May 15, 2008
McCain Lays Out His Vision for the First Term of a Presidency
John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, looked into the future and described today how he would want it to look if he were to become president.
His speech laid out an idyllic version of the state of the nation as he said he would like it to be at the end of a first term of a McCain administration.
Among the things he said he would work to make happen by the end of four years: Community colleges and technical schools would have developed worker re-training programs that helped millions of unemployed people find new jobs; Congress would have stopped passing spending bills that contain earmarks; and more enthusiastic and innovative teachers would have entered the classroom, thanks to an emphasis on programs like Teach for America and Troops to Teachers.
Sara Hebel | Posted on Thu May 15, 01:57 PM | Permalink | Comment [7]May 14, 2008
Obama Calls on Congress to Act on Measure to Expand GI Bill
On the campaign trail this week, Barack Obama has been calling on Congress to pass a bill that would significantly expand tuition benefits for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And, at the same time, he has been criticizing John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president who is a Vietnam veteran, for refusing to support the legislation.
“He is one of the few senators of either party who oppose this bill because he thinks it’s too generous,” Senator Obama was quoted yesterday as saying in The Charleston Gazette. “I couldn’t disagree more.”
The legislation, which would cover up to the full cost of a four-year education at a public college, may be attached to a war-spending bill that lawmakers are expected to take up soon.
Sara Hebel | Posted on Wed May 14, 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comment [9]Student Superdelegates Pick Obama
Barack Obama has picked up the support of the president and vice president of the College Democrats of America, both of whom are superdelegates to the Democratic National Convention.
Lauren Wolfe, the group’s president, and Awais Khaleel, the vice president, announced their decisions in a YouTube video (below) after they solicited advice from fellow students in the same venue.
The student leaders said Senator Obama has spoken out about issues like college affordability and the war in Iraq that affect college students. They lauded the Democratic candidate for inspiring record numbers of young people to vote in the primaries and including them in his “coalition that is ready to get the country back on track.”
In weighing whom to endorse, Ms. Wolfe and Mr. Khaleel have been in a tough spot, reports The Washington Post, because College Democrats of America is a part of the Democratic National Committee and the student leaders are, in turn, officers of the DNC. Howard Dean, the DNC chairman, and other officers of the organization have yet to endorse a candidate.
“DNC rules require officers to withhold endorsements until the last primary or until there is a presumptive nominee,” a DNC spokeswoman told the Post. The DNC declined to comment to the newspaper about the student leaders’ endorsement.
Sara Hebel | Posted on Wed May 14, 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comment [1]May 13, 2008
Student Journalists Looking for Their Big Scoop in Campaign Coverage
The national online student-run campaign news site, Scoop08.com, has grown since its start in November into a network of 400 high-school and college journalists who are covering the 2008 presidential race, according to a story about the project and its founders in today’s Boston Globe.
The two founders and editors — Alexander Heffner, 17, a senior at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and Andrew Mangino, 20, a junior at Yale University — have yet to vote in their first national election, the Globe noted. But their student-centric take on the 2008 campaign is looking well-timed, given the high turnout this year among young voters in primary elections, the article said.
The site has a 19-person editorial board, and all of its staff members are volunteers. While TV programs like The Daily Show remain staples of young peoples’ news diets, Scoop08.com aims for meatier fare, the Globe said.
“We’re still looking for that first big scoop,” Mr. Heffner was quoted as saying. “It won’t happen with one story, though. I tell our reporters that we can make this work, but it requires a lot of unconventional and untraditional thinking.”
Sara Hebel | Posted on Tue May 13, 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comment [2]May 12, 2008
Bob Barr Enters the Presidential Campaign
Bob Barr, a former Republican who served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, announced today that he is beginning a campaign for the presidency as a Libertarian Party candidate.
His campaign Web site highlights four key issues he will pursue. They include scaling back government spending, taking aggressive action to secure U.S. borders against illegal immigration, promoting individual liberty (such as by protecting against unlawful searches and seizures), and reinventing the nation’s defense policy by making a new commitment to nonintervention.
