on an Ohio interstate bridge in 1996, though that bridge only sagged in one section and did not collapse. Money quote: “Although it has a vaunted reputation for investigating plane crashes, the NTSB has limited experience with structural bridge collapses. In its 40-year history, the board has concluded just 23 investigations. Many of those investigations were related to bridges that collapsed when their support piers were either struck or washed out. The agency has investigated few collapses related to problems in a bridge’s superstructure - where the I-35W bridge is believed to have failed - and none in at least 20 years.” Which would seem to lend added credence to fears that the consultant hired by the state to assist the NTSB could, in fact, hijack the investigation’s findings. Please note, too, that one disgruntled denizen of the Strib newsroom has written the Mole to say the Strib had the Ohio bridge information as well–and, so far, has done nothing with it.
- Mike Kaszuba’s Saturday feature in the Strib covers much of the same ground as Hoppin’s story about gusset plates from last Thursday (discussed here), but adds some further information on the 1998 and 2007 bridge deck projects.
- Mismanagement at MnDOT: Paul McEnroe and Tony Kennedy continue to break important new ground on the larger matter of Department of Transportation troubles. Yesterday they wrote about a leaked MnDOT internal audit showing a surge in in construction project cost overruns that’s been going on since the Ventura administration but has escalated dramatically of late: “[T]he audit found that supplemental contracts are a ’significant percentage of total construction costs,’ and represent an ever-increasing percentage of total construction costs. For example, in fiscal 2002, MnDOT paid contractors about $7 million for supplemental contract work. By fiscal 2006, those costs had climbed to $28 million.” Very good story, but I have a framing question: Do those cost overruns, first and foremost, constitute evidence of poor management or of underfunding as a way of life?
- Paw Louwagie writes that while politicians may be anxious to embrace “design flaws” as a sound-bite explanation, attorneys for bridge-collapse victims intend to highlight maintenance oversight–what was or wasn’t done to keep the bridge safe.
keep looking »
