Aug.31
Political News, Now.
Ben Carson Ties Donald Trump in Iowa Poll
Donald J. Trump likes to brag that he leads his Republican rivals in every poll, but a new poll on Monday showed him with company at the top of the field.
According to a survey of likely Republican Iowa caucusgoers from Monmouth University, Ben Carson is tied with Mr. Trump in Iowa. The poll marks the first time in more than a month that the billionaire tycoon was not leading a poll in one of the first four states to hold nominating contests.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Carson were deadlocked with the support of 23 percent of the Iowans who were polled. Carly Fiorina, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin made up the next tier of candidates.
The poll shows the growing appetite for political outsiders in Iowa and could spell trouble for more traditional candidates who were counting on the state to propel them to the nomination. Mr. Walker has seen his prospects in Iowa dampen substantially in recent weeks and candidates such as former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas and former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who were once favorites in the state, are barely registering with voters.
The Monmouth poll follows a survey from The Des Moines Register over the weekend that showed Mr. Trump leading in the state, but revealed that Mr. Carson is gaining ground.
Monday’s poll did show that Mr. Carson is leading Mr. Trump with people who consider themselves to be “very conservative,” with evangelical Christians, and with women.
“After more than a month of Trump winning virtually every Republican demographic group, we’ve finally got a little variation in voting blocs to talk about,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute.
Monmouth’s poll of 405 Republicans had a margin of sampling error is plus or minus 5 percentage points.
More Posts
Rick Perry’s Woes Continue as Iowa Staff Is Cut to One Person
Former Gov. Rick Perry’s campaign continues to retrench.
The Republican from Texas has whittled his staff in Iowa to one paid operative amid continuing fund-raising struggles, a spokeswoman for Mr. Perry confirmed.
Mr. Perry led in the polls for a stretch during his first presidential bid four years ago. He spent significant time boning up on foreign policy and getting himself in physical shape for the grinds of the campaign trail.
However, he has failed to generate excitement among voters in a crowded and more competitive Republican field. A Monmouth University poll on Monday showed Mr. Perry with support of 1 percent of likely Republican caucusgoers in Iowa.
According to The Des Moines Register, most of Mr. Perry’s staff members have already joined other Republican organizations, with one signing on to work with former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.
Mr. Perry had already trimmed staff in South Carolina and other crucial primary states. There were early signs of trouble in Iowa last week when Sam Clovis, his chairman in the state, left the campaign to join Donald J. Trump’s staff.
Dick Cheney Jabs at Hillary Clinton’s Emails and Urges Joe Biden to Run
Former Vice President Dick Cheney has not been shy about sharing opinions about his successors since leaving office, and he is not holding back on trying to meddle in the Democratic nominating contest.
In a preview of an interview with CNN that was shown on Monday, Mr. Cheney suggested that Hillary Rodham Clinton should have known better than to use a private email account and server as secretary of state. The situation, he warned, could be disqualifying.
“I think it was sloppy and unprofessional, that it reflects a lack of understanding about how easy it is for adversaries to tap into communications,” Mr. Cheney said. “She’s an intelligent woman. She spent a lot of time in the White House. You should not operate in the way she did.”
Mr. Cheney said it was likely that Chinese or Russian hackers had access to Mrs. Clinton’s work emails and that her actions were not in keeping with how classified information should be handled.
Mr. Cheney also put on his Democratic strategist’s hat and offered some free advice. Regarding Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s possible presidential ambitions, Mr. Cheney had three words for him: “Go for it.”
Suggesting that Mrs. Clinton did not have enough competition for the nomination, Mr. Cheney argued that Mr. Biden could be a formidable alternative.
“I think there’s a lot of support for him in the Democratic Party,” Mr. Cheney said. “I think it would stir things up. They’re short candidates on their side, so, you know, Joe, have a shot at it.”
Valerie Plame Is Among Hillary Clinton’s September Fund-Raisers
Hillary Rodham Clinton will make a two-day swing across the West Coast to raise money next month, including the holding of a fund-raiser with the exposed former C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame.
A Clinton campaign supporter described the event in an email as a “briefing in the post-Snowden world.”
Ms. Plame and her husband, Joseph C. Wilson, will take part in a lower-dollar fund-raising event at the Palo Alto, Calif., home of Mike McNerney, a cybersecurity expert, and his wife, Jillian, according to an email sent to Mrs. Clinton’s supporters detailing her events in September.
