"White" America.

Now you know that I don't like to play around with gotcha journalism and spend hours discussing one comment made by one candidate.

I had a post all ready to write, about how George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic nominee who was soundly defeated by Richard Nixon, changed his endorsement from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama after Obama's large victory in North Carolina and Clinton's very slim one in Indiana.

McGovern won the nomination against the will of the party elders at the time, and the whole "superdelegate" idiocy was enacted after his general election loss to ensure that the party leadership never lost control again. (A better strategy, one might have thought, would be to actually throw 100% support behind the candidate chosen by the voters, but what the hell, right?) You can read Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 for a full rundown on McGovern and an unflinching look at another very messy Democratic primary campaign. MORE

Reader mail can go to sarah.jaffe-at-gmail.com. Please include “Political Buzz” in the subject line or it may go to junk mail!

I know everyone's really excited about Obama's win in the Guam caucuses (don't lie--how many of you even know where Guam is?)

We've covered Rev. Wright pretty extensively here, and yet he just won't seem to go away. At first he was interviewed by Bill Moyers, and that seemed to be all right. Then he gave a speech to the NAACP, and that was good. And then all of a sudden he speaks to the National Press Club, and people are freaking out again.

This time, Obama didn't try to put his words into context. He just flat out denounced them.

I don't have much to add on this, other than to note that we have yet to hear calls in the mainstream media for John McCain to denounce John Hagee or Hillary Clinton to explain her ties to the Fellowship. MORE

Pennsylvania primaries.

You'd have thought it was a horse race, or a football game. Every TV anchor was buzzing about Hillary Clinton needing to win by at least ten points to remain viable. (in fact, according to Slate.com's delegate counter, she would've needed at least 65% of the vote to stay on track to catch Obama.)

So when they called her as the projected winner--with only 2% of precincts reporting--the question was, would she cross that ten-point threshold?

Not quite. She won by 9.2 or so points, but because Pennsylvania's delegates are assigned by district, she only came out with nine (as of last count) more delegates than Obama. She still got the win, though, and the boost in her donations that came with it. MORE

In addition to the Presidential primary, on April 22nd Pennsylvania's Democrats will make choices about primary candidates for a variety of positions, including the 5th Congressional District.

The 5th District is in central PA, home to Pennsylvania State University, and is currently represented by Republican John Peterson, who is not running for reelection. It is the largest of Pennsylvania's Congressional districts, and though it is Republican leaning, recent swings in voter registration before the primary have made many of the counties in it majority Democratic for the first time in many years.

Pennsylvania already has one Iraq war veteran in Congress, 8th District Representative Patrick Murphy. Murphy has now endorsed another Iraq veteran Democrat, Bill Cahir, for the 5th District seat.

Cahir was a journalist before serving two tours of duty as a Marine in Iraq, and is still in the reserves. MORE

The Obama campaign is doing things a little bit differently. That's been acknowledged over and over again. But one of those differences was a forum at the University of Pennsylvania on Thursday, April 3, with Obama's top foreign policy advisers.

Richard Danzig, the 71st Secretary of the Navy, Susan Rice, the former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Paul Bucha, the former president of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, and Denis McDonough, the Obama National Foreign Policy Director spent two hours taking questions on foreign policy issues ranging from Pakistan to Colombia and Israel to Africa.

The event was open to the public. MORE

In 1992, Congresswoman Pat Schroeder told Wendy Kaminer, “Congresswomen aren’t powerful.”

Hard to believe that that was 16 years ago.

Nancy Pelosi was in Congress then. She was first elected to serve in 1987, and became Democratic Whip for one year before being chosen as the leader of the Democrats in 2002 and then, with the Democratic takeover of 2006, being chosen as Speaker of the House.

That’s a woman with power.

In 1992, there were two women in the Senate and 28 women in the House (out of 435).

Today, there are 70 women in the House and 16 in the Senate, as well as three nonvoting women delegates from Guam, the Virgin Islands and Washington, D.C. While it’s still far from a representative sampling of America, it’s better than it was in 1992, right? MORE

Ever since the Bush Administration has taken office, America’s media channels have become lapdogs, seemly taking their direction from the White House press director. They have done a disservice not only to American citizens but to the world as a whole.

Last weekend was no different. On the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, Iraq Veterans Against the War emulated a similar gathering held by 109 Vietnam veterans gathered in Detroit for the first Winter Soldier conference in 1971, where former soldiers presented their accounts of what really happened in Vietnam. This was the panicle moment when the nation pushed for a pull out of that war.

