Posts by Cindy Cooper

Senate Candidate Wants to Change His Name to "Pro-Life"
Posted by Cindy Cooper, Words of Choice on March 28, 2008 at 6:10 AM.

A report from Idaho indicates that U.S. Senate candidate Marvin Richardson legally changed his name to Marvin Pro-Life Richardson.

This seemed weird at first glance -- but why not get all anti-abortion legislators to change their names? And then mandate that all anti-abortion legislation change names to add "anti-abortion," or heck, even "pro-life"? Now that would be informed consent!

As synopsized by National Partnership for Women and Families, here's the deal with Marvin Pro-Life. (Pro-Life, by the way, is running for the seat of Larry Craig, who is most recently known for for his encounter with an airport men's room.)

An Idaho candidate for the U.S. Senate has legally changed his name to Pro-Life, the AP/CBS News reports. The man attempted to appear on a 2006 ballot as Marvin Pro-Life Richardson when he unsuccessfully ran for governor, but the state's policy prohibits slogans from appearing on the ballot. However, officials in the Idaho Office of the Secretary of State have said they have no choice but to allow Pro-Life to be on the 2008 ballot because it is now the candidate's full legal name (AP/CBS News, 3/18).

Idaho Secretary of State Ben Ysursa (R) at a state Senate committee hearing Monday advocated for legislation (S 1514) that would require candidates who change their name to a political slogan to have a parenthetical note after the name on the ballot that states "A person formerly known as ..."

But wait ... if this were applied across the board, we could have John Pro-Life McCain running for President ... and there would be no confusion for the pro-choice majority. We wouldn't have to worry when he makes his comments obscure and coded, as George W. Bush did. Everyone would know, flat-out, where McCain stands.

Instead of "crisis pregnancy centers" or "pregnancy care centers," which regularly deceive women about their intentions, we could have "crisis pro-life centers" and "pregnancy pro-life care" ... and the whole encounter could be clarified for those crossing the threshold of one.

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Why McCain Owes The New York Times a Thank You Card
Posted by Marc Cooper, Huffington Post on February 22, 2008 at 7:23 AM.

The Republican Right is already howling over the bombshell dropped by The New York Times on John McCain, the GOP's all-but-official nominee. It's an outrage, they say. A deliberate torpedo. A liberal media smear.

Sorry, but these guys have got it backwards. The Times, in fact, couldn't have found a moment more favorable for Johnny Mack to let this fearsome cat out of the bag. If McCain could have personally chosen when to have this story break, it would have been right about now.

Not to say that the well-researched piece that broke late Wednesday evening isn't any candidate's nightmare. It's not only a detailed run-down of McCain's awfully close friendship with a pert and well-connected lobbyist thirty years his junior; the Times also does an admirable job of rehashing the Senator's long record of cozying up to the same sort of lobbyists against whom he repeatedly rails in public.

So what's my beef? The timing, folks. The timing. Everyone who knows anyone has been hearing about this story for some months. Back in December, Matt Drudge got wind of it from inside the Times and teased it at the top of his site. We all waited, but the shoe never dropped.

Under what is said to be intense pressure from McCain and prominent D.C. criminal attorney Robert Bennett, who was hired to help deal with the matter, the Times capitulated and held off on publishing the story - offering no explanation, then or now. And if you read through the piece just published, there doesn't seem to be any new information that the Times couldn't have had two months ago.

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Ron Paul Can Spoil McCain's Comeback
Posted by Marc Cooper, Huffington Post on January 3, 2008 at 3:23 PM.

Des Moines, Iowa - GOP presidential candidate John McCain is deeply worried that his resurgent national campaign may be stalled by a relatively strong showing in tonight's Iowa caucuses by the iconoclastic Ron Paul.

The Arizona senator's campaign told the HuffPost that their candidate is concerned that Paul will finish third behind front-runners Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney.

McCain, whose campaign floundered earlier in the year, has been showing renewed strength in the battle to win the key New Hampshire primary next week. His national numbers have also been rising and one respected poll now has him in first place..

The McCain campaign also gives former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, currently leading the Iowa Republican polls, little chance of surviving New Hampshire even if he scores a clear victory in tonight's caucuses. The fight for the GOP nomination, McCain strategists believe, should be a head-to-head showdown between McCain and Mitt Romney.

