SIOUX CITY, Iowa — Perhaps 50 voters showed up Saturday for a campaign event held in a barn on a dirt road amid cornfields near Roland, about 20 miles north of Ames. While a few dozen voters isn’t much of a crowd by Republican presidential campaign standards, the audience inside the barn was enlarged — and enlivened — by the presence of scores of children, the offspring of several Christian homeschooling families in attendance. One family brought eight kids, another brought nine, and the hosts, Scott and Susan Hurd, have seven of their own, as did the guest from Pennsylvania whose “Road to Ames Barn Bash” was the occasion of this gathering.
Rick Santorum has been campaigning across the state for months and, as he told the voters (and their numerous children) during his speech in the barn, he has visited 51 cities in Iowa by now. Despite his dogged persistence, however, Santorum’s candidacy has yet to strike the kind of sparks that garner major national attention — a problem the former Pennsylvania senator blames on the media. “The national media has done a very good job of ignoring Rick Santorum,” he said, lamenting the fact that polls show him as the only GOP candidate whose name-recognition hasn’t increased in recent months. “Everybody else was being covered and promoted by the national media, even people that are below me in the polls, even people who most people say have no chance of ever getting the nomination.” The reason for this, he explained, is that the liberal media knows he is a conservative who can win and have decided “maybe the best way to get rid of this guy is to simply suffocate him by making sure that nobody talks about him?” . . .
“Rick is a very devout Catholic guy, and he believes in the principles of the founding fathers of this country. . . He is not willing to compromise on that. He will stand for his beliefs and his principles above any political expediency.”
DES MOINES, Iowa — Highway 193 runs nearly flat and straight some 60 miles southeast from the state capital in Des Moines to the Mahaska County seat of Oskaloosa, where the monument in the town square honors the tribal chieftain for whom the county was named. Chief Mahaska? “lived at peace with the white man and was slain by an Indian in 1834,” a plaque at the base of the statue explains to visitors.
There were many visitors in the Oskaloosa town square Thursday for the “Sweet Corn Serenade,” the annual festival celebrating the region’s most famous product. And this being Iowa in the summer before an election year, one of the visitors was running for president.
Herman Cain didn’t stay long enough to sample the corn — roasted in the husk and served with a pork sandwich for $3 a plate — but he did shake hands with residents and talk with several of the vendors before adjourning to the Smokey Row Coffee Shop on Market Street for a meeting with two dozen or so of his local supporters. “Happy to be here,” the retired Atlanta businessman began his presentation, “because I like to get out and meet people and talk to people.” He quickly segued into a variation of his standard stump speech, emphasizing his background as an executive — “a problem-solver, not a politician” — and his plan to boost economic growth. And given that the Dow Jones Industrial Average had just lost more than 500 points in the aftermath of an unpopular compromise debt deal in Washington, Thursday was a good day to be a non-politician with a pro-growth economic message.
Less than ten days before the Ames Straw Poll on Aug. 13, Iowa is swarming with Republican presidential candidates, nine of whom will appear on the straw-poll ballot. . . .
President Obama is a “bully” who is “clearly failing” on economic policy, according to Newt Gingrich , and House Republicans should stop negotiating with the White House and move forward with passing their own solutions to the debt-ceiling and budget deficit.
“Obama has put the ‘bully’ back in the bully pulpit,” Gingrich told reporters Friday afternoon. The former Speaker of the House and current GOP presidential hopeful accused Obama of “intellectual dishonesty,” and said congressional Republicans should “take Social Security off the table” in the current debate over the federal debt ceiling.
John Boehner and House Republicans should “quit talking to Obama and start passing legislation,” Gingrich said in a conference call with a number of writers for conservative publications and blogs. . . .
Read the rest at The American Spectator. In a situation like that — where everybody and his dog is on the same conference call — the trick is to take good notes, figure out your lede before the call ends, and be the first to whip out a quick 200 words. Let somebody else transcribe the whole thing and write an 800-word analysis, if they want. Just get the scoop while the getting’s good.
Take notes, kids. This will be on your final exam.
UPDATE: The conference call was billed as a follow-up on Gingrich’s recent appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show:
The way it is written I think is basically a surrender by the Republicans. Now is the time to be calm, courageous, creative and clear. To be calm, first I want you to understand. Obama is under as much pressure as the Republicans are. Does he want to be the first president in American history to default? Is he really going to go out to the world and say I can’t do my job and I can’t get Washington to work? I don’t think so. I think in the end he’s going to have to reach an agreement.
Second, I think that they have got to be courageous because this is a hard business. This is history. This isn’t politics. This isn’t 30-second attack commercials. This is a power struggle between the 80 percent of the American people who believe in a citizen-centered government and the 20 percent who believe in a Washington-centered government. That power struggle is as deep and as real as anything since the civil war. You have to have the courage to stand there and take the heat.