Approximately 300 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans held their own Winter Soldier Conference (http://ivaw.org/wintersoldier) in Maryland, testifying about what has been taking place in Iraq over the past five years, showing pictures and video footage of what we will never see on the Nightly News.

The most coverage I was able to find was on DemocracyNow.org, which was not a surprise, considering their news content delves deeper into the issues that matter versus 60 second clips on NBC or any other mainstream media outlet. This was the only news channel that dedicated time and coverage to this extremely critical news story that every American citizen needs to see and hear. “While the corporate media ignored the story, we broadcast their voices.” MORE

Much as I love to pretend that nasty things like racism and sexism don't exist and go along happily thinking that everyone who votes does so because they genuinely agree with the policies proposed by their candidate, I know deep in my little progressive heart that it ain't always so.

I continue to think that it is so more often than it isn't, but the whole scandal over Rev. Jeremiah Wright had me worried for a while. I just couldn't understand what everyone was so freaked out about. I mean, Pat Buchanan works as a political commentator, and Ann Coulter is a frequent guest on Fox News and nothing I'd heard from Wright was any crazier than anything the two of them had said.

But, well, people seemed bothered by it, though according to polls less so after Obama's milestone speech on race, given right in my current hometown of Philadelphia, PA.

So I turned to someone who knows all about the history of race relations in Pennsylvania, journalist and journalism professor Linn Washington, Jr., of Temple University. Washington is a columnist for the Philadelphia Tribune, America's oldest African-American-owned newspaper, and a graduate of the Yale Law Journalism Fellowship program. MORE

Yes, in the aftermath of March 4, Barack Obama got decisive wins in Wyoming and Mississippi, and loads of fur flew when Geraldine Ferraro said that Obama would not be where he is today if he were white (to which some answered, you're right, he'd have wrapped up the nomination already), and then it was revealed that Obama's pastor had said some not-so-nice things about white America.

But since Ferraro stepped down, refusing to apologize, and Obama gave a significant speech on race and politics just today, I'm not going any further into these controversies. See, I'm funny like that, I think that the election should be about the candidates' policies, not their skin color or gender.

But something else happened in electoral politics in the past couple of weeks that got a little bit less attention than the gaffes by campaign supporters. MORE

Yep, it's over.

John McCain clinched the Republican nomination and Mike Huckabee made a groveling concession speech.

Oh, you meant the Democratic race? No such luck.

Well, luck is a bad thing for me to call it. As a political writer, I should be thrilled that the primary season is going to go on into April, right? Aside from the late nights and the headache I get from listening to Chris Matthews and Tim Russert, I've got another reason to dread the continuation of the primary season: nothing at all was settled on Tuesday night. MORE

I have been thus far unable to find someone who is willing to go on the record with me about Hillary Clinton. If you're a supporter and want to talk to Kaffeine Buzz about her, please email me at the address below and I'll get right back to you.

Until then, I can't go any further with this project until I talk about Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign for the presidency.

Senator Clinton is not the first woman to run for President. That was Victoria Woodhull, back in 1872. Which was, need I remind you, before women were given the vote. Belva Ann Lockwood also ran for president before women voted, and actually won over four thousand all-male votes. In 1964, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Republican, was the first woman candidate in a major party. She won 3.8 percent of the vote. In 1972, Shirley Chisholm, also the first black candidate of a major party, won 152 delegates to the Democratic convention. She was the subject of a documentary in 2004, with the sassy title Shirley Chisholm: Unbought & Unbossed. Plus, she had fabulous glasses. MORE

Another week, another set of victories for Obama and McCain.

It's just not that interesting to keep rehashing these wins, so I'm going to move on from there. I'm also not going to bother with the silly 'plagiarism' cracks that seem to be the worst thing that the candidates can level at each other. We're gearing up for a general election, and we'll have plenty of nasty to go around. I'd rather not jump the gun.

Speaking of nasty, the New York Times printed a story about John McCain that on first read seemed to be a lot of nothing. Basically, McCain aides who wouldn't be named warned a certain (very pretty) female lobbyist away from McCain out of fear of the appearance of impropriety. This was back in 2000, and apparently there was also a question of how much undue influence this lobbyist had. MORE

Last week, Barack Obama and John McCain swept through the Potomac and picked up victories in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. The Republican turnout was low, perhaps because McCain holds a commanding delegate lead and all sorts of Republican heavies are coming out to endorse him now that he's already in essence won the nomination.

Mike Huckabee won't quit yet, though, and continues to get enough of the "Conservative" vote (read: Christian, anti-abortion, Rush Limbaugh-listeners, or just plain McCain haters) to make McCain's life at least a little more annoying.

