I’m not going to say Barack Obama has a chance to win Pennsylvania.  He doesn’t.  But I can’t imagine anything making a stronger case for his campaign theme of moving beyond old school Washington politics than the ABC News debate last night.  I’m guessing that for every undecided voter who watched that debate and came away […]

[Read more →]

For some reason, I thought there was a debate scheduled tonight.  At 8:00 p.m., I turned my television to ABC expecting to see Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama answering questions posed by objective journalists.  Instead, they were showing some two-hour infomercial on why Hillary Clinton should be the Democratic nominee, hosted by former Clinton senior political […]

[Read more →]

There’s been a lot of complaining in recent weeks by the Clinton campaign about what they perceive to be the media’s uneven treatment between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  But Jonathan Martin over at Politico caught a moment in Tuesday’s debate where the media very noticably gave Clinton a pass.  When asked if she could […]

[Read more →]

I’ve been making note of the fact that, in the last five CNN debates– which were all sponsored by the coal industry front group Americans for Better Energy Choices (ABEC)– there were coincidentally no questions asked about climate change.  But environmentalist blog The Green Miles notices that there were no questions asked about climate change in Tuesday’s […]

[Read more →]

In potentially the final Democratic debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, both candidates stayed on message and executed their gameplans, despite the best attempts of NBC newsmen Brian Williams and Tim Russert.  While Obama looked to remain presidential and above the fray, Clinton sought to force her opponent into a mistake that might turn the race […]

[Read more →]

Commenter “david, with ABEC” takes issue with last week’s suggestion that there may be a connection between CNN’s lack of debate questions on climate change and the fact that their debates have been sponsored by ABEC, a coal industry front group:
While we are flattered that there are some people out there who are convinced we can dictate the questions of the […]

[Read more →]

For those of us who’ve been keeping score, last night’s event makes five straight CNN debates sponsored by coal industry front group Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC) without a single question about climate change policy.

[Read more →]

The real debate tonight wasn’t between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, it was between Clinton advisers Mark Penn and Mandy Grunwald.  A New York Times story on the internal discussions this week in the Clinton campaign framed the debate like this:
Even now, after a string of defeats, her advisers are divided over how to proceed […]

[Read more →]

Coincidence?

[Read more →]

Commenter Mike– who gets the distinguished honor of being the first person to leave a non-spam comment here at TWP– caught a mistake in my Republican Debate Rankings.  I stated:
Mike Huckabee - Scored points for honesty by being the only candidate to note that Americans are worse off now than they were eight years ago (though […]

[Read more →]

The big winner of tonight’s Los Angeles debate was the Democratic Party.  Overall, a substantive and appropriately cordial debate, which benefited both candidates.  Barack Obama’s graciousness throughout put a damper on ”The Snub” from earlier in the week, and he wisely avoided any “You’re likeable enough” moments as well.  He even went so far as to hold Hillary Clinton’s chair for […]

[Read more →]

This was the first debate I’ve watched using CNN’s online real-time reaction tracker.  It’s a graph from 1 to 100 that shows you how people are reacting, positively or negatively (100 being absolute positive, 1 being absolute negative), toward what a candidate is saying, and it’s pretty amazing.  The Politico– CNN’s partner in the debate– […]

[Read more →]