Showing posts with label Fred Thompson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fred Thompson. Show all posts
Sunday, January 20, 2008
The End of Fred?
I thought so last night. Everyone's talking about Fred Thompson's "impressive" delivery of his post South Carolina primary speech, but as I sat alone in my living room with the lights off and the volume cranked up I could have sworn I was witnessing the end of Fred's campaign.
A word of caution to every candidate, never deliver a speech when less than 5% of the vote's been counted, and never say what Thompson said last night: "We're turning in a little early tonight," "I want to take a minute to speak to you from my heart," and "I want to thank all the people that have travelled with me all these months"—I was seconds away from making calls to friends and family celebrating his withdrawal.
The most poorly managed presidential campaign in recent memory? You bet.
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Slavery is Over. Deal.
per CNN
LEXINGTON, South Carolina (CNN) — Eight Confederate flag-waving men protested outside a Fred Thompson campaign stop Wednesday evening, one week after Thompson and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney criticized the Confederate flag during the CNN/YouTube debate in Florida.
Clad in jackets bearing the Confederate flag and holding signs reading "South Carolina hates Fred Thompson" and "Fred Thompson go home," the protesters said Thompson was not a "true southerner."
_____
Not only is supporting the Confederate flag in the year 2007 politically-incorrect, it's about as un-American as you can get. I'd be drop dead terrified if any legitimate presidential candidate polling above 5% was in favor of increasing the use of the Confederate flag. Slavery is over. Deal.
An early voting state + a radical group with (still) a considerable amount of support = not a good filter for presidential candidates.
LEXINGTON, South Carolina (CNN) — Eight Confederate flag-waving men protested outside a Fred Thompson campaign stop Wednesday evening, one week after Thompson and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney criticized the Confederate flag during the CNN/YouTube debate in Florida.
Clad in jackets bearing the Confederate flag and holding signs reading "South Carolina hates Fred Thompson" and "Fred Thompson go home," the protesters said Thompson was not a "true southerner."
_____
Not only is supporting the Confederate flag in the year 2007 politically-incorrect, it's about as un-American as you can get. I'd be drop dead terrified if any legitimate presidential candidate polling above 5% was in favor of increasing the use of the Confederate flag. Slavery is over. Deal.
An early voting state + a radical group with (still) a considerable amount of support = not a good filter for presidential candidates.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Here's Johnny
It seems the McCain campaign in New Hampshire is circulating a Union Leader article on the Senator's recent gains in the state.
So what's the reason behind McCain's recent success? Well, much of it is due to Mitt Romney's recent downticks in New Hampshire polls from higher positions he held earlier this summer. Some of Romney's old supporters have moved over to Giuliani, but more voters seem to be heading back to McCain.
New Hampshire Republican primary voters (unlike their Democratic counterparts) will vote for the candidate they think is the "true conservative" in the pack. Even if Romney has the organization and money to beat out his Democratic competition in a national election, it seems Granite Staters are beginning to realize Romney may not be as solid a conservative candidate as they thought. Took them long enough....
Funny that so many articles predicted a McCain dropout after the release of Q2 fundraising figures and staff abandonments (One, Two, Three) when in fact McCain was subtly reinventing his campaign and recharging his fiery personality for an autumn surge.
And it isn't even all about the polls. The fact that McCain has bounced back from national numbers in the single digits only two months ago to nearly twenty percent now is less important than the fact that people are no longer using his name as the punch-line of jokes.
As GOP "savior" Fred Thompson seems all but dead after falling from grace with his campaign's botched launch, McCain's biggest fall was out of the sky over Vietnam forty years ago. That sure didn't stop him, did it?
(photo credit: © 2007 by Luke N. Vargas. All Rights Reserved.)
Sunday, September 9, 2007
The Scene
When I press the play button on my voice recorder and listen to the sounds of what's known as 'the spray,' I quickly turn down the volume. For the first few seconds, as a dozen photographers scrambe down the stairs from a press holding area towards the debate stage, the tape plays back in bangs and clatters. Equipment pushes against bodies and silent breathes become noisy. One photographer jokes and yells "dive! dive! dive!" as he jumps down the steps.