The Democratic turnout was huge, though, and Obama took 75% of the vote in D.C., 64% in Virginia and 60% in Maryland.

Turning away from campaigning and candidates for a second, there's a whole other side to the election process. There are people who do all the grunt work of making sure the elections go off without a hitch. In these post-2000, electronic voting machine days, that can be a lot of work. Kaffeine Buzz spoke to Lori Plazinski, who works as a Chief Judge at the polls in Maryland on election day, about the inner workings of the voting process. MORE

There was one big loser on Super Tuesday, and it was Mitt Romney.

Sure, he won Massachusetts, the state he used to govern, and Utah, with its large Mormon population. He also took North Dakota.

But it wasn't enough to slow John McCain's momentum. Romney dropped out the next day, leaving three candidates theoretically in the race (Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee haven't quit) but one with the largest chunk of delegates and with conservative radio hosts beginning to make nice.

It's funny, though, to still hear the campaign talked about in terms of McCain vs. Clinton, when it's beginning to look more likely that Obama may be the candidate facing McCain in November.

Super Tuesday was a virtual tie, with Obama taking more states and according to estimates, a small delegate lead. But the biggest sign that the Clinton campaign is in trouble is the money issue. The Clintons put $5 million of their own money into their campaign fund, and put out what the New York Times called a "distress call" for money to supporters. MORE

Ron Rona describes New Orleans as “a city that is striving to retain its culture in a nation that’s starting to look like K-Mart.”

He should know. As part of the band/performance art collective The New Orleans Bingo! Show, he’s from a culture of music that happens far from the tourist throngs, day-glow drinks and neon signs of Bourbon Street.

In dark clubs in the Ninth Ward or Uptown or on the fringes of the French Quarter, in front of mostly locals, the bands play their own songs instead of well-known classics.  They don’t play just jazz, rock or blues, but music that reflects the varied nature of the city.

The members of the Bingo! Show wear black and white face paint and vaudevillian costumes and conduct a bingo game in between carnivalesque musical numbers. Only in New Orleans could such a thing become a phenomenon. It’s miles away from anything experienced in most of America, dotted with chain restaurants and stores with a background of Top 40 pop. MORE

It's the eve of Super Tuesday, and your humble correspondent is completely exhausted. Candidates were dropping too quickly for me to get interviews on all of them, but since my predictions at the beginning of all this were completely wrong, we may have another few weeks or even months of Primary Season before the candidates settle into the real business of attacking the other party.

But in the interests of fuller coverage than the national media brings you, we have an interview for Super Tuesday-eve with a supporter of one of the more interesting and outspoken candidates this year: Ron Paul.

Ron Paul is a representative from Texas and a staunch libertarian, though he's running for the Republican nomination. While not a front-runner, he has gotten between 3% and 19% of the vote in the states that have voted thus far, and has 6 delegates. While this puts him in fourth place among Republicans, he has some of the most ardent supporters of any candidates, and possibly the most yard, window and street signs of any. Chances are, no matter where you live, you've seen a Ron Paul sign. MORE

John Edwards is out of the race.

Rudy Giuliani is out of the race (and we hardly even got to see him run!).

It’s down to two candidates on the Democratic side, who even now are squaring off in possibly their last debate, and four on the Republican side, though John McCain and Mitt Romney are far in the lead—it wouldn’t be impossible for them to get caught, but it’d be hard.

Will we know who the nominees are after Tuesday? Oh, my earlier article about the primary process seems so naïve. Still, there is a chance that one candidate will make a sweep of Super Tuesday (Tsunami Tuesday, Super Duper Tuesday, whatever dumb name the pundits use this week—my favorite is “Ballot Bowl” on CNN for its pure desperate attempt to make voting sound enough like football to get the majority of Americans to care).

It could happen. Or it could stretch on into April and even May—even to the conventions. MORE

So a vote in Florida just wouldn't be a vote without some drama, right?

This time, it's a battleground for the Republicans, where John McCain and Mitt Romney are slugging it out and Rudy Giuliani is gasping for breath.

Giuliani hung most of his hopes on Florida, choosing to cede the other early states to his rivals and focus on Florida and Super Tuesday. Though he spent money in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, you'll hear over and over again that he didn't really "compete." He's got no cover in Florida--everyone knows he's "competing" there. MORE

So you already know that your humble Political Buzz correspondent was in South Carolina for the Democratic primary. My family lives in Hilton Head, and I did for the past three and a half years before returning to school in Philadelphia.

