Presidential Campaign

The nation's murder rate rose slightly last year, but the number of robberies skyrocketed by 6 percent, preliminary FBI data released Monday show. The rise in violent crime is especially prevalent in the suburbs and in smaller cities.

While nobody is talking about this now, I believe that it will become an issue in the elections next year, and that it is having an impact on the current debate on immigration.

The backers of the immigration bill should take this dynamic into consideration if they want to truly understand what is driving the anti-immigrant sentiment in the current debate.

Criminal gangs from Latin America are having an impact on the nation’s crime rate. They should be targeted and destroyed. Their members should be deported and pressure should be put on their home-country governments to help us stop illegal gang activity. Read more...

All three top contenders for the Democratic nomination tied for victor at the New Hampshire debate last night, each for separate reasons. Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), who had given a weak performance at the last debate, was far more prepared and his confidence set him apart. John Edwards, clearly reading the polls, knew it was time to make a move and he made it. He was forceful and articulate and had, perhaps, the best answer next to Sen. Joseph Biden (Del.) on Iran. And but for a bit too many fake nervous chuckles, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) delivered what front-runners must — she was poised, calm and authoritative without allowing herself to become combative. She got a laugh at Dick Cheney's expense to boot, always an added benefit in New Hampshire.

But more intriguing than the substance was, of course, the Vice Presidential Dating Game that has clearly begun. While Edwards was going for the jugular on the Iraq supplemental votes Clinton and Obama came to at the last minute, he stirred some applause by praising Obama for opposing the war. This AFTER Obama had rebuked him earlier for arriving at his leadership on the war four and a half years late. Not only that — when it came to healthcare, Edwards gave credit to Obama for introducing a plan but never acknowledged that Clinton had introduced one as well. When she spoke on the subject Edwards took pains to add that the savings she spoke of from tax relief were incorporated into the Edwards and Obama plans as well. It practically sounded like teamwork. Obama couldn't let all the love go unanswered and he later said he appreciated Edwards's compliment. Clinton was stuck, literally, in between them to make it even more awkward. In the break before she sat down Obama and Edwards yukked it up over her empty chair. Read more...

The biography of Hillary by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta, Her Way, is really worth reading. It contains lots of new insights, the product of diligent investigative reporting by two of the best. The chapters on her positions on Iraq and how they respond not to military facts but to poll data are very good and their tracking of her Senate ethical improprieties, while not surprising, are still riveting. The Clintons have tried to spin this book as about their marriage. They wish it were. Instead it is about a politician addicted to lying and misrepresenting herself.

Carl Bernstein's book, A Woman in Charge, by the same publisher who put out Bill's memoirs, is a far more friendly treatment of the senator and, while well written, has nothing really important and new to say.  Unfortunately, it ends its narrative in 2001 just when Hillary started her Senate career and her presidential run.

One even is given to suspect that the Bernstein book is part of an effort to tone down coverage of the truly interesting stuff in the Gerth volume.

He hears a cry of distress. He steps into a phone booth. He dons his red cape. He leaps into action … It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s Fred Thompson!

Yes, in what many Republicans hope will be a repeat of 1980, another actor is flying to the rescue of the beleaguered GOP. According to Politico.com, Fred Thompson will file papers forming a campaign committee in early June, and officially announce his candidacy for president over the July 4 holiday.

Granted, it doesn’t take much to excite members of the Washington punditocracy. Nevertheless, Fred Thompson’s belated entry into the race has left even veteran reporters positively orgasmic — with little apparent reason.

No one can deny that, with the exception of Ron Paul, the current Republican field is decidedly unimpressive. Neither the Mayor nor the Senator nor the Used Car Salesman is setting the world on fire. But what makes Fred Thompson better than the other 10 candidates already in the race? And what does Thompson stand for? Does anybody really know? Read more...

Yes, it had been a good week for Mitt Romney, and that poll showing social conservatives choosing to stick with Rudy Giuliani despite his rejection of their principles must have had America's Mayor bouncing all over the Big Apple.

But that was then, and this is now. Now that Big Fred is here, the whole game has changed. And if you're a Republican running for president and you're not Fred Thompson, you're running scared. No, he is not the second coming of Ronald Reagan. But beyond his star power, his Southern drawl, his commanding 6-foot-6 frame, is Thompson's ace in the hole: there is nothing wrong with him. Big Fred sprints virtually clean onto a field of negatives — Romney's a Mormon flip-flopper, Rudy's a social liberal protested by 9/11 firefighters and their families wherever he goes with ethically challenged associates like Bernard Kerik, and after six years of courting them, the base just doesn't like poor John McCain. So Thompson may have had an active bachelor career? It hardly stacks up.