At the end of a bright concrete hallway is the darkened floor of the arena. We wait in the shadows under a makeshift television stage, hidden from the view of the crowd. With no warning an announcer's voice fills the room and begins introducing the debate participants. As the last name is read off and Brit Hume pauses for an ad break before the event begins a hand signal is made from halfway across the floor and the race begins. Our footsteps dampened by thick red carpeting, the photographers find the shortest route towards the base of the debate stage. Up the aisles and around the crowd, the looming wall of red, white, and blue seems to lean over us as we draw closer. Arriving there, however, the shiny jewels of the television set and the polished contestants are unimposing, personal, and imperfect.
We're told we have four minutes to take all the photos we can. Some of the photographers kneel down front and center, aiming to catch the head of a mayor or governor at the foot of the towering and colorful facade, while others set up tripods at stage left and catch each man lined up like dominos in matching suits and ties. I realized that every photo I would see in the morning's paper would be taken by someone within feet of me. The guy yelling "dive! dive! dive!" would have his shots in hundreds of papers from the Seattle Times to the Houston Chronicle, and it's likely I would wind up with a photo nearly identical to his. So took a photo of the photographers taking their photos, because I knew that would never be published.
It was oddly silent standing at the base of a television scene. Somehow, in the same room as thousands of students, noisy Ron Paul supporters, and millions of dollars of equipment, cameras, and lights there didn't seem to be any noise; I'm used to more noise coming from ten kids at the back of the high school auditorium. The silence is a blessing because it opens up a window into the movements and noises of the candidates on stage. As the photographers moved around and and angled for their shots I could clearly hear Mitt Romney whisper "time to suck it in, guys," and Duncan Hunter repeatedly saying "we've got a nice crowd here tonight," making the nerdy and obvious comments to himself that nobody responded to.
I lost track of time and didn't hear the press wranglers reminding us how long we had left until it was time to go. We all moved off to stage left and slipped behind the tall black curtain. I couldn't help but peer back behind me and see the stage lights brighten up a notch and the quirky individualism of each candidate turn to the polite and polished faces of the television. The security guard near us around stated firmly that there were to be no photos taken back stage and I faced forward again and marched towards the cement passageway. Cindy McCain leaned on her crutches to my left and gazed back towards the light of the stage.
It took a few minutes for the group of photographers to find its way back to the two hockey training rinks that comprised the spin room and blogger area; without a guide our knack for taking photos served us little in navigating through the intricacies of a place we weren't familiar with. A UNH student with some sort of yarn pullover and tangled hair took the lead and helped us back. He was holding a tiny Nikon Coolpix and was busy looking through his pictures. The guy from the AP looked at me and laughed when he saw the guy was wearing a press pass just like us, but I merely smiled back--though I may have had more equipment than my UNH counterpart, there's a pact between "new media" people that can't be broken--we're still bloggers and student journalists, and five years ago we never would have ended up on the floor of a Fox News Debate.
We pushed through an unmarked door and walked past some students on their way to the weight room before coming upon the converted hockey rinks again. The red carpet of the spin room glistened in the light of the empty television set, and a lonely maintenance worker walked around and made sure everything was working. I broke from the group and followed the plexiglass siding of the rink around the building towards the exit and went outside. To my left was a giant white trailer the size of an 18-wheeler with its supports embedded into the grass outside the arena. The trailer methodically whined as hidden engines supplied power through dozens of thick plastic tubes that snaked back into the building and into the laptops and battery chargers. Some Austrian journalists sat on the railing by the door and had a smoke while reviewing their footage, and I passed by them and up a dark stairway.
Just a little ways up was the main entrance to the arena. I walked through the last of the protesters and sign-holding supporters, all of us clueless as to what was being said inside or whose candidate was really standing out. What had been a noisy and raucous area of competing chants only an hour earlier was peaceful now. At the end of the long fence that had held the crowd back was a simple piece of folded plasterboard stretched out beneath a twisted tree. The two guys watching over it said it was the "Memorial Wall," an imitation of the stone monuments in Washington D.C. of fallen soldiers from decades past. A hundred yards from debating politicians inside an enclosed and vibrant sports hall was a solemn reminder of what should be the most important issue of debate. The first three years of names, about 3,700, were neatly painted on the gray board, with the most recent victims from Iraq printed out on computer paper and waiting to be painted later. One of the men said the woman who did the painting found the task so painful that she had to stop down for a while.