They’ve also got to be creative that’s why I suggested just now, pass a one-month debt ceiling increase and pay for it with the same number of dollars in savings and be prepared to come back a month later and do the same thing. And do it once a month until we win the presidency.
And finally, I think you have to be clear so the American people understand it.
Gingrich called on “everyone in the conservative movement” to “do what I’ve done, and call it the Obama Depression.”
“You can go everywhere in this country and find ways Obama kills jobs,” he asserted. “Obama is the best food stamp president in American history, but we need a paycheck president.”
Gingrich believes today’s congressional Republican leadership holds much higher ground than he did, during his legendary battles with President Bill Clinton. “Clinton was a natural centrist, but Obama is a radical.” He says Clinton won re-election [in 1996] by adopting Republican policies, such as welfare reform, while Obama is incapable of such ideological flexibility.
“Do we have the nerve to take on the most radical President in American history?” is the question Newt Gingrich wants every conservative to ask. . . .
Read the whole thing. Friendly advice to John: Never begin your story with “In a conference call with bloggers today . . .” Why? Because the real news-value is what he said, not where he said it or to whom he said it. Also, by leading with “conference call,” you’re telling the reader up front that what you’re reporting isn’t exclusive. But if your story contains important material that the other reporters on the call forgot to include, your story is exclusive to that extent, and therefore you don’t want to start off by signaling the reader, in effect: “Hey, a dozen other publications have the same story, so this isn’t really anything special.”
Therefore, when reporting a conference call, do what I did:
Lead with the news.
Slip into the second paragraph the fact that the subject “told reporters” such-and-so; and then
At some point later in the story, mention that all this stuff was said in a conference call, or during a speech to a Kiwanis Club, or overheard in a bar while the politician was sloppy drunk and trying to pick up a 17-year-old.
On second thought, sometimes where a politician says something is more important than what he says, but that’s just the exception that proves the rule.
Newt Gingrich thinks that Republicans should only hike the debt ceiling by as much as Democrats are willing to cut spending by.
“The principle for a long-term debt ceiling hike ought to be very simple: the president does not get any more money in the debt ceiling than he signs into savings. So if he wants a trillion dollars increase in the debt ceiling, there has to be a trillion dollars in savings in how the government is run,” Gingrich said in a conference call with reporters this afternoon.
Gingrich focused on waste, fraud and abuse when talking about how spending could be cut, arguing that applying Six Sigma business practices to the government could save as much as $500 billion. He also cited a study done by his Center for Health Transformations that estimated Medicare and Medicaid theft amounted to $70 billion to $120 billion. He pointed to Rep. Paul Ryan’s $700 billion savings estimate for block granting Medicaid, and recommended that cabinet officers should eliminate the 10 percent of workers least effective under them. . . .
Read the rest. Katrina got her story online about 30 minutes after I did, and adds serious news value with the detail about the specifics of Gingrich’s policy ideas, but I still think his “bully” remark was the obvious headline from the story. To have a candidate for president call the incumbent a “bully” is news, any way you slice it.
MINNEAPOLIS Everybody I saw downstairs this morning at the Right Online conference kept telling me, “You look rough.” As well I should.
My flight out of Dulles yesterday was delayed more than an hour on departure. By the time I arrived, checked into the Hilton and had dinner — bangers and mash at a British-style pub downtown — I was running desperately late on deadline for my column at The American Spectator:
Three weeks ago, Anthony Weiner was a rising star in the Democratic Party, an influential spokesman for the progressive movement and, quite possibly, the next mayor of New York City.
Today, Weiner is a despised figure so thoroughly disgraced, even in the eyes of the most partisan Democrats, that he is unlikely to have any future in politics. In the process of stringing out his bizarre scandal for nearly three weeks — the first 10 days of which were spent telling one implausible lie after another — Weiner damaged himself and his party in a way that would not have happened had he resigned much sooner. By the time Weiner gave his resignation speech Thursday in New York, he was such a pariah that even his political mentor, Sen. Charles Schumer, would not even speak publicly in his defense, instead issuing a brief statement wishing Weiner well. . . .
Please read the whole thing. After I hit deadline, I managed to grab Andrew Breitbart in the hotel lobby for this 4-minute interview about his role in breaking the WeinerGate scandal:
You’ll notice Breitbart had a bottle of red wine handy, and kept waving the cork when he was gesturing. This interview took place at about 2 a.m., after the lobby bar had closed.
Ms. Hahn, a Los Angeles City Councilwoman and a Democrat, released a statement deeming the ad “degrading to women in the worst way.” . . .
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent out a fundraising e-mail, calling for $150,000 in donations to help fight “vile right-wing attacks like these,” while Ms. Hahn, in her statement, urges supporters to “help Janice fight back with a $25, $50 or $100 donation.”