What's more, it sounds like Team Thompson is a force to be reckoned with, given their shrewd plan to come out strong from the starting gate — time the dropping of the bomb to ruin the next GOP debate and plot the collection of a boffo war chest before a formal announcement. Read more...

Should state and federal governments, trial lawyers and insurance companies across the country band together and sue the auto industry just as they sued tobacco companies more than a decade ago as a way of recouping hundreds of millions of dollars in healthcare costs from a product (in this case, petroleum) they claim is a nuisance?

There is a movement afoot — slow and steady — leading in that very direction. Sue Big Auto for the costs incurred in providing medical care to people with birth defects, asthma, emphysema and cancer.

Big Auto is to blame, and Big Auto owes us. That, in essence, is the claim of an obscure man you've probably never heard of who is running for president of the United States. His name is Terry Tamminen, and before you blow him off (preferably through tailpipe emissions out of your massive Hummer), know that he is a close friend and adviser to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and is the former secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency. Oh yes, and he has written a book: Lives Per Gallon. (I'd make a snarky comment about people who run for president to sell their books, but that criticism cuts across both parties, doesn't it?) Read more...

Mitt Romney is finally having a good week. A new Des Moines Register poll has found him ahead of Sen. John McCain and Rudy Giuliani in the key state of Iowa, where Romney is diligently plotting for victory at the Aug. 11 straw poll in Ames to pave his way for victory in the caucuses. By the way, he is ahead by a LOT — he is at 30 percent to McCain’s 18 percent and Rudy’s 17 percent.

With this momentum Romney should probably stop attacking McCain and set his sights on the solid lead Giuliani still holds. Even after the drama at the debates, sparked because Rudy dared to state his real position on abortion, he remains the frontrunner and a new Pew research poll shows social conservatives willing to abide Giuliani’s heretic social views because they think he is a winner. Read more...

Now we read in the Boston Globe how John Kerry, preparing to campaign to be commander in chief, voted in 2002 for the Iraq war after his political consultants informed the would-be leader of the free world that he would not be "politically viable" unless he voted yes.

This followed the disclosure that Bob Shrum advised John Edwards to send young men and women to die as a way of  improving his weak national-security resume in 2002.

Why Democratic officials listen to this is beyond me.

Here are the presidential campaigns that Bob Shrum lost: 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004.

Here are the presidential campaigns Mr. Shrum won: none.

Nice work, if you can get it. Read more...

Nobody knows what impact Hillary Rodham Clinton may have on the economy as a whole, but it looks like she’s going to, single-handedly, save the publishing industry.

I already have a shelf full of Hillary books: by Dick Morris, David Brock, Gail Sheehy, Susan Estrich and Laura Ingraham, among others. And now there are three — count ’em, THREE! — new books on Hillary: one by Watergate legend Carl Bernstein; one by New York Times reporters Jeff Gerth and Don van Natta; and one by Bay Buchanan.

From what I’ve seen so far, not one of them contains anything new. And not one of them is worth reading. Among their exciting “tidbits:” Read more...

This is a week Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is looking forward to putting behind her. First it was the leaked memo on her weak standing in Iowa and whether or not she should potentially decide to skip the caucuses rather than risk losing them. Needless to say, the break-in at the Fort Knox of Clinton campaign discipline was quite newsworthy and managed to completely overshadow a healthcare speech she gave Wednesday. Then yesterday Clinton had to bow to the anti-war left and vote against the supplemental war-funding bill, a sacrifice to her general election strategy she will not be rewarded for. Today The Washington Post is carrying a story about two new Hillary books by credible reporters — one by Carl Bernstein and another by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta — that drag back all the dirt Clinton’s voracious scrubbing has kept at bay all these years.

The authors write about Clinton’s refusal to allow Bill to leave her for a longtime girlfriend and that in spite she considered running for governor of Arkansas to succeed him. The plan didn’t last long, according to Bernstein’s book, because The Hill columnist and blogger Dick Morris polled the voters and found Arkansans weren’t interested. They also write that Clinton decided on a run for president two decades ago. Read more...