I headed back down the stairs and into the blogger room again, taking a seat in the very back row and spreading my equipment over the table. A number of people at the front of the room typed rapidly, glancing up the television monitors of the debates and summing up video with a few sentences of a blogger's words.
About an hour later I was tapped on the shoulder and told that the spray for the end of the debate was getting ready to leave. I packed up my gear and prepared myself for heading out onto the debate floor and obnoxiously taking a bunch of pictures of candidates I was gradually losing more and more interest in. Not once during my hour of rest in the middle of the debate did the blogger room ever audibly react to anything that was said on the television screens, and I was curious to see what would be spun into interesting news from all of it. The second spray in the arena was longer and less interesting than the first. Students tried to get autographs and pictures themselves, and I ended up trapped next to Brit Hume and Ann Romney on the questioners stage, wondering how long it'd be before I could head back to the spin room.
I had seen a few fashionable twenty-somethings with special VIP passes running past us on the way into the arena after the debate, and sure enough the spin room was packed with smooth talking representatives eager to let everyone know why their candidate really stood out. "Hannity and Colmes" was already live on tv, and Rudy Giuliani smiled under the bright spotlights that filled the room. John McCain entered through the back entrance of the television set and an assistant slipped an earpiece and transmitter onto him before he wandered over to the wing of the stage.
With the cameras rolling and the reporters talking the room started to bustle with activity. I found a step ladder and peered across the floor, locating the most congested areas, assuming there was someone interesting in front of the groups of reporters and cameramen there. Sam Brownback stood underneath an awning with his name on it and took questions from everybody with a pad of paper or a microphone. Each individual had their own reason for being there and a particular question that they wanted to ask, but watching all of it, the questions and answers lacked any coherence.
Some other candidates worked the crowd too, signing autographs and creating semicircles of press in front of them. One girl even managed to get a photograph with Duncan Hunter and said her dad would be so proud to see it. I found the "exciting and unpredictable" spin room to be the epitome of a messed up election process. So much was made of Fred Thompson's decision to skip the debate and his lack of respect for the New Hampshire way of campaigning, but I didn't see anything New Hampshire about manipulative men and women in suits working the television cameras either, and with every candidate going on Hannity and Colmes to explain why they were the clear winner, it seemed just as much an advertisement as Thompson's 30-second spot.
I spent another few minutes taking photos and saying hello to some of the campaign staffers that I knew before heading out to my car. I popped in an old CD instead of listening to talk radio, and drove the two hours back to Boston. It was 3:00 A.M. before I finally went to sleep, but I slept excited to go back to school and my US Government class. Perhaps fifty minutes of Plato, Machiavelli, and history could enlighten me more than ten hours at a debate.
(all photos: © 2007 by Luke N. Vargas. All Rights Reserved.)
At the end of a bright concrete hallway is the darkened floor of the arena. We wait in the shadows under a makeshift television stage, hidden from the view of the crowd. With no warning an announcer's voice fills the room and begins introducing the debate participants. As the last name is read off and Brit Hume pauses for an ad break before the event begins a hand signal is made from halfway across the floor and the race begins. Our footsteps dampened by thick red carpeting, the photographers find the shortest route towards the base of the debate stage. Up the aisles and around the crowd, the looming wall of red, white, and blue seems to lean over us as we draw closer. Arriving there, however, the shiny jewels of the television set and the polished contestants are unimposing, personal, and imperfect.
We're told we have four minutes to take all the photos we can. Some of the photographers kneel down front and center, aiming to catch the head of a mayor or governor at the foot of the towering and colorful facade, while others set up tripods at stage left and catch each man lined up like dominos in matching suits and ties. I realized that every photo I would see in the morning's paper would be taken by someone within feet of me. The guy yelling "dive! dive! dive!" would have his shots in hundreds of papers from the Seattle Times to the Houston Chronicle, and it's likely I would wind up with a photo nearly identical to his. So took a photo of the photographers taking their photos, because I knew that would never be published.