Michelle Kraus, who is also a cybersecurity expert as well as a former fund-raiser for President Obama and now a “Hillblazer” bundler for Mrs. Clinton, described the “conversation” with Ms. Plame and Mr. Wilson as part of life in the era since Edward J. Snowden, a former government contractor, leaked secret government files that exposed the National Security Agency’s surveillance operations, ranging from private citizens to foreign leaders.
Ms. Plame, once a covert C.I.A. officer, had her identity exposed by President George W. Bush’s administration after Mr. Wilson criticized the White House and the war in Iraq that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Ms. Plame and Mr. Wilson are longtime supporters of Mrs. Clinton. They backed her in her 2008 presidential campaign, and wrote an op-ed endorsement this past April in USA Today that was timed with her campaign announcement that described her as the best choice for president.
Mrs. Clinton will attend four other events in California, some hosted and involving tech entrepreneurs.
Today in Politics: Hillary Clinton, Facing a Difficult Summer, Flexes Her Muscle
Good Monday morning. As Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont continuesto gain on her in the polls and as Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.considers joining the race, Hillary Rodham Clinton has increased her efforts to show her foundational support.
For all the attention paid to Mrs. Clinton’s email controversy and political vulnerabilities, she retains significant strengths, including her fund-raising ability, her institutional support, her organizational muscle and her potential to make history as the first female president.
After a difficult summer, Mrs. Clinton and her team are increasingly highlighting some of those strengths.
For many weeks after she declared her candidacy, her campaign asked surrogates to hold organizing events to galvanize supporters instead of issuing paper statements about their support. But they’re now beginning to shift the spotlight toward major endorsements, including from Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a longtime friend of Mrs. Clinton and the first member of the Obama administration to align publicly with her.
She is also planning to rely on Senator Jeanne Shaheen, of Mr. Sanders’s neighboring state of New Hampshire, whose key political aides went to work for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, as the candidate begins efforts to re-energize her base of female supporters.
Mrs. Clinton spent the weekend fund-raising in the Hamptons, where roughly 1,000 people turned out over three events. She was described as relaxed and engaged by people who saw her speak at the home of the fashion designerTory Burch. While several guests said she didn’t linger on the subject of her email use, her aides pointed out an opinion article by the federal prosecutor overseeing the case against the former C.I.A. director David Petraeus, who was accused of knowingly sharing classified information. The prosecutor is now out of office, and she is a supporter of Mrs. Clinton. But she emphasizes that Mrs. Clinton’s situation is different than that of Mr. Petraeus, despite critics’ claims to the contrary.
It’s the aggressive defense that some of Mrs. Clinton’s more nervous supporters had hoped to see her give, and it suggests there will be more to come.
— Maggie Haberman
Stay tuned throughout the day: Follow us on Twitter@NYTpolitics and on Facebook for First Draft updates.
What We’re Watching This Week
In the early part of the week, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky will make appearances across New England, Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio will be in Michigan, and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida will be in Nevada, while at the end of the week, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, Jeb Bush andMartin O’Malley will be in New Hampshire.
On Tuesday, Rick Santorum, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Sam Clovis, who recently resigned as the leader of Rick Perry‘s Iowa campaign and moved to Donald J. Trump‘s team, are scheduled to speak at the Northwest Family Leadership Regional Summit meeting, where a central theme will be “the sanctity of human life and the public funding of Planned Parenthood.”
Following Obama to Alaska — on Facebook and Instagram
In the age of the social media-powered travelogue, Mr. Obama is about to become that Facebooking, Instagramming friend who just cannot stop sharing every last moment of his spectacular summer trip.
Mr. Obama sets off on Monday for a three-day sojourn to Alaska, during which White House officials say he will be making groundbreaking use of social media to show the public precisely what he is doing and where he is going.
That includes hiking on and cruising around a glacier in the Kenai Mountains of Alaska; meeting with fishermen on the pristine Bristol Bay, known as the salmon capital of the world; and appearing in the city of Kotzebue above the Arctic Circle, where he will become the first sitting president to visit Arctic Alaska.
It is all in the service of building public awareness about the effects of climate change and the need to counter it, the theme of the trip and an issue that he hopes to make a major element of his legacy.
