Moving forward

Dear Dem Apples readers, I'm going to be very self indulgent and write a post about me.  Specifically, my graduating.  It has been a pleasure getting to blog here with various folks over the years, from the liveblogging craziness of our Mark Warner gala (too bad we lost that...) to the Dem Apples promo video(that one's for you, Audrey), from covering my home state of Massachusetts to my focus on voter rights, registration, and participation this past year, it has been great having a place to express my thoughts.  

Since I'm graduating this week, I feel it is best for me to no longer post here, except maybe in the comments every now and again, but I invite readers to come visit me on my new blog: http://bostonrob.wordpress.com/ Many thanks to you all because a blog is nothing without its readers (cough desperate plea for subscribers cough cough).

Forward! 

Art of Politics

Want to be famous? There's a competition going on right now that's co-hosted by my friends back west at the Oregon Bus Project, called the Art of Politics. Now, they did this back in 2004, and came up with a great poster for that electoral season:

So read some more about it here, and submit your own shot at a poster. Because, hey, we're smart, funny, and creative, right?

An easy way to register to vote!

Voter registration rocks, yes? Yes. Well, now there is a new way for us to register ourselves and our friends: www.harvarddems.com.

Yes, friends, the logo that says register to vote is indeed an application that helps you register to vote! Fill it out online, print it, and mail it in! Granted, it would be awesome to be able to do it all online, but at least we're one one step closer.

If you just want to email a link to a friend, feel free to use this stand-alone one: http://www.registrationbyworkingassets.com/register/?api_key=zDg_txrqH1Y2mIWXZ7ivn2UjaQg

Voter registration is important, for reasons both partisan and non. Voter registration is civic engagement and a sign of a healthy democracy. Voter registration is how your team wins. Voter registration rocks. Register a friend. Double your democracy. Democracy thanks you.

Spread the Word Week One

So, thus begins Spread the Word, a hopefully weekly segment in which people will essentially blog, but with visual aids. Welcome to the talking points of the future, brought to you by your new Talking Points coordinator!

Here are some links to sites that I used in gathering info - there's good stuff here:
Abuses of Religion on the Campaign Trail

The Survey .

Enjoy the first Spread the Word segment everyone!

~Meryl

Richardson is Out

Looks like Bill Richardson is set to drop out of the race tomorrow. The big question is now who will he endorse, if he does endorse? As I said yesterday, this is his chance to make a bigger impact than he ever had while running. Rumors abounded that he gave second-choice support to Obama in Iowa - will he continue the (alleged) trend and endorse him? Or, being a former Bill Clinton Cabinet member, will he support Hillary? This will all be especially important with the Hispanic vote in Nevada - it could either seal the deal with Obama following his endorsement by the Culinary Union or give Hillary a boost and make the race more interesting.

My guess is that he'll go with Obama if he chooses to endorse. There was just too much talk about him sending support to Obama in Iowa for it to have just been rumors or precinct captains acting alone.

Now the fun begins...

It's incredible just how wrong so many polls were. Hillary's pulled through, defying talk of a double-digit loss, and won New Hampshire. The Clinton campaign worked overtime playing down expectations post-Iowa, and it pulled off big time. A few weeks ago, a three point NH win would have been seen as a major defeat for Hillary, and now she's the new Comeback Kid. Tim Russert just called it "one of the greatest political upsets in American political history."

Earlier today there was talk of her skipping a state or two, of her wealthy donors resorting to forming an independent group to try and swiftboat Obama, of the "end of the Clinton era." Despite fairly consistent leads all night, the networks refused to call it for hours, with the expectation that Obama would validate the polls and turn it around. And now, seeing how well they've shifted the message to that of a stunning comeback, I can't help but think it was all orchestrated to some extent.

Regardless, congratulations the Clinton campaign and Clinton supporters. As an Obama supporter, it's a tough loss. But I'm looking forward to the road ahead, and especially that more voters in more states (although still probably not my one-week-too-late February 12th vote in Maryland) will get a say. It's going to be a fun race.

Some immediate questions:

• When will the recently-departed candidates (Biden and Dodd) endorse, and who will they support? (And will it matter?)
  
• With the prospect of an early win by either Clinton or Obama fairly slim, how long will Gore be able to hold out on an endorsement of his own?
• Earlier today the extremely important Culinary Union in Nevada was poised to endorse Obama, almost handing him a victory there. Will they rethink that endorsement in light of Hillary's win?
• Will either of the remaining major candidates (Edwards and Richardson) take the opportunity to make more of an impact than they ever could by remaining in the race by dropping out and endorsing Obama or Clinton?

Update: Looks like Obama's still got the Culinary Union but Hillary got the endorsement of Nevada's Democratic Congresswoman. It's going to get interesting.

A victory for grassroots

Over 220,000 people went to the Iowa caucuses for Democrats tonight. How many people went to the Democratic caucuses in 2004? 120,000.

We're talking about not quite doubling the participation here folks. This is a victory of campaigns in general. I'm sure all of our friends who are working on the Obama campaign are very energized tonight, as they well should be. However, the campaigns in general should all be exceedingly proud of themselves for the tremendous job they did involving people in the process of choosing our next leader.

This has been your general, feel good post of the evening.

For those who love numbers, check out the exit polling data over at MSNBC.

p.s. I already talked about my feelings on Huckabee.  That said, I can't help but love Romney getting trashed in Iowa.  Sorry for the negativity, but sometimes its nice to see a bad guy get hit hard.  Everyone reset your countdown clocks.  103 hours and counting...