And I am proud of my state today.

500,000 Democratic voters turned out to have their voices heard, including 155,000 more African-American voters than in 2004. In South Carolina, the reddest of red states, the Democratic turnout was higher than the Republican.

The conventional wisdom this year is that Democrats are having a hard time choosing because they like all the candidates, while Republicans are having a hard time choosing because they don’t like any of them. MORE

I stood in line for an hour to see Barack Obama. Kaffeine Buzz not being a household name, I couldn’t get a press pass and had to line up with the rest of the folks. All 5000 of them.

It was like standing in line for a rock concert. Excited volunteers handed out stickers and cheered. We could hear music vaguely thumping in the background. Groups of middle and elementary school kids stood with their teachers. Grey-haired white guys bought Obama T-shirts from vendors who would’ve looked at home at a hip-hop show. Hipsters and hippies, old and young, black and white and every shade in between—it was a much more diverse crowd than I’ve ever seen at a rock show, come to think of it. MORE

We're neck deep in what's turning into a quite nasty campaign season. I honestly had such high hopes at the beginning of this whole mess. After Iowa, things looked great. Voter turnout was up and people seemed to care about changing the rampant partisan bickering and sniping that politics in this country became back in the days of Nixon.

So much for all of that.

Ironically, it seemed to start with Hillary Clinton's "tears that shook the Granite State" moment.

Pundits wrote her off. John Edwards made a comment to the effect that the President has to be "strong." And then she won New Hampshire.

I like to think that it wasn't the choked-up moment that did it. She did, after all, have a commanding lead in the (notoriously inaccurate) polls up until Obama's Iowa win, and she squeaked out a popular vote win so narrow that it was a statistical tie for delegates. MORE

When it came time to draw cards, Barack Obama had all the luck.

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but it appears according to several websites that Obama actually won the delegate count, getting 13 to Clinton’s 12. How does that work? You got me. But here’s a link to the stories that I’m drawing my information from, so you can see if you can figure it out: MSNBC.com and BBC.co.uk.

Part of the reason may be that card draw. Appropriately for Nevada, instead of a coin flip to break a tie, a card is drawn in the caucuses to decide who wins. In both places where a card was drawn, Obama came up the winner. MORE

So now yet another Republican has won yet another state. Well, Mitt Romney would remind you that he’s won Wyoming as well, but nobody really counted them anyway. They were yet another state that moved their caucus ahead of February 5th and lost half their delegates and weren’t even given news coverage. Michigan lost half their delegates as well, but Romney took the remaining ones with an 8-point lead over John McCain.

So technically, yes, Mitt Romney has won Wyoming and Michigan, Mike Huckabee won Iowa, and John McCain won New Hampshire.

What does this mean? It’s still a mess. MORE

Welcome to New Hampshire!  Your humble Political Buzz correspondent has deep ties to the Granite State. My mother grew up there, and my grandmother, uncle and aunt, and my favorite cousin still live there. I own a T-shirt with the outline of the state and the words “Live Free or Die,” the state motto, printed around it.

The New Hampshire primaries are being touted as a huge victory for Hillary Clinton, with as much hyperbole as was used over Barack Obama after Iowa. Obviously, they can be just as wrong. Since neither of the two parties have voted for the same person in the two states, that just means we’ve got a fight. And that those of us who don’t live in Iowa or New Hampshire get to have a say in the process.

There’s also an interesting bit of the process that goes without mention: superdelegates. The superdelegates are elected officials and party leaders who get a vote at the convention. The primary winners get a certain number of delegates out of the state’s total: in the case of New Hampshire, Clinton and Obama both got 9 and John Edwards got the remaining 4. Back in Iowa, Obama got 16, Edwards 15 and Clinton 14. But with the superdelegates who have declared their support for Clinton ahead of any voting (note that they can change their minds at any time, unswayed by any popular vote), she’s way in the lead with 183. Still, with 2025 required to win the nomination, that’s a long way off. MORE

Candidate Issues Chart - Election 2008

Had enough slogans and soundbites and negative ads? We here at Kaffeine Buzz are a little tired of hearing about poll numbers and likability
and the new buzzword, change. We wanted to know what all these people
really stand for--so we found out. And we printed all the information
in a nice neat chart for you to look at. That way you don't have to
spend nearly as much time as we did reading all the candidates' pages
and voting histories.

Think of an issue that isn't on the list? Let us know and we'll try to
find out where they stand on it, too.

Click here to view the chart, which features where each candidate, both Republican and Democrat, stands on the issues that matter.