A strong showing by Paul tonight could severely damage McCain's overall strategy. McCain is said to be especially irked because the outsider campaign of the Texas Congressman is given little viability on a national scale. But Paul raised $20 million from his fervent supporters in the last quarter of 2007, enough money to act as a spoiler for more mainstream candidates like McCain.

"Ron Paul's like the Joker in a poker game," said one McCain staffer. Paul reportedly dropped three mailers overnight and kicked his phone banks into turbo-mode in an all-out push to make into the final tier of tonight's winners.

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Meltdown in Iowa: Huckabee Publicly Attacks Negative Campaigning With Negative Ad
Posted by Marc Cooper, Huffington Post on December 31, 2007 at 2:15 PM.

UPDATE: Video from this press conference available here

Des Moines, Iowa - In what is likely to be remembered as one of the more bizarre moments of this campaign season, embattled GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee renounced negative campaigning today by unveiling an attack ad to a ballroom full of reporters and dozens of TV cameras.

Standing before a banner reading "Enough is Enough" and flanked by five large charts attacking the record of rival Mitt Romney, a haggard-looking Huckabee said that the fight to win Thursday's Republican caucus had gotten "out of hand" and "out of control" and that he would refrain from any more negative campaigning.

Huckabee's unorthodox media event comes as a barrage of new polls has battered his lead in Iowa and put his campaign at risk of crash-and-burn. Some of those surveys now show Romney regaining a lead he had maintained over most of the year until Huckabee began to surge ahead in recent weeks.

"Conventional political wisdom is that you must counter-punch," the former Arkansas governor said. "When you get hit you should hit back. And every bit of advice I have been given says that is exactly what we should do." Huckabee explained that he, indeed, prepared and produced a TV spot attacking Romney, sent it to local TV stations but had just given the directive to pull it from airing. "This morning I ordered them to hold the ads," Huckabee said. "From now we will run only ads that say why I should be president not why Mitt Romney shouldn't be president."

Then, amid loud gasps and laughter from the more than 150 reporters on hand, Huckabee announced he would show the assembled press the same ad. As dozens of TV cameras whirred, and after two false starts, the 30-second spot assaulting Romney's record was shown in full. The tag line of the spot ended with the narrator saying of Romney: "If a man's dishonest trying to get the job, he'll be dishonest on the job"

The room then exploded into a cacophony of questioning from the press memorializing this event as a moment that might be remembered as campaign meltdown for Huckabee.

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Hillary's Final Strategy: Be Afraid
Posted by Marc Cooper, Huffington Post on December 30, 2007 at 8:07 AM.

Eldridge, Iowa - Barack Obama and John Edwards might want to change the world. But Hillary Clinton wants to protect you against it.

That's the unmistakable message that Senator Clinton is pounding out in this final phase of the campaign to capture the Iowa caucuses. In a world brimming with danger and uncertainty, she argues as she blitzes the Hawkeye State, there's no time to waste daydreaming about pie-in-the-sky promises of reform.

Instead, the American people must choose a leader ready to immediately start fixing the problems that already exist and one who is immediately ready to face the inevitable and "unpredictable" crises looming right over the horizon. And that would be Clinton.

"We know some of the challenges that await the next president," Clinton told a packed crowd at a junior high school Saturday morning. "But no matter how much we know, we can't possibly anticipate all the problems."

The razzamatazz cheerleading, sloganeering style that punctuated her earlier campaign events has now been replaced by a sedate, somber, even grave tone coming from the podium. Clinton never raised her voice, never elevated the mood, and at times sounded like a concerned, responsible parent telling the kids that something terrible was taking place outside the door but not to worry because Mom and Dad - or in this case Hill and Bill- would take care of it.

Becoming president, she said in a hushed tone, is "an awesome responsibility. And it was thrown into relief with the events last Thursday with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto."

"When that person gets into the Oval Office," she said, referring to the next president, "there will be a stack of problems already waiting: a war, another war to resolve, an economy that is faltering, housing values that have dropped 6% in some parts of the country...all of those millions, 47 million of them uninsured."

As is now customary among her leading rivals, Clinton didn't utter the words Obama or Edwards - the two candidates now in a dogfight for the mantle of change- but she drew a bright shining line between her position and theirs. They are the dreamers. She is the doer. All three are locked in a dead heat to win next Thursday's first-in-the-nation caucus.