It was oddly silent standing at the base of a television scene. Somehow, in the same room as thousands of students, noisy Ron Paul supporters, and millions of dollars of equipment, cameras, and lights there didn't seem to be any noise; I'm used to more noise coming from ten kids at the back of the high school auditorium. The silence is a blessing because it opens up a window into the movements and noises of the candidates on stage. As the photographers moved around and and angled for their shots I could clearly hear Mitt Romney whisper "time to suck it in, guys," and Duncan Hunter repeatedly saying "we've got a nice crowd here tonight," making the nerdy and obvious comments to himself that nobody responded to.
I lost track of time and didn't hear the press wranglers reminding us how long we had left until it was time to go. We all moved off to stage left and slipped behind the tall black curtain. I couldn't help but peer back behind me and see the stage lights brighten up a notch and the quirky individualism of each candidate turn to the polite and polished faces of the television. The security guard near us around stated firmly that there were to be no photos taken back stage and I faced forward again and marched towards the cement passageway. Cindy McCain leaned on her crutches to my left and gazed back towards the light of the stage.
It took a few minutes for the group of photographers to find its way back to the two hockey training rinks that comprised the spin room and blogger area; without a guide our knack for taking photos served us little in navigating through the intricacies of a place we weren't familiar with. A UNH student with some sort of yarn pullover and tangled hair took the lead and helped us back. He was holding a tiny Nikon Coolpix and was busy looking through his pictures. The guy from the AP looked at me and laughed when he saw the guy was wearing a press pass just like us, but I merely smiled back--though I may have had more equipment than my UNH counterpart, there's a pact between "new media" people that can't be broken--we're still bloggers and student journalists, and five years ago we never would have ended up on the floor of a Fox News Debate.
We pushed through an unmarked door and walked past some students on their way to the weight room before coming upon the converted hockey rinks again. The red carpet of the spin room glistened in the light of the empty television set, and a lonely maintenance worker walked around and made sure everything was working. I broke from the group and followed the plexiglass siding of the rink around the building towards the exit and went outside. To my left was a giant white trailer the size of an 18-wheeler with its supports embedded into the grass outside the arena. The trailer methodically whined as hidden engines supplied power through dozens of thick plastic tubes that snaked back into the building and into the laptops and battery chargers. Some Austrian journalists sat on the railing by the door and had a smoke while reviewing their footage, and I passed by them and up a dark stairway.
Just a little ways up was the main entrance to the arena. I walked through the last of the protesters and sign-holding supporters, all of us clueless as to what was being said inside or whose candidate was really standing out. What had been a noisy and raucous area of competing chants only an hour earlier was peaceful now. At the end of the long fence that had held the crowd back was a simple piece of folded plasterboard stretched out beneath a twisted tree. The two guys watching over it said it was the "Memorial Wall," an imitation of the stone monuments in Washington D.C. of fallen soldiers from decades past. A hundred yards from debating politicians inside an enclosed and vibrant sports hall was a solemn reminder of what should be the most important issue of debate. The first three years of names, about 3,700, were neatly painted on the gray board, with the most recent victims from Iraq printed out on computer paper and waiting to be painted later. One of the men said the woman who did the painting found the task so painful that she had to stop down for a while.
I headed back down the stairs and into the blogger room again, taking a seat in the very back row and spreading my equipment over the table. A number of people at the front of the room typed rapidly, glancing up the television monitors of the debates and summing up video with a few sentences of a blogger's words.
About an hour later I was tapped on the shoulder and told that the spray for the end of the debate was getting ready to leave. I packed up my gear and prepared myself for heading out onto the debate floor and obnoxiously taking a bunch of pictures of candidates I was gradually losing more and more interest in. Not once during my hour of rest in the middle of the debate did the blogger room ever audibly react to anything that was said on the television screens, and I was curious to see what would be spun into interesting news from all of it. The second spray in the arena was longer and less interesting than the first. Students tried to get autographs and pictures themselves, and I ended up trapped next to Brit Hume and Ann Romney on the questioners stage, wondering how long it'd be before I could head back to the spin room.
