Stories

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama showed this morning why he’s in the presidential race with his best debate performance to date, one in which he commanded details, looked Oval Office ready and effectively made the case that he is indeed the candidate of true change — and that instead of polarizing GOP voters in the fall [...]

The Democratic Presidential Candidate Debate at Drake University this morning started with a bang as candidates were aggressively questioned by debate moderator George Stephanopoulous of ABC News, but overall it was largely a sedate affair that saw the field deepening their commitment to lines of attack they’d shallowly sketched during the Yearly Kos and AFL-CIO [...]

The Sign War

When one is confronted with a sea of Democratic campaign barn signs and placards, the temptation is to look for what stands out.  On Drake’s campus today, the only Republican sign-holder I could find after the debate was holding a sign marked with an insignia invoking Soviet politics and large letters urging us to “DEFEAT [...]

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, like many of the Democratic candidates for President, spent the past week touring around Iowa in a fancy bus, with decals on the side and a sound system rivaling many dance clubs.  When it rolled up to the Edwards debate watching party across the street from Drake University, a [...]

In answering the religion question, Kucinich quips that he’s spent the past 45 minutes “praying that [George] would call on me.” This seals it for me: Dennis Kucinich is the most improved candidate of contest 2008. He’s finally got a decent haircut, he smiles all the time, he’s frequently funny, and he’s figured out a [...]

Clinton, Joe Biden, and Obama all agree to a large extent on the difficulty of getting out of Iraq. This is interesting, in that during the last debate, the AFL-CIO presidential forum in Chicago, a dynamic emerged of Edwards and Obama allying as the anti-establish outsiders against what Edwards adviser Joe Trippi dubbed “the Senate [...]

Having followed Edwards for the past few days, it’s become clear that Edwards sees running against lobbyists as one of the most important planks of his platform. It has become a central part of his stump speech, and now his main line of attack against Clinton in this debate. Clinton, for her part, says that [...]

Pressed repeatedly by Stephanopoulous, John Edwards says he agrees with Clinton’s stance of not talking about whether an American leader should make its nuclear policies plain. “I don’t want to talk about hypothetical use of nuclear weapons,” he said.

George Stephanopoulous got things off to a rolicking start by asking the rest of the field about Sen. Barack Obama’s qualifications and experience. This looks like it’s going to be a very pointed debate. Bill Richardson nicely parried by saying that Obama stood for change and Hillary Clinton for experience, but “with me you get [...]