Daily buzz on 2008 Democratic front-runners

A few of the 2008 Democratic potentials are in the news:

• Mark Warner is in the Middle East right now as he continues a week-long schedule of policy briefings with leaders in the region.  According to The Richmond Times Dispatch, Warner met with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and will fly to and Lebanon and Jordan to get briefed by the leaders of those countries as well.
• Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack is backing a $50 million water quality campaign in his state, as written about in today's Des Moines Register newspaper.  This will be a difficult challenge for him because the Republicans hold control in the state House.  "This is a watershed moment for the environment," Vilsack said.
• In an exclusive interview with the newspaper "The News and Observer", 2008 presidential hopeful Evan Bayh explained what he thought Democrats need to do if they intend to win the presidency the next time around: "We need to make this election a referendum on the future of thecountry. What it's going to take to make that future what it ought tobe for the middle class in America. That's going to involve growing theeconomy. Restoring our finances. Improving our energy situation andproviding security for this country in a way that is both tough andsmart.  We also need to reach out to people in the Midwest andthe South and let them know that we are not cultural elitists. We sharetheir values."

In other campaign news, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and John Kerry round out the top-three favorites in the state of Ohio for the Democratic nomination:

Listed as the favorite by 37 percent of Democrats, Clinton leads bothmembers of the party’s 2004 ticket: Former Sen. John Edwards of NorthCarolina got 23 percent, while 19 percent said Sen. John Kerry ofMassachusetts should get a do-over.

And today, Jonathon Alter wrote about how the Democrats might want to learn from the FDR nomination:

Democrats who today despair of finding a leader should take heart fromhow unpopular FDR was within the party before he became president. In1932, he was seen as weak and not especially bright, so unprincipledthat he was dubbed the "corkscrew candidate" for acting as if theshortest distance between two points was a corkscrew. He flip-floppedon the League of Nations and so straddled the Prohibition issue that hewas labeled neither a "wet" nor a "dry" but a "damp." All of the toppundits thought he was the worst possible candidate for the Democratsand a likely loser to Herbert Hoover. The New York delegation to the1932 Democratic Convention was so opposed to its own governor that hiscampaign manager, Jim Farley, couldn't even get a seat in thedelegation. (Can you imagine the same thing happening to Karl Rove inthe 2000 or 2004 Texas delegation?). When he was (barely) nominated forpresident on the fourth ballot, the galleries booed.

I guess FDR didn't turn out so bad!  In other words, some of the most unpopular individuals within a party might sometimes hold a party's best answer to solving all of its problems.

Comments

[Jason Biggs]

fuck the US