- Though it is great to see John Edward’s team taking advantage of YouTube it would be nice if they signed up for a directors account so they could go ahead and put the entire video in one file!

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Part 2

Part 3

About a month ago Governor Mitt Romney began the 2008 Campaign attack season by going after Senator John McCain’s conservative record. Former Senator John Edwards whom began his campaign this week just made the second attack against McCain on ABC’s ‘This Week’.

Edwards referred to President Bush’s potential plan to raise troop levels in Iraq as the “McCain Doctrine”. Senator McCain has been a proponent of raising troop levels for several years now.

Senator Edwards isn’t the only one tying troop level increases to John McCain. Governor Tom Vilsack also has a letter you can co-sign to the Senator’s office urging against an increase.

Edwards & Vilsack might just be jumping on an item by the Evans-Novak report which said McCain has been witnessing a decline in polling numbers linked to his support of Iraq and troop levels.

Meet the Press, which is available on iTunes and online now for free, took an in-depth look at Gerald Ford this morning with Tom Brokaw and Bob Woodward. There was also a discussion about 2008 politics with a panel that included William Safire,

William Safire, who recently won a Presidential Medal of Freedom, predicts Hillary Clinton will lead by the end of 07′ and noted a point I made and will continue to make, that the press every few months finds someone new to be interested in that caters to a new need but ultimately the press moves on.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson doesn’t think Barack Obama will win the nomination but will “have legs to stand on” and do well.

Safire also predicts that Senator John McCain will be ahead at the end of 07′.

Washington Editor for the National Review Kate O’Beirne believes John McCain will probably top the polls but says that “doesn’t mean he will get the nomination”. She believes there are vulnerabilities with McCain amongst conservatives and suggests Governor Mitt Romney might be a possible alternative.

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne agrees there is room for a more conservative candidate on the Republican side but sees possible problems with Mitt Romney because of recent revelations that contradict his conservative claims. On the Democratic side Dionne believes Senator Barack Obama could be “the real deal” as he has often been labeled. He also says not to discount the machinery of Hillary Clinton’s potential campaign.

Presidential Historian Michael Beschloss made no real predictions.

Political Wire is reporting a couple of items from the Evans-Novak Report.

1) That Conservative Republican Bill Simon has begun building a network of support in California for the potential presidential campaign of Rudy Giuliani. Simon worked as a prosecutor for Giuliani in NYC in 1986-1988.

2) That the Iraq War is a key factor in the recent decline in polls for Arizona Senator John McCain. The report suggests public disenchantment over McCain’s desire to raise troop levels by 30,000. Likewise the report says many republicans fear that if the President raises troops levels and a surge in progress is not seen immediately in Iraq it could have dire political consequences.

Former Senator John Edwards released the above announcement as a preview of his announcement today. His platform includes:

We know what we need to do. Changing our country means:
- Providing moral leadership in the world — starting with Iraq, where we should begin drawing down troops, not escalating the war.
- Strengthening our middle class and ending the shame of poverty.
- Guaranteeing health care for every single American.
- Leading the fight against global warming.
- Getting America and the world to break our addiction to oil.

Because Iraq will be a pivotal issue in 2008 I figured it wouldn’t hurt and would be timely to place a link to an article written by Bob Woodward about Ford’s comments concerning the decision to go to War in Iraq.

Hello all.

It was leaked today that former Senator John Edwards will announce his candidacy from New Orleans tomorrow.

As for the site updates have been light during the holidays as I attempt to get all the stuff on the back end working. Also many thanks to a reader Brigitte who noted a spelling error I continually used with Senator Barack Obama. I have fixed this error throughout the site and will do my best to be more careful in the future.

Up until now as the site has been building the blog has contained most of the daily news links. This is an amazingly time consuming way of doing things compared to a news generator I am putting together. This frees blog updates to be more about the overall goings on, breaking news, comment and media. As campaign ads and stops abound I forsee a lot of linking to the best from YouTube as well as throughout the Web.

Though he may be far behind on the list for 2008 Congressman Duncan Hunter definitely gets points for jumping ahead of the other candidates. Hunter started airing two 30-second ads over the weekend in South Carolina, North Carolina and South Dakota and are planned to air for two weeks.

Read the rest of this entry »

Gerald Ford died today after breaking Ronald Reagan’s record as longest living president in United States history.

Ford was born in Omaha Nebraska. After serving in the Navy during World War 2 he returned home and was elected to the House of Representatives for Grand Rapids Michigan in 1948. He was elected House Minority Leader in 1963 and served in Congress until 1973. He was a prominent member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, served on the Warren Commission which investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and found himself disliked by President Johnson whom he frequently and publicly criticized over the presidents handling of the Vietnam War and “Great Society” social welfare programs.