Scary things and places

The DSCC is playing off the RNC's Scariest Democrat Halloween theme of scary politicians of late with their latest email blast video:

They dig into six big targeted seats for Democrats to pick up in 2008: Norm Coleman, Susan Collins, Jim Inhofe, Mitch McConnell, Gordon Smith, and John Sununu.

While we're on the topic of scary politicians, why not cover 10 of the scariest (ok, most dangerous) political organizations in the US. Guess what, if you're reading this, you are IN DANGER! That's right. Colleges and Universities are rated second on the top 10 dangerous organizations by the group Family Security Matters. I guess I'm about quintuply in danger since I get emails from other of their list toppers: ACLU, MoveOn, ThinkProgress, and the Center for American Progress.

Oh, and if you are a Muslim student and belong to your national student association, you can be dangerous too. With token call outs to the Family Research Council (who got Ann Coulter to keynote their 2006 Values Voter Summit) and the League of the South (which earlier this month had a a conference titled "Southern Secession: Antidote to Empire and Tyranny.") I'm sure he hoped to placate any accusations of bias. Man, I'm definitely going to take this blogger as an impartial judge, after his admission that those two groups are dangerous to politics.

So be safe this Halloween, kiddos.

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Gov. Shaheen expected to enter NH Senate race today!

The Globe political blog, The Primary Source, reports that the IOP's own Jeanne Shaheen is going to announce her campaign to win the NH senate seat from John Sununu today.  A subsequent blog post says that Democratic primary contender, Jay Buckey, Dartmouth Med School Prof and former astronaut, will stay in the race even if she enters.  The post closes with the comment that he is already having fundraising issues.  I say he has a lot more to lose because he won't have the massive student force that are the Democrats of Harvard behind him.  

The Union Leader also has a story, with polling data that says Shaheen beats Sununu 54-38.  (editorial note: the comments under this story, at least the first few, are good for a laugh.)

Anybody know how to drive a bus, want to go to NH a lot? (I have this thing about buses, recently)

I Saw Barack Obama In New Hampshire Today

I went up to New Hampshire today for the town hall with Barack Obama. This was my second time seeing him in person and both times I came away really engaged by him. I first saw him about 3 months ago and since then I have drifted away, considering other candidates such as Edwards for his focus on poverty and Clinton for her campaign's expertise. However, today reaffirmed my enthusiasm for Obama. Others who were there with me expressed similar feelings, saying unanimously that they were "impressed" by him.

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Obama is in!...?

This is John McCain's War Now

When 2008 rolls around, if John McCain is the Republican nominee for President and we are still in Iraq, remember that he was the one who first advocated we send more troops to Iraq as President Bush has unilaterally decided to do. Given that our troops are causing more unrest than they are quelling and that we do not have the capabilities to stop a civil war, more troops will only lead to more deaths.

Bush's escalation, and that is what it is because this will not be a temporary increase in troop levels, is only prolonging this disastrous adventure in Iraq. If John McCain wants to become President, make sure he does not forget that the blood of these 20,000 brave soldiers is on his hands.

Biden' his time...whistlin' Dixie

The outcome of the Civil War was a good thing--I think we have reached a consensus on that. Even southerners. A ridiculous amount of Civil War nostalgia still exists; there are still the Daughters and Sons of the Confederacy, and battle re-enactments on a field near my house all summer long. And there is still racism in the South. But it is not universal, and a lot of southerners have moved on-- about a century ago. Why then do politicians, Democratic politicians, think that telling white southerner's "we were on your side" is a good way to get their vote?

Joe Biden, Democrat of Delaware and '08 hopeful, made a less than tactful (some would call it Kerry-esque, with a bit of Trent Lott thrown in there) "joke" at a South Carolina Rotary Club this week. Trying to warm up the mostly Republican crowd, I guess, he said Delaware was a “slave state that fought beside the North. That’s only because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South. There were a couple of states in the way.”

Vote Democrat! We're not all self-righteous Northeastern liberals! Our ancestors also owned slaves!

That wasn't the first time he's sought to re-align Delaware; in August, on Fox News Sunday, he said "You don't know my state. … My state was a slave state. My state is a border state. My state has the eighth-largest black population in the country. My state is anything from a Northeast liberal state." Huh?

I have lived both in the South, and in the great state of Delaware. I'm not a proud southerner. I think true "southern culture" is being homogenized so fast they probably won't even know what grits are 10 years from now. But Delaware is not the South, regardless of whether it had slavery. So did New York City. And why on earth would you want to celebrate that?

The South is overwhelmingly conservative, and it does have serious unresolved problems with race relations, but the Democrats should give us some credit, and not pander to the worst of our history.

Obama La Bomba

Anytime someone gets as much hype as Barack Obama has in the past few weeks, there are bound to be naysayers. I'm not going to address them right now. Yes, he faces huge and unavoidable obstacles between now and 2008. But nobody who was at the Deval Patrick rally in Roxbury Friday night can deny he's a fucking rockstar. 

Mark Warner Won't Run in 2008

Via Hotline on Call, the "AP's Bob Lewis and the Washington Post's Michael Shear both have Dem sources confirming that Warner has decided not to run for president."

No one seems to know why. Maybe we'll find out at the press conference at 11 am.

Update: Warner has released a statement, "I Have Decided Not To Run For President". (See extended entry for text.)

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