Also see the Agonist News Section: USA Campaign 2008

The Campaign 2008 Diary Section does not show up in the forums, but you can see those diary entries in that section (I went back and assigned them the diary category "Campaign 2008"):

Previous Agonist Diary Entries about Campaign 2008

From the Los Angeles Times
NEWS ANALYSIS

Foreign policy is central in 2008 presidential races

Parties' candidates are all talking about ending the Iraq war or fighting terrorism -- but Americans want answers to both.

By Doyle McManus
Times Staff Writer

July 29, 2007

WASHINGTON — It's easy to tell the difference between the two parties on foreign policy in this presidential campaign. The Democrats all want to talk about getting out of Iraq, but not so much about Al Qaeda or terrorism. The Republicans all want to talk about terrorism, but not so much about Iraq.

Although fireworks erupted last week among the leading Democratic candidates, those differences are narrow compared with the chasm between the two parties' worldviews, one focused on battling the threat of radical Islam, the other on ending the war.

The problem each party faces, polls show, is that most Americans want answers to both questions, not just one or the other.

"Foreign policy is playing a role in this campaign unlike any election since the Cold War," said Kurt Campbell, a former Clinton administration official who heads a new centrist think tank in Washington, the Center for New American Security. "The debate so far has made the two parties' positions appear polarized, more than they need to be…. The election may well be decided on foreign policy and national security, but it's all about just two issues: Iraq and the war on terror."

Not every foreign policy issue is as polarizing as Iraq. There are even signs of potential bipartisan consensus on other issues: reinvigorating traditional alliances, rebuilding a war-weary Army and Marine Corps, preventing nuclear proliferation, and maintaining aid to Africa, to name some. But Iraq is the issue many voters say will determine their choice in the presidential election; the rest have barely rated a mention in the campaign so far.

The Iraq war "may be the most partisan major foreign policy issue that we've ever had," said Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign policy scholar at Johns Hopkins University. "This is a war unlike any other we have ever had, in that it is a partisan war. Even the Vietnam War, which was pretty divisive, had supporters in the Democratic Party."

Among Republicans, there's something close to unanimity: The next president's top priority will be the war on terrorism; it's too early to withdraw troops from Iraq; and the election will be decided on the issue of strength.

"I think the American people in November 2008 are going to select the person they think is strongest to defend America against Islamic terrorism," former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, the front-runner among Republican candidates in most polls, said last month.

GOP candidates sometimes sound as if they are competing to show who is most unrelenting.

"Some people have said we ought to close Guantanamo; my view is that we ought to double Guantanamo," former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said at a debate in May. "I want them in Guantanamo where they don't get the access to lawyers they get when they're on our soil." President Bush is among those who want to close the military prison for suspected terrorists.

The Republicans face a dilemma: Most of the people likely to vote in GOP primaries want to continue fighting the war in Iraq, but a big majority in the general-election electorate does not. A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll in June found that 67% of Republicans still approve of the way Bush is pursuing the war, compared with 26% of independents and 9% of Democrats. The responses indicated that 31% of voters in the country as a whole favored Bush's approach.

So far, the leading Republican candidates have said they are sticking with Bush. Romney has given himself a little wiggle room, saying that the Bush administration "made mistakes" and warning that there is no guarantee of success, but supporting continued funding for the war, at least for now.

"The stakes are too high ... to deny our military leaders and troops on the ground the resources and the time needed to give it an opportunity," he said.

Arizona Sen. John McCain, who has long advocated increasing U.S. troop strength in Iraq, has been more categorical. "I would rather lose a campaign than lose a war," he often says.

Giuliani has been bluntest of all. "I'm for victory," he said last week, dismissing Democrats as "the party of losers."

Experts see a certain inevitability to the tactic.

"The problem the Republicans have is that the administration's strategy [in Iraq] is a political loser — just look at John McCain — but if you're a Republican, you can't completely repudiate it," said Daniel W. Drezner, a professor at Tufts University who served as a foreign policy advisor in the 2000 Bush campaign. "So they have replaced Bush's foreign policy with 'We won't back down in the war on terror,' with being resolute."

Mandelbaum said: "The Republicans are going to try to make the war on terror a winning issue for the simple reason that they have no choice. And they may well succeed."

Among the Democratic candidates, last week brought a dust-up in which Illinois Sen. Barack Obama derided New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as "Bush-Cheney lite" after Clinton called Obama "irresponsible and frankly naive."