Ford described himself as “a moderate in domestic affairs, an internationalist in foreign affairs, and a conservative in fiscal policy” (source).

After Spiro T. Agnew resigned his position as Vice President under Richard Nixon, Ford was nominated by the president to take the office. The years Ford spent in Congress and the relationships he formed there served him well and he was nominated 92 to 3 in the Senate and 387 to 35 in the House.

Ford was appointed to the presidency in 1974 after the resignation of Richard Nixon becoming the first to do so under the 25th amendment of the constitution. He served for three years becoming the 38th president and coming to office amid the loss of a Vice President and a President to scandals that occupied most of the nations attention and destroyed much of the nations trust in government.

In his first address as president Ford said of the situation “I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your President by your ballots, and so I ask you to confirm me as your President with your prayers.”

Ford received much criticism and some believe lost his bid for re-election over his controversial decision to pardon Richard Nixon. There has been speculation about how this decision was made and many different opinions on whether the decision was made rightly or wrongly. Ford’s press secretary and close friend Jerald terHorst resigned in protest over the decision.

Soon after his ascension a mid-term election handed many Republican seats to the Democratic Party. A mild recession and rampant inflation filled the economic sphere and the country saw the final withdrawal of troops from Vietnam as the fall of Saigon marked the end of the War and the return of communist rule to the region. The circumstances under which he became president and the course of the nation couldn’t have been more challenging.

Many see the pardon of Richard Nixon as the most lasting decision from the Ford administration, two others come to mind. The first was the appointment of John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court. Stevens replaced Justice William O. Douglas a man Ford had continually attempted to have impeached from the court in 1970. Steven’s, a more liberal justice then Ford had anticipated or perhaps would have liked, still sits on the bench shaping our society in very profound ways including the 2000 decision on the presidency of the United States.

The second was not about policy but instead about fellowship. Gerald Ford brought to his administration several names who rose to very powerful positions long after his term. George H.W. Bush was appointed both Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China in 1974 and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Bush of course went onto the Vice Presidency under Ronald Reagan and then the presidency for a term after that.

Donald Rumsfeld was former Chief of Staff to Ford and then Secretary of Defense a position he held again under George W. Bush. Ford also appointed Richard Cheney to be his Chief of Staff to replace Rumsfeld and later campaign manager. Cheney of course rose to become a member of the House of Representatives, Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush and Vice President of the United States under George W. Bush.

During Ford’s reelection campaign another now familiar face James Baker served as campaign chairman and before that Undersecretary of Commerce in the Ford administration. He went on to be White House Chief of Staff under Ronald Reagan, Secretary of the Treasury, campaign manager and then Secretary of State for George H.W. Bush and then successfully argued the Supreme Court case that confirmed George W. Bush as the president of the United States.

President Ford’s post presidency was filled with much goodwill. Much of the anger over his decision to pardon Richard Nixon subsided and over the decades as the country moved forward most did too with their vision of Ford. Many of those whom he worked with, appointed and helped groom moved on to positions of power and presidential administrations that are now seen as more successful than his own.

He played the role of a gatekeeper, a man who made a difficult decision that ultimately played its role in moving the country forward rather then staying the course of looking behind. A decision that cost him another term and stayed the most dominant artifact of his presidency in the publics eye.

His was the only presidency appointed and not brought to power by the popular will of the people or the electoral college. He was a capable, decorated, well liked man who reached the office under circumstances less then ideal and in a time of great national anguish. He served his country and lived a long and fruitful life.

Since it is the giving season I thought I would give some of the other candidates running for president, some might say the ‘longshots’ some time in the blog.

First up on the Republican side is Michael Charles Smith who has officially filed with the FEC and has his campaign Web site up and running. Smith is from the state of Oregon. He was born in Illinois in 1961 and attended the University of Illinois for a short time before joining the Air Force in 1985. While in the Air Force he was trained as a Russian linguist.

He was elected village trustee for the small town of Garrett, Illinois where he served from 1993 to 1994 before moving to Oregon. Smith earned an accounting degree from Oregon State University, where he graduated cum laude in 1999 and a Master of Business Administration degree from Willamette University. He currently works for Hewlett Packard.

Smith announced on Saturday, May 20, 2006, at a fund-raising dance in Corvallis. He believes that the Republican Party is too far right of the American people and is running on a moderate platform of fiscal conservatism, limited government and wants to see the party move away from the religious right.

“I’m disillusioned and frustrated that most of the voices that seem to dominate the discussion in the party I’m aligned with in principle are on the far social and religious right, and I don’t hear much at all from the party on fiscal issues or taxes. The party creed talks about smaller government and individual responsibility and liberties, but much of the activism from the social right seems to step on those principles.”

Smith’s goal is to win enough votes in the 2008 Oregon primary to take a delegate to the Republican National Convention, so he can deliver his message of traditional Republicanism to the party leadership.