Oh-eight (R): How about 'Thunder Rd.'?
Posted: Tuesday, September 11, 2007 9:08 AM by Domenico Montanaro
Filed Under:
Republicans
GIULIANI: A new New York Times/CBS poll finds that some of Giuliani's social positions are still not known by Republicans. "While the poll found that Mr. Giuliani faced some big challenges in winning his party’s nomination, with 31 percent of self-identified Republican primary voters saying he does not share the values of most members of his party, it also suggested that he might be able to win over wary or unconvinced Republicans if he could make the case that he would be the candidate with the best chance of winning the general election."
MCCAIN: Not only does John McCain hope that his journey for his party’s nomination mirrors John Kerry’s in 2004 -- in which the onetime front-runner gets overshadowed by other candidates before winning the nod -- McCain today embarks on his “No Surrender” tour, which just happens to be the name of the Springsteen song Kerry used as his campaign anthem. Over the next week, the tour takes him to Iowa, New Hampshire, and then South Carolina.
It looks like the first of the McCain comeback stories has been written. This one by his hometown paper, the Arizona Republic, which previews the tour. "McCain's resurgence comes as he kicks off his ‘No Surrender Tour’ in Sioux City, Iowa. The tour, timed to this week's report on progress in Iraq, will take him to the three influential early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina."
ROMNEY: The campaign headquarters was robbed, but the campaign believes it was simply a routine burglary.
The Washington Post reports on an anti-Thompson Web site, phonyfred.org, that appears to be the work of Warren Tompkins, Romney's chief South Carolina supporter. Said Thompson spokesperson Todd Harris: "There is no room in our party for this kind of smut. As the top executive of his own campaign, Governor Romney should take full responsibility for this type of high-tech gutter politics and issue an immediate apology.” More: "If this is true, Governor Romney should exercise some of his much-touted executive acumen and immediately terminate anyone related to this outrage."
THOMPSON: The Columbia State writes that Thompson made a positive impression at a stop in South Carolina.
Has Thompson once again changed his view on Bin Laden? The Los Angeles Times: "After three days of saying that Osama bin Laden should be captured and killed, Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson added the caveat Monday that the Al Qaeda leader should also get ‘due process.’ Thompson's comment on Bin Laden came as he attempted to quell the flap set off by a remark he made last week as he launched his candidacy in Iowa,” when he said that Osama was nothing more than a symbol.
More: “The ensuing criticism led Thompson to toughen his language: Bin Laden, he said, ‘ought to be captured and killed.’ But Monday in South Carolina, Thompson told reporters on his campaign bus that he wasn't suggesting Bin Laden should be killed as soon as he was caught. ‘No, no, no, we've got due process to go through,’ the Associated Press quoted him as saying. ‘I'm not suggesting those things happen simultaneously.’”
“Todd Harris, his communications director, offered a clarification of Thompson's view of Bin Laden on Monday afternoon. ‘Before he's killed, we need to pump him for every ounce of information about Al Qaeda that we can possibly get,’ Harris said. Anyone who does not understand the need to interrogate Bin Laden, he said, ‘doesn't understand the long-term fight against terror.’”
The American Spectator’s Rubin calls Thompson's "due process" line the first significant "woops" of the campaign.
In an interview with a handful of reporters yesterday in South Carolina, Thompson acknowledged that he's not a member of any church. He says he attends church when he's in Tennessee; he usually goes with his mother. He does not attend church regularly in the DC area.
Also during that Q&A session, NBC/NJ campaign reporter Adam Aigner-Treworgy asked Thompson about the role he played with the Pam Am 103 bombers: "As often happened, at the firm there I was affiliated for a couple of years, one of the senior partners came in and asked me for some legal technical advice. I believe it was a venue question, about where a trial would probably be held and whether or not there would be a change of venue, things like that. It was several years ago. I gave them my opinion, and that was the long and short of it. That's all I know about it."