But there's also a rough consensus: Combating terrorism is important, but the war in Iraq is weakening the United States and the next president should exert more diplomacy and less military muscle.

"The current security policy — with its excessive reliance on unilateral force, its rejection of international agreements of all kinds, and its preference for policy-making based on ideology, not evidence — has to change," Clinton, the party's front-runner, said in a speech last month.

Still, the Democrats have arrayed themselves on a clear foreign policy spectrum, with Clinton, who emphasizes military strength, closest to the center of the electorate; former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, who has said "The war on terror is … a bumper sticker, not a plan," on the left; and Obama somewhere between the two.

Clinton talks about terrorism as a priority, and she was the last of the three leading Democratic candidates to turn against the war in Iraq.

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available here.

Citizen journalists are using the Internet to do opposition research in the '08 campaign.
Christian Science Monitor, By Ben Arnoldy, October 17

Oakland, Calif. - Mayhill Fowler wrote a significant Web-only political story this week that took the temperature of the Democratic electorate. More remarkable than her conclusion – that Democrats are more undecided and less Iraq-focused than polls suggest – is the whopping 17 reporters in nine states who filed on-the-ground accounts to contribute to it.

The cornucopia of contributors, surpassing what most news outlets could ever afford, cost virtually nothing. That's because the reporters are volunteers, including Ms. Fowler, a Californian, who at age 60 has embraced beat reporting on Barack Obama.

"I looked through all the information that people sent in and I came up with what I thought were the significant things we discovered in these 14 cities on Saturday," she says. Her story was published online by Off the Bus, a project boasting 1,500 citizen journalists and affiliation with The Huffington Post, a liberal website.

"Until [this] post, there's nothing really on the Obama campaign that I think we've brought that the mainstream media can't. It's this kind of joint effort that really is the thing," she adds.

Collaborative citizen-reporting projects like this one are sprouting across the political landscape of Election 2008. Thousands of volunteers are adding muscle to efforts by professional reporters and campaign staff to leave no stone unturned – and no skeletons in the closet. But to drive volunteer interest, many of these "crowdsourcing" efforts draw more energy from partisan fervor than traditional journalism's impartiality, say experts.

All the presidential candidates but one (Mike who?) skip the event because of the state's rift with the national party over primary scheduling.

Los Angeles Times, By Carol J. Williams, October 29

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — It was every host's worst nightmare: a big, lavish party and not a single invited A-lister showed up.

The Florida Democratic Party's annual convention here got snubbed by all but the longest shot among the eight Democratic presidential contenders because of a feud between the state party and the Democratic National Committee over the Florida Legislature's decision to move up the state primary from March to Jan. 29.

In an effort to prevent big, influential states from overshadowing traditional early votes in Iowa and New Hampshire, the national committee has vowed to strip Florida of its 210 delegates to the national convention in Denver next year for leapfrogging its primary ahead of more than 20 other contests scheduled for Feb. 5.

The national party hierarchy has authorized only four states to vote before that Super Tuesday: Iowa and New Hampshire, in a bow to tradition; Nevada, for its Western view; and South Carolina, to give black voters a greater role in the process.

The national committee strong-armed the Democratic hopefuls into signing pledges not to campaign in states that violate the early-primary restrictions -- hence most candidates' absence from the weekend party here in the fourth most populous state.

The only presidential hopeful who ignored the ban was former Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska), who is outpolled by all seven other candidates as well as "other" and "not planning to vote."

Agonist Posting: In God they trust

Also: Mitt Romney Panders Right

By John Whitesides, December 30

DES MOINES, Iowa (Reuters) - Democrat Hillary Clinton holds a narrow lead in Iowa four days before the state opens the presidential nominating race, while Republicans Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney are virtually tied, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released on Sunday.

Clinton, a New York senator, led Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois 31 percent to 27 percent, with former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards a close third at 24 percent and no other Democratic contender registering in double-digits.

Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, held a statistically insignificant one-point edge over former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, 29 percent to 28 percent. Arizona Sen. John McCain was a distant third with 11 percent.

Three Republicans, former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Texas Rep. Ron Paul, registered 8 percent in the poll.

The poll found about 6 percent of likely caucus-goers in each party are uncertain of their choice in Thursday's contest, the first big test in the state-by-state battle to choose candidates for the November presidential election.