Mr. Barr, who represented Georgia in the U.S. House, must win the Libertarian nomination at the party’s national convention that begins May 22, but party officials consider him a front-runner, the Associated Press reports.
His candidacy is seen as one that could take votes away from Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, whom Mr. Barr has criticized for not being a true conservative.
Sara Hebel | Posted on Mon May 12, 04:41 PM | Permalink | Comment [2]Calling Ivy-League-Educated Candidates Elitist Is Anti-Democratic, Columnist Argues
Tagging Barack Obama an elitist who is out of touch with the working class, in part because he is Columbia- and Harvard-educated, allows “deeply anti-democratic” ideas to fester, argues Stanley Crouch in an article posted on the Web site RealClearPolitics.com
“It has become commonplace for the predictable millionaire puppets of Fox News and their conservative talk radio counterparts to present themselves as the voices of the working class in combat with an educated elite from places like Harvard,” Mr. Crouch writes.
But those are clichés, he argues, that are anti-democratic “because they scoff at this basic truth: Education is the key to social mobility in our country.”
“The presidency,” he continues, “is not an Academy Award for Best Performance as a bowler, a fast food gobbler, a whisky and beer guzzler, a hard-hat-wearer or a hunter. We ought to know how far leadership capabilities are from surfaces, slogans and costumes.
“And we should be ever suspicious of anyone or any group that scorns education, that pretends to believe that only the simple and the uncomplicated can express the national ethos.”
Sara Hebel | Posted on Mon May 12, 01:50 PM | Permalink | Comment [29]May 9, 2008
Is Ralph Nader Poised to Raid the Democrats' Youth Vote?
John McCain is not the only presidential candidate who might benefit from the Democratic Party’s internecine struggle. Some polls are suggesting that some share of Democrats—especially the younger ones—may cast their votes for the Independent candidate Ralph Nader if they are unhappy with the Democratic Party’s eventual nominee.
In recent polls conducted in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana before their primaries, the Suffolk University Political Research Center found about a fourth of likely Democratic voters under the age of 36 saying they may vote for Mr. Nader if the candidate they prefer does not get the nomination. David A. Paleologos, the center’s director, cautioned that the number of young voters sampled in each of the polls was small enough that the young-voter results were not statistically valid for any individual poll. But, he said, the findings from one poll to the next were consistent enough for him to conclude that young Democrats are much more likely than older ones to consider Mr. Nader if they are unhappy with the outcome of the Democratic selection process.
Mr. Paleologos said his surveys’ findings for all age groups suggest that “Obama’s voters have a higher propensity to vote for Nader than Hillary Clinton’s.” Among other polls suggesting that Mr. Nader will fare better in a Clinton-McCain race than an Obama-McCain race are national polls by Zogby International—the most recent of which was conducted late last month—and a poll of likely Michigan voters conducted in early April by the polling firm EPIC-MRA, based in Lansing, Mich. In a national poll of 18- to 24-year-olds conducted back in March, Harris Interactive found 7 percent of the voters in that age group favoring Mr. Nader if Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain are the major party choices, and 4 percent favoring Mr. Nader if Mr. Obama is the Democrats’ pick to go up against Mr. McCain.
Bruce E. Cain, a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley, says he interacts with undergraduate students from 10 campuses in his capacity as director of the University of California’s center in Washington, D.C. His sense is that students who support Mr. Obama “would be horribly disillusioned and upset” if Mrs. Clinton became the Democratic nominee through the support of superdelegates. “I think Ralph Nader would have fertile ground to go after their votes,” he says.
Mark Saigh, one of the Nader campaign’s point people in dealing with colleges, says he is not actively going after disillusioned young Democrats, but their defection to Mr. Nader “is bound to happen” as the fight between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton drags on.
The likely impact of youth support for Mr. Nader on the election’s outcome is anything but clear.
Clearly, youth support for third-party candidates has been a factor in other recent presidential elections. The Independent candidate John Anderson got about 11 percent of the under-30 vote in 1980, and H. Ross Perot received about 22 percent of the vote from this age group as an Independent candidate in 1992 and about 10 percent as a Reform Party candidate in 1996, according to exit polls conducted by Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, a nonpartisan research organization housed at University of Maryland. (In all three elections, the outside candidates received the support of significantly smaller shares of over-30 voters.)
