Friday, November 23, 2007

Nyquil news: Candidates round-up.


1. Huckabee
Huckabee: I'm Against Illegal Immigration, But I'm Not A Lunatic About It
TPM:

ABC News has posted a pretty compelling interview with Mike Huckabee about immigration. In it, Huckabee was asked about charges from rivals that he's soft on immigration because he supported the children of illegal immigrants being eligible for scholarships and backed free prenatal care for illegal immigrants in need of it.
Huckabee's response:
"We penalize law-breakers. We don't penalize their children for something they can't help.
"If a child is gasping for air, asthmatic, and he's on the hospital steps, what do the other candidates suggest we do, let him sit there and gasp until he doesn't have any air left and he dies? If a child comes to our school -- and our law, by the way, in most of our states, mine certainly says you've got to educate a child if he's of child age -- what do you, break your own law and say, `No, you can't come in the schoolhouse door'?
"No, you don't do that. What you do is you elect a president who will fix the problem where it needs to be fixed: At the border. But if your government at the federal government is so incompetent that it fails to secure the border, you don't then grind your heel into the face of a 6-year-old child over it. That's not what this country does. We're a better country than that."
2. The Mittster
His new New Hampshire ad:
TPM:
Mitt Romney has a new radio ad in New Hampshire featuring his most prominent endorser in the state: Three-term U.S. Senator Judd Gregg.
"As President, Mitt will bring that 'can-do, get-it-done, let's-solve-the-problem' optimism America needs today," Gregg says in the ad. "Mitt Romney embodies New Hampshire's values-the values you and I want in a leader."
3. Grampa Fred
How did “Fred’s Giving Day” go?:
Wednesday’s come and gone. How’d they do? With one exception, there’s nothing about it on Google News. Nothing on Fred’s campaign site, either, or on Blogs for Fred Thompson, which promoted the event on Wednesday morning. In light of the holiday and the fact that it wasn’t an official campaign initiative, it may be that they haven’t run the numbers yet or that they’re not planning to do any official count. But someone at Lew Rockwell (the exception on Google News) claims to have been watching the running tally of pledges and reports that they … didn’t do quite as well as Ron Paul did with his own unofficial grassroots fundraiser a few weeks ago. Take it with a grain of salt, obviously, but do also note that one of the commenters in this Politico post also claims to have been watching the tally and his number roughly corresponds to Rockwell’s. If there’s any news about this today, I’ll update.
Meanwhile, Politico reports this morning that “[e]ven his own aides and advisers acknowledge privately that there are days when he seems disinterested in running for president at all.” The ‘Net-centric campaign model was supposed to solve that problem but it never had a chance:
Thompson is frustrated for another reason: He didn’t think he’d have to endure so much of the “inside-the-Beltway political B.S.” In being convinced to run, Thompson was swayed to think that he could “YouTube” his way to the nomination. He apparently thought he could bypass many of the traditional campaign rituals such as tromping from one Iowa diner to another or appearing on the Washington wise-guy shows.
He even bragged that he wasn’t going to follow the rules and that he would run the race his way.
In some ways, he’s kept his word. He’d prefer to talk about serious, if not politically sexy, ideas like entitlements, and he’s doing that. He doesn’t want to keep up the frenetic campaign pace of some of his rivals, and he’s not.
But, in many other ways, Thompson is giving in and running a conventional campaign. The man who was going to exploit the power of “new media” has spent hours this week doing the traditional grip and grin in places like Orange City and Le Mars, Iowa. And the candidate who would bypass the filter of the “old media” will have, after this weekend, done three Sunday show appearances in the month of November (even going so far as to cite that ultimate horse race indicator, polling data, on ABC’s “This Week”).
4. Rudy
Ruby exposed by an interesting source.
Talkleft:
Rudy exposed by a surpising source:
[In 1996, Rudy] stepped on the podium at the Kennedy School of Government to deliver a speech on immigration. “I’m pleased to be with you this evening to talk about the anti-immigrant movement in America . . . I believe the anti-immigrant movement in America is one of our most serious public problems. . . . It can be seen in the negative attitudes being expressed by many of the politicians.” . . . At the moment [in 2007], Giuliani and fellow moderate Mitt Romney are attacking each other for being insufficiently Tancredo-esque. . . .

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