"We have two very tight races that are too close to call," said pollster John Zogby. "But there is a lot of potential for things to change here."

The poll of 934 likely Democratic caucus-goers and 867 likely Republican caucus-goers was taken Wednesday through Saturday and has a margin of error of 3.3 percentage points for the Democrats and 3.4 percentage points for the Republicans.

CLINTON'S NARROW EDGE WITH WOMEN VOTERS
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New York Times, By Nicolas Confessore, January 6

Hundreds of miles from the hustings of New Hampshire lurks a possible presidential candidate who supports gay marriage, abortion rights and stricter regulation of handguns. Who doesn’t mind taxing the rich on their income or big companies on their carbon emissions. Who says that deporting illegal immigrants would destroy the nation’s economy. And who is not necessarily averse to adding more bureaucrats to the government payroll.

That politician — Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York — has spent months laying out his vision for a post-partisan approach to politics that would take the best from left and right.

Yet a close reading of the policies Mr. Bloomberg has promoted during his mayoralty suggests that Mr. Bloomberg actually has a lot in common with one party’s leading candidates — the Democrats — and not so much with the other’s. Indeed, on issues like gay marriage and gun control, Mr. Bloomberg stands well to the left of top-tier Democratic candidates like Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama.

Mr. Bloomberg has long coyly denied rumors that he would undertake an independent bid, even as some of his aides have laid the groundwork for one. On Sunday in Oklahoma, Mr. Bloomberg was scheduled to meet with a bipartisan group of elder statesmen to discuss ways of defeating “partisan polarization,” according to organizers, and to urge the creation of a national-unity government. But judged strictly on the issues, it is hard to discern the grounds on which Mr. Bloomberg might midwife a new kind of fusion politics, even if he wants to.

CNN, By Rebecca Sinderbrand, January 12

WASHINGTON -- The Republican presidential field appears to face a tough general election fight in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released Saturday.

According to the survey, both of the Democratic front-runners, Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, hold mostly double-digit -- and statistically identical -- advantages over Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee, drawing greater than 50 percent support in each hypothetical matchup.

The Republican candidate who gives Clinton and Obama the closest race in the new poll is Arizona Sen. John McCain, who is essentially tied with both: He draws the support of 48 percent of those surveyed to Clinton's 50 percent and Obama's 49 percent.

Clinton leads the front-running candidates of both parties -- Obama, McCain, Giuliani, Huckabee and Romney -- in the percentage of voters who say they would definitely vote for her if she won her party's nomination, with 37 percent. But she trails the pack in the percentage of voters who do not support her, but say they might consider voting for her under those circumstances, with 19 percent.

Obama is second to Clinton in potential voters who say they would definitely vote for him in the general election, with 30 percent. McCain, who is third in that category with 22 percent, is first among voters who say they'd consider voting for him if he were the Republican nominee, with 35 percent.

God and race divide parties in key battle for the soul of the South

Barack Obama has to win over both black and white Democrat voters to see off Hillary Clinton: the Republican hopefuls are more worried about religion

The Observer, Paul Harris, January 13

South Carolina - The Back Porch Cafe in downtown Columbia was full of staff and supporters from John McCain's campaign in South Carolina. When news of McCain's victory in New Hampshire blared from the bar's TV set, they cheered and clapped.

Now it was their turn in the spotlight as America's dramatic presidential race turned to the South. It is a region where race and God will enter the battle as never before. It will be fierce.

As they digested their candidate's win, a group of four McCain supporters drank beer and contemplated the imminent arrival of black Democratic hopeful Barack Obama. 'You know what Barack Obama's middle name is?' asked one. 'Hussein,' he said, answering his own question. The sharp intakes of breath by his companions said more than words. [Not just in the south - I've seen emails to this effect].

South Carolina is the state where black voters will, for the first time in this contest, play a significant role. In a race that is seeing the most viable presidential run by a black candidate, that could make a big difference to the Democrat nomination. Yet things will not be simple in South Carolina. Obama is basing his appeal on a 'post-racial' image, far from the traditional tactics of previous runners such as Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. Nor can he count on unquestioning black support. He is coming up against Hillary Clinton's formidable machine, which has long-standing ties with black America. Their battle here will set the tone for the contest for America's entire black vote.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US Senators John McCain and Hillary Clinton have emerged as nationwide leaders in their respective Republican and Democratic parties, despite early setbacks in the primary election

A survey conducted jointly by CBS News and The New York Times indicated that following his primary election win last week in New Hampshire, McCain now leads the national Republican race over former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee 33 percent to 18 percent.