Ralph Nader received less than 1 percent of the vote from people under 30 in the 2000 and 2004 elections. But some Democrats insist that his presence in the 2000 race contributed to George W. Bush’s victory, an assertion Mr. Nader strongly denies.
Peter Schmidt | Posted on Fri May 9, 02:14 PM | Permalink | Comment [16]May 8, 2008
Bowling and Whiskey Get More of the Campaign Spotlight Than Education Policy
None of the three remaining major presidential candidates has spent any “real time” discussing education policy on the campaign trail, even though the future of the nation may well rest on how well it educates current and future generations, argues OpenEducation.net, a Web site dedicated to tracking changes in the field of education.
In a recent post the site’s editors argued that the presidential candidates lack a vision on education. Even though the Democrats, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, have offered detailed platforms on education topics, they wrote, the candidates have failed to shine much of a spotlight on the issue as they have campaigned.
On the Republican side, the situation is bleaker for education. The blog item says that “it has become increasingly clear that John McCain may forgo any real discussion about the topic completely.”
The item also links to several other articles that have raised similar concerns about the lack of extensive discussion so far about education policy in the 2008 campaign.
They include an article in The American Prospect that said that Mr. McCain’s last major statement on any plans he has to fix the nation’s problems in education came in 2000. The OpenEducation blog item also links to an opinion piece in The New York Times by Bob Herbert, who lamented that education appeared to be “much too serious a topic to compete with such fun stuff as Hillary tossing back a shot of whiskey, or Barack rolling a gutter ball.”
Sara Hebel | Posted on Thu May 8, 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comment [5]May 7, 2008
Student Superdelegates Post YouTube Plea for Advice
As superdelegates to the Democratic National Convention, the president and vice president of the College Democrats of America are seeking students’ advice on how they should vote.
Lauren Wolfe, a 25-year-old law student at the University of Detroit Mercy, and Awais Khaleel, a 23-year-old political-science major at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, posted a video on YouTube last week urging students to weigh in.
Party leaders, celebrities, even the Democratic presidential candidates themselves have been calling, Ms. Wolfe says. “That’s not who we want to hear from.”
Mr. Khaleel chimes in: “We really want to hear from you.” He tells students to friend him on Facebook or MySpace — or contact him “the old-fashioned way — through e-mail.”
“We want to make sure,” Ms. Wolfe says, “that our vote belongs to you.”
A few students have replied with their own videos. “We college students, we love Senator Obama,” says Nick from Concordia College. “Please, please, please vote for Obama,” says Karla from San Diego State University.
One student urges the superdelegates to vote for the candidate they “genuinely, deep inside think would be the best person to sit in the Oval Office.”
“You should vote for whoever your state voted for,” another respondent says. “As a delegate, you should represent the people.”
Sara Lipka | Posted on Wed May 7, 03:08 PM | Permalink | Comment [2]Clinton, Campaigning in North Carolina and Indiana, Skipped Vote on Earmark Measure
Hillary Clinton, who has backed a one-year moratorium on earmarks, passed up a chance last week to send another earmark-reform measure to the Senate floor, CongressDaily reports.
The measure, which was offered as an amendment to the fiscal-2009 defense authorization bill, would have required earmarks to be listed in the bill’s text and not the conference report. It was defeated, 12-12, after Ms. Clinton, who was campaigning, failed to cast a proxy vote in favor of the amendment.
John McCain, her Republican rival for the White House, voted yes by proxy. Barack Obama, the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination, does not serve on the committee that held the vote. Only two Democrats, out of 13 on the committee, voted in favor of the amendment.
Philippe Reines, a spokesman for Senator Clinton, told CongressDaily she had opted not to vote because she missed the markup and debate on the bill.
“Because of the technical issues raised, she would like to have the benefit of her colleagues’ input before taking and expressing a position on the issue,” he said.
Kelly Field | Posted on Wed May 7, 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comment [4]