Last night on MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell and Ed Schultz both discussed it. So, when it comes to reporting on “vile right-wing attacks,” this blog is at least 36 hours ahead of the mainstream media. The Democrats are demanding an investigation:
Hahn’s campaign believes there was coordination between Huey’s campaign and Turn Right USA PAC, the group that launched the ad. The Hahn campaign is calling for a Federal Election Commission investigation into the ad . . .
But once everybody is finished jumping up and down and screaming about the video, how about somebody do some reporting on Janice Hahn and LA’s “anti-gang intervention” program? Because that looks like a pretty interesting story, as you can see in this excerpt from my latest American Spectator column:
Hahn’s support for the “gang intervention” program was the subject of an investigative report by KTTV in Los Angeles in April 2008. That report focused on Steve Myrick, a member of the Crips gang who told police he was “working with Janice Hahn” and even had a certificate of appreciation from the councilwoman for his work with a summer job program. “That’s why I’m out [of jail] right now,” Myrick told police after he was arrested on a drug charge in 2006. “Miss Hahn got me out, like, three weeks ago.” He said he violated a police order banning him from a public housing project because Hahn “sent me over there to do some work. She got me off, so it was cool.” In 2007, Myrick was sentenced to life in prison for rape.
Hahn told KTTV it was “blatantly false” that she had made “direct payments” to Myrick or other gang-intervention workers, but defended the program’s hiring of convicted criminals: “I do know that it does take a different kind of person to be able to speak the language that convinces the shooters to not retaliate…. I see it as keeping the peace in a community that has been plagued by violence.” The report also exposed the case of Brandon Bullard, another Crips gangster who told police he was paid to work on Hahn’s gang-intervention program. Hahn spoke at Bullard’s funeral after he was murdered in February 2008.
That 2008 report also named gangsters Marlon “Bow Wow” Jones and Demarco “DC” Chaffold among those who had claimed Hahn as a patron, but KTTV did not mention other notorious examples of how LA’s anti-gang efforts have funded criminality. Mexican Mafia gangster Hector “Big Weasel” Marroquin, whom federal agents of the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms arrested in May 2007 on gun-trafficking charges, headed a group that received some $1.5 million in city anti-gang money. In February 2009, former Long Beach gang-intervention worker “Crazy John” Kennedy was convicted in the murder of a couple who were tied to an anchor and thrown off their yacht to drown. And in May 2009, a federal racketeering indictment named Alex “Rebelde” Sanchez as a top leader of the ultra-violent MS-13 gang. Sanchez had been one of the most high-profile gang-intervention activists in Los Angeles. . . .
Just for starters, it’s kind of hard for Hahn to deny her connection to Bullard, given that she spoke at his funeral. And it is impossible for Hahn to deny that she has spent year supporting this crazy program, even calling for a tax increase to fund its expansion.
So once you major media genius types are through recycling Democratic Party talking points about “vile right-wing attacks,” you might want to try reporting, y’know, facts and stuff.
. . . who refuses to quit. Haley Barbour quit. Donald Trump quit. Mike Huckabee quit. Guess who didn’t quit?
Four years ago at the studios of WSB Radio in Atlanta, I interviewed talk-radio host Herman Cain, who had only recently recovered from cancer. He smiled as he vowed, “Death’s going to have to catch me, and it’s going to have to run fast.”
Cain is smiling more than ever now, and running strong with a Republican presidential campaign that has surged to national prominence since the May 5 debate in Greenville, S.C. In a Fox News focus group of South Carolina GOP voters following that debate, pollster Frank Luntz asked for a show of hands: “How many of you think Herman Cain won the debate?” More than half the participants raised their hands. Luntz was flabbergasted, calling the result “unprecedented.” Luntz then went around the room, asking what it was that made the retired restaurant executive so appealing.
“He’s likeable,” one man said, summarizing a key factor in Cain’s campaign that seems to elude pundits. For the past two weeks, the political intelligentsia has struggled to understand how the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, who has never held elective office, could have suddenly emerged as a contender in a crowded Republican 2012 primary field. It’s never been a mystery to Cain’s communication director Ellen Carmichael.
“When people meet Herman, they like Herman,” she explained in a phone interview a few weeks before the Fox News debate in which 2 million viewers met Cain for the first time. . . .
Conservatives, predisposed to defend all things traditional and hierarchical, might naturally be expected to admire the British monarchy. But the remarkable fact is that most of the Americans obsessed by the royal wedding (and the media shamelessly feeding that obsession) are not conservative. The Will and Kate wedding is being hyped, and the hype is being consumed, by Americans who see no contradiction between their commitment to egalitarian ideals and their celebration of hereditary privilege. Liberals who quiver in outrage that American millionaires pay only a 35 percent marginal rate on their incomes — an injustice they blame on the hated “Bush tax cuts” — nevertheless seem unembarrassed by their adoration of British royalty. But then again, liberals spent decades pining for the restoration of a Kennedy dynasty, so perhaps we should not be surprised by their fascination with the House of Windsor. . . .