McCain is now seen as the most electable in November and leads among conservatives as well as moderates with 41 percent of the vote, up from seven percent in December, according to that poll.

Meanwhile, support for former Republican national front-runner Rudy Giuliani, an ex-New York mayor, has fallen by more than half in this survey -- to 12 percent, down from 43 percent last month.

But there are many indications this race is far from settled, with 72 percent of the respondents saying they could still change their minds and fewer than half, or 43 percent, "strongly" supporting their candidates.

On the Democratic side, Senator Clinton leads her fellow Senator Barack Obama by a double digit margin -- 42 percent to 27 percent, according to the CBS News/New York Times poll. John Edwards is in a distant third place with 11 percent.

But a survey conducted by ABC News and The Washington Post indicated the margin to Clinton's lead was much smaller.

According to that poll, 42 percent of likely Democratic voters support Clinton and 37 percent back Obama. Clinton's support was down 11 percentage points from a month ago, with Obama's up 14 points.

But neither of the two leading Democrats enjoys firm support: 39 percent of Clinton voters say their minds could change, as do 43 percent of Obama's, the CBS News/New York Times survey found.
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The Democratic frontrunners, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, last night called a truce to the bitter row over race and the legacy of Martin Luther King that has dominated the campaign and the US airwaves for the past few days.

Obama said all candidates for the presidential nomination "share the same goals". He told reporters: "We're all Democrats. We all believe in civil rights; we all believe in equal rights," adding that he did not want the campaign "to degenerate into so much tit-for-tat, back and forth, that we lose sight of why all of us are doing this."

Article continues
Clinton later issued a statement echoing the call for a halt to hostilities. "Let's come together, because I want more than anything else to ensure that our family stays together on the frontlines of the struggle to expand rights for all Americans," she said.

The truce followed a day of repeated accusations from both camps. Obama claimed that his rival was engaged in a wholly negative campaign.

"All they are trying to do is run me down," he said in Nevada. He later told NBC: "I think there's some intentionality on the part of the Clinton campaign to knock us off message."

Clinton and Obama will come face to face tonight for the first time since their two camps embarked on the dangerous strategy of trying to extract political gain from the race issue.

After Obama's victory in Iowa and Clinton's in New Hampshire, the two candidates - who meet for a debate in Las Vegas tonight - are looking to break the tie in Nevada on Saturday or South Carolina the week after.

The increasingly bitter and ugly exchanges over race reflect the importance of South Carolina, where about half the Democratic voters are African-American.

The Clinton team was forced on the defensive over a comment from the New York senator that suggested she was trying to minimise the role of Martin Luther King in the civil rights era.

The Clinton campaign accused Obama of distorting the remarks; Obama rejected the charges.

Meanwhile, Bob Johnson, a founder of the Black Entertainment Network, who is among Clinton's most prominent African-American supporters, revived the issue of Obama's teenage drug use, which he has written about in his memoir, Dreams From My Father. During an introduction for Clinton at an event, Johnson said Hillary and Bill Clinton were engaged in black issues when Obama "was doing something in the neighbourhood: I won't say what he was doing, but he said it in his book".

Johnson later said in a statement released by the Clinton campaign that his comments referred to Obama's work as a community organiser in Chicago "and nothing else. Any other suggestion is simply irresponsible and incorrect." The Obama campaign demanded an apology.

A New Hampshire Clinton campaign official, Bill Shaheen, resigned last month after suggesting Democrats should be wary of nominating Obama because of his past drug use.

In what seems to have been another misjudged remark, Obama's wife, Michelle, campaigning for him in South Carolina, also brought up race. Addressing African-Americans sceptical about his ability to win, she said Iowa, which is predominantly white, voted for Obama. "Ain't no black people in Iowa," she said.

The language could alienate some white voters and the comment is also wrong: there are 75,000 African-Americans in Iowa.

John Edwards, who is trailing at 11%, came down on the side of Obama in the race row. Since a debate on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, the former North Carolina senator has gone out of his way to find common cause with Obama. The association has led to speculation that he is vying for a spot as Obama's vice-presidential running mate.

The intensity of the Clinton-Obama contest is reflected in Nevada, where the two are locked in a legal dispute over the role of unions. A pro-Clinton union is challenging the caucus plans arguing that it would give an advantage to the hotel workers' union, which has endorsed Obama. Obama's supporters counter that the legal challenge would disenfranchise the largely Latino and African-American members of the union.