“Throughout this trip, we’ll be trying to give the American people and the public an opportunity to see and interact with the president in new and more direct ways,” including through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Medium and other social media platforms, said Brian Deese, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser for climate policy.
The effort began this month when the White House started a webpage and released a video previewing the trip and asked viewers to sign up to receive photos and videos of the president’s Alaskan travels.
“I hope you’ll follow along,” Mr. Obama said in the message.
— Julie Hirschfeld Davis
State Department to Release Large Trove of Clinton Emails
The State Department is scheduled to release another trove of Mrs. Clinton’s emails on Monday, as part of its monthly production of messages from the personal email account she used exclusively as secretary of state.
This batch is expected to be larger than the two previous ones the State Department has made public. Last month, it fell behind a schedule set by a federal judge for the release of her correspondence. State Department officials have blamed the shortfall on the additional scrutiny the emails have received from the intelligence community, which wants to review her messages to ensure that they did not contain classified information.
Secretary of State John Kerry was said to be angry with his deputies that the department had fallen behind schedule, and he has pushed them to make sure they are releasing the amount that the federal judge had ordered.
If the State Department follows the schedule set by the judge, all of the emails should be public by January.
As in the previous batches, it is expected that some information will have been upgraded to sensitive during the review and will be redacted.
— Michael S. Schmidt
Our Favorites From The Times
Mr. Clovis’s move from Mr. Perry to Mr. Trump, some Iowans fear, “sends a perception that we’re pay-for-play,” a Republican official said.
If Mr. Biden decides to run for the Democratic presidential nomination, his history with the financial services industry, and reputation as being too close to credit-card companies in more than three decades in the Senate, could be a significant obstacle.
The opinions about Wall Street that are emerging from the presidential candidates suggest that the financial industry could face very different futures depending on which party wins control of the White House.
And Mr. Obama announced on Sunday that Mount McKinley was being renamed Denali, restoring an Alaska Native name with deep cultural significance to the tallest mountain in North America.
What We’re Reading Elsewhere
The Associated Press writes that Mr. Trump‘s “call for mass deportation of millions of immigrants living in the United States illegally, as well as their American-born children, bears similarities to a large-scale removal that many Mexican-American families faced” during the Great Depression.
Supporters of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin tell The Washington Postthat his drop in the polls is a result of “a candidate who — in contrast to the discipline he showed in state races — continues to commit unforced errors.” And, the supporters say, “there also needs to be a clear acknowledgment inside the campaign that the governor has yet to put to rest questions about his readiness to handle the problems and unexpected challenges that confront every president.”
And in an interview with KCCI 8 News Close Up, a new television program in Iowa hosted by a political columnist from The Des Moines Register, Carly Fiorina defended her record as chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, which has come under increased scrutiny as she continues to rise in the polls.
Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Biden developed a close friendship during their time in the Obama administration — they even held weekly breakfasts — which could complicate any presidential run by Mr. Biden, Politico reports.
Senate Democrats’ Long Memories Could Hinder a Biden Run
Senate Democrats hold a lot of affection for Mr. Biden, their former colleague. But he shouldn’t count on much support from the leadership in the chamber if he jumps into the presidential race.
The party’s No. 2, 3 and 4 leaders — Senators Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, Chuck Schumer of New York and Patty Murray of Washington — are all full-throated backers of Mrs. Clinton. And Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the party leader, has waxed enthusiastically about Mrs. Clinton in the past though he has not yet formally endorsed her.
But there is one particular reason Mr. Reid would be unlikely to favor Mr. Biden over Mrs. Clinton.
Mr. Reid and other top Democrats were rather unhappy when Mr. Biden circumvented them in a series of independent tax, budget and debt negotiations with Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, including in the 2012 resolution of the so-called fiscal cliff crisis.
The leadership believed that Mr. Biden and the White House gave away too much while cutting them out of the talks in favor of Mr. McConnell. During the 2013 shutdown, Senate Democrats insisted Mr. Biden not engage with Republicans and the White House complied. There are long memories on Capitol Hill, and Mr. Biden’s role in those talks with Mr. McConnell is not forgotten.
— Carl Hulse
Like the Politics Newsletter? Get it delivered to your inbox.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment-- or suggestions, particularly of topics and places you'd like to see covered