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Dodd Declares He Won't Support Mukasey, Fellow Democrats Follow His Lead
Posted by Marc Cooper on October 30, 2007 at 6:52 AM.

This post, written by Marc Cooper, originally appeared on The Huffington Post

Kudos to Chris Dodd whose third-tier-nothing-to-lose presidential campaign has sprouted him a robust pair of cojones. Dodd became the most prominent Democrat, and the first among the presidential candidates, to declare he will vote against Bush nominee Michael Mukasey's confirmation as Attorney General.

Angered by Mukasey's Senate testimony last week in which the former federal judge and prosecutor floated a legal "theory" that the President of the United States could, indeed, stand above constitutional statutes, Dodd declared on Monday:

"That is about as basic as it gets," Dodd said. "You must obey the law. Everyone must."

Dodd, along with a slew of other legal and political observers were also dismayed when Mukasey dodged Senators' questions last week about whether or not so-called waterboarding was, in fact, a form of torture. After eluding any straight answer, Mukasey wound up making the incredulous statement that he wasn't quite sure what was meant by the term.

Over the weekend, some leading Senate Democrats ranging from Dianne Feinstein of California to Carl Levin of Michigan engaged in their own form of equivocation, warning they might vote against Mukasey if he doesn't properly clarify his views when he responds to written questions from the Senate later this week.

But Dodd's bold stepping-out on this issue, rejecting any mulligan for a nominee who refuses to call torture by its proper name, seems like it might force the hand of fellow Democrats who might start looking rather silly if they don't turn thumbs down on the newly proposed AG. Within hours of Dodd's statement, fellow candidate and Delaware Senator Joe Biden also said he had made up his mind to vote nay. Campaign spokesmen for John Edwards and Bill Richardson also joined the chorus. And by late Monday night, the campaign of Barack Obama piled on, telling The New York Sun:

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Siesta Time: Univision Fumbles First-Ever Spanish Language Presidential Debate
Posted by Marc Cooper on September 10, 2007 at 5:50 AM.

This post, written by Marc Cooper, originally appeared on The Huffington Post

Sunday night's nationally televised presidential debate among the Democratic candidates was the first ever conducted in Spanish. But the hosting network, Univision, handled it as ineptly as if this was the first time anyone had dared to put a pack of candidates before a camera in any language.

Almost everything about it was a dud, rendering the entire exercise little more than a gimmick. It's hard to figure what any Latino voter, or better said any voter, would have gotten out of it. It was back to 1984, format-wise, as if no one at America's largest Spanish-speaking TV network had noticed any shift whatsoever in communications over the last two decades.

The huge live Miami audience, even more than usual in these sort of events, were reduced to mere props. Not even token questions were allowed from the floor. Worse, Univision allowed no other reporters, other than their own two star anchors Jorge Ramos and Maria Elena Salinas, any form of participation. So you could forget, Dios Mio, about any Spanish-language bloggers (or citizens) having any shot.

While the questions were supposedly culled from those submitted earlier by Univision viewers, the chosen queries were uniformly non-confrontational and conveniently open-ended - the sort of questions pols dream of. The candidates might as well have been tele-transported to an underhand soft-ball batting cage for 90 minutes. "Are you taking any risks by appearing before a Spanish-speaking audience?" was the first laugher rolled out by Salinas. "Do you support immigration reform?" "Would you make Spanish a second language?" 'What's the most important contribution Latinos make to America?" were some of the other whiffle balls limply pitched.

Univision researchers took no time or effort to ply whatever authentic differences exist among the candidates nor to challenge any of them on the contradictions and waffles that mark their respective records and campaign promises. The closest anything came to a moment of tension was when Senators Clinton and Obama were asked why they, indeed, had voted for construction of a wall along the Mexican border. But even this question was off the mark as it evaded the complicated circumstances of the votes they cast.

The rigidly formatted debate allotted precise amounts of equal time to candidates who are hardly equal. More aggravating, the anchors seemed bereft of any creativity, any spunk, any passion, or for that matter any journalistic sense, as they made no attempt to confront one candidate's views with another. The field wasn't leveled - it was utterly flattened.

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