A poll for the Washington Post-ABC News yesterday showed Obama closing the gap nationwide, with Clinton on 42%, down 11% since last month, and Obama on 37%, up 14. But a national CBS News-New York Times poll had Clinton on 42
Source

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrat Hillary Clinton holds a narrow 5-point lead on rival Barack Obama in Nevada on the eve of the state's presidential nominating contest, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released on Friday.

Clinton, a New York senator and former first lady, led Obama, an Illinois senator, by 42 percent to 37 percent in the rolling tracking poll. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards was a distant third with 12 percent.

In South Carolina, where Republicans vote on Saturday, Arizona Sen. John McCain maintained a steady 7-point edge on former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, 29 percent to 22 percent, although rival and Mitt Romney gained three points overnight to climb into third place at 15 percent.

Both polls had a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points.
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DAVOS, Switzerland — To look at the reams of coverage in newspapers outside the United States or to follow the hours of television news broadcasts, you might conclude that foreigners had a vote in selecting an American presidential candidate — or, at least, deserved one, so great is America’s influence on their lives.

From Berlin to London to Jakarta, the destinies of Democratic and Republican contenders in Iowa or New Hampshire, or Nevada or South Carolina, have become news in a way that most political commentators cannot recall. It is as if outsiders are pining for change in America as much as some American presidential candidates are promising it.

The personalities of the Democratic contest in particular — the potential harbinger of America’s first African-American or female president — have fascinated outsiders as much as, if not more than, the candidates’ policies on Iraq, immigration or global finances.

And there is a palpable sense that, while democratic systems seem clunky and uninspiring to voters in many parts of the Western world, America offers a potential model for reinvigoration.

“It is in many ways an uplifting sight to see a great democracy functioning at that most basic of levels,” said Lord McNally, the leader of the small opposition Liberal Democrats in Britain’s House of Lords. “Even with all the money, the publicity, the power of television, the person who wants to be the most powerful man or woman in the world still has to get down and talk in small town halls and stop people on the street and stand on soapboxes.
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Video: Stewart slams media for provoking campaign drama

I can't find any ?:{

Ex-pat Americans get more delegates than some states

For Canadians of a particular bent, the American presidential primaries are akin to a spectator sport. And just like the many avid sports fans who wish they were on the field with their team instead of stuck on the sidelines, so, too, do many Canadians wish they could have a hand in choosing the next leader of the free world.

"Everybody in the world wishes they could have their say in what happens in American politics," said James MacDonald, a 22-year-old Université du Québec à Chicoutimi student.

Fortunately for Mr. MacDonald, he does get a say. Though he was born in Germany, currently lives in Canada and never intends on living in the United States again, his mother is from Texas and he spent much of his childhood in the U.S. -- so he gets to vote for president.

"I figure if you have that privilege, you should take advantage," he explained.

It's a sentiment echoed by many of the hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens living in Canada -- many of whom, despite their citizenship, are essentially Canadians who get to vote in another country's election.
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Lieberman Defends Waterboarding: It’s ‘Not Like Putting Burning Coals On People’s Bodies’

Yesterday, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) “reluctantly acknowledged” that he doesn’t believe waterboarding is torture. According to the Connecticut Post, Lieberman downplayed the severity of the waterboarding because it doesn’t inflict permanent physical damage:

In the worst case scenario — when there is an imminent threat of a nuclear attack on American soil — Lieberman said that the president should be able to certify the use of waterboarding on a detainee suspected of knowing vital details of the plot.
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“You want to be able to use emergency tech to try to get the information out of that person,” Lieberman said. […]
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“It is not like putting burning coals on people’s bodies. The person is in no real danger. The impact is psychological,” Lieberman said.

more with links at Think Progress

WASHINGTON — Howard Dean, at least on paper, should be the power broker best positioned to get the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama people behind closed doors and resolve their fight over contested delegates from Florida and Michigan, which threatens to rupture the party.

But in this tense time, when Democrats are whispering and wondering about whether there's a wise man or woman out there who could step in and break the presidential candidates' deadlock, the Democratic Party chairman isn't being widely considered as a natural for that role.

Dean has his backers.

"He's really the obvious person to broker some sort of compromise, and a lot of people think he's done a really good job so far," said former Iowa Democratic Chairman Gordon Fischer.

That seems to be a minority view, however.
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In a tight race, the Democratic Party's pick for presidential candidate could be decided by superdelegates -- 795 party insiders who are free to vote for anybody they want at the party's national convention. Candidates lobby for those votes fiercely, in a process that's always unfolded behind the scenes.

But now, thanks to the internet and wiki software, voters can see exactly what those superdelegates are up to, and can even try to apply a little pressure of their own.

Party activists fearful of a Hillary Clinton superdelegate coup have created several new websites that use collaborative software to focus attention on the superdelegates, in the hope that once under a microscope, they'll resist lures like financial contributions and political quid pro quos offered by the competing campaigns.

"There is an unprecedented level of interest in superdelegates, and with this information there's an unprecedented opportunity to pressure those superdelegates however [voters] want to pressure them," says Chris Bowers, co-founder of OpenLeft, and one of the organizers of the Superdelegate Transparency Project.

The Transparency Project lets you click on a map to see which superdelegates come from your state, and who they currently support -- Clinton or Obama -- if anyone. Every Democratic member of Congress is a superdelegate automatically, and the site's most enlightening feature lets you compare whom they support with whom their constituents favor.

Representative Dennis Cardoza, of California's 18th District, for example, has pledged his vote to Hillary Clinton, while voters in his district favored Barack Obama by 3-2 in the Feb. 5 primary. The site shows scores of similar cases in which a representative's commitment is at odds with the will of his or her constituents; they include superdelegates pledged to both Clinton and Obama.

That trend is what worries 36-year-old Rick Klau, who started a similar site called Superdelegates.org, which explains the Byzantine primary voting process, and geographically maps all the superdelegates.
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A Queen's professor is using software to determine which politicians deal the straight goods.

David Skillicorn's computer can't vote in today's U.S. primaries, but if it could, it knows which politician it would believe.

Mr. Skillicorn, a computing science professor at Queen's University, has devised a program that analyses the candidates' speeches to see who is putting the most political spin on their message.
Illinois Senator Barack Obama, New York Senator Hillary Clinton and Arizona Senator John McCain had their speeches scrutinized by a computer to detect political 'spin.'

Illinois Senator Barack Obama, New York Senator Hillary Clinton and Arizona Senator John McCain had their speeches scrutinized by a computer to detect political 'spin.'

Its findings: John McCain shoots the straightest, Barack Obama spins the most and Hillary Clinton falls somewhere in the middle.

Mr. Skillicorn created the software to look at the candidates' speeches between January and mid-February this year.

By examining how frequently various qualifiers, negative words, the singular "I" versus "we," action words and "but" and "or" are used, the software calculates the "spin" -- defined as the way politicians slightly alter what they say to appeal to the widest audience while ensuring they aren't crossing the line into fiction.

The program uses the frequency of 86 key words to calculate a "spin score" for each speech. The higher the score, the lower the tendency to spin. In Mr. Skillicorn's scale, Mr. McCain scored 2, Mrs. Clinton got 0.6 and Mr. Obama received -1.3.

But Mr. Skillicorn says he has noticed a dramatic difference with Mr. Obama's word usage this week, particularly a decrease in using the word "we."

"I can only imagine that ... he is absolutely convinced that he can't lose, so all of a sudden his spin level has dropped dramatically," he said.

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2008 Democratic Popular Vote
On March 5

Popular Vote Count
                            Obama        Clinton
Popular Vote Total -        12,946,615 - 12,363,897
Popular Vote (w/FL) -       13,522,829 - 13,234,883
Popular Vote (w/FL & MI)* - 13,522,829 - 13,563,192

US President George W Bush poked fun at his potential successors during his last White House Correspondents' Association dinner.

..... Referring to Republican candidate John McCain's absence, he said: "He probably wanted to distance himself from me."

..... President Bush also put forward mock excuses on behalf of the Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Taking a jibe at controversies which have dogged their campaigns, he said: "Hillary Clinton couldn't get in because of sniper fire and Senator Obama's at church." LOL
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_{"While not a Playboy reader, she invites a male acquaintance in for a quiet discussion of Chagall, Nietzsche, jazz, sex." - not a Hugh Hefner quote}

LA Times

conclusion:

So if the experts are right, Clinton really is smart and tough and stays until the last dog dies, Obama is an engaging bridge-builder, and McCain takes charge, and does it his way.