I had seen a few fashionable twenty-somethings with special VIP passes running past us on the way into the arena after the debate, and sure enough the spin room was packed with smooth talking representatives eager to let everyone know why their candidate really stood out. "Hannity and Colmes" was already live on tv, and Rudy Giuliani smiled under the bright spotlights that filled the room. John McCain entered through the back entrance of the television set and an assistant slipped an earpiece and transmitter onto him before he wandered over to the wing of the stage.
With the cameras rolling and the reporters talking the room started to bustle with activity. I found a step ladder and peered across the floor, locating the most congested areas, assuming there was someone interesting in front of the groups of reporters and cameramen there. Sam Brownback stood underneath an awning with his name on it and took questions from everybody with a pad of paper or a microphone. Each individual had their own reason for being there and a particular question that they wanted to ask, but watching all of it, the questions and answers lacked any coherence.
Some other candidates worked the crowd too, signing autographs and creating semicircles of press in front of them. One girl even managed to get a photograph with Duncan Hunter and said her dad would be so proud to see it. I found the "exciting and unpredictable" spin room to be the epitome of a messed up election process. So much was made of Fred Thompson's decision to skip the debate and his lack of respect for the New Hampshire way of campaigning, but I didn't see anything New Hampshire about manipulative men and women in suits working the television cameras either, and with every candidate going on Hannity and Colmes to explain why they were the clear winner, it seemed just as much an advertisement as Thompson's 30-second spot.
I spent another few minutes taking photos and saying hello to some of the campaign staffers that I knew before heading out to my car. I popped in an old CD instead of listening to talk radio, and drove the two hours back to Boston. It was 3:00 A.M. before I finally went to sleep, but I slept excited to go back to school and my US Government class. Perhaps fifty minutes of Plato, Machiavelli, and history could enlighten me more than ten hours at a debate.
(all photos: © 2007 by Luke N. Vargas. All Rights Reserved.)
Here's Some Filler
Everyone seems to be focusing on Fred Thompson these days and why he chose Jay Leno over New Hampshire.
I don't particularly care, and I won't spend any time writing about it, but since I'm working on a more interesting piece, why not put up the one picture that says it all?
(photo credit: © 2007 by Luke N. Vargas. All Rights Reserved.)
I don't particularly care, and I won't spend any time writing about it, but since I'm working on a more interesting piece, why not put up the one picture that says it all?
(photo credit: © 2007 by Luke N. Vargas. All Rights Reserved.)
Friday, April 13, 2007
The Republican Nominee Polls Get Even Weirder
As the Democratic nomination essentially turns into a three man (man and woman, rather) race, the Republican contest isn't getting any easier to sort out. Check out the following LA Times/Bloomberg Poll:
Rudy Giuliani - 29%
Fred Thompson - 15%
John McCain - 12%
Mitt Romney - 8%
Newt Gingrich - 7%
Tommy Thomson - 3%
Sam Brownback - 2%
Duncan Hunter - 2%
Tom Tancredo - 2%
UNSURE - 14%
The entrance of Fred Thompson into the race, in my mind, only shows that even fewer Republican voters are really commited to any one candidate at this point. Reagan did a pretty good job of balancing the actor with the president, but Thompson makes everything seem like it's primetime TV. Long and short of it, he won't get too far.
If you add Thompson's 15% to Gingrich's 7% (I know some people out there are convinced he might be able to take his campaign deep into 2008 (should he announce), but a vote for Gingrich at this stage is simply a vote for the Republican Platform 101) and the 14% camped in the "unsure" realm, and you've got yourself 36% of the Republican voting pool.
It's clear this 36% won't go to Giuliani--the candidates they are alligned with now don't represent the more liberal politics that Giulini has been attached with.
With a loaded wallet going into the summer months, Mitt Romney COULD be the recipient of a lot of attention and COULD start to move up in the polls, but if he thinks he can win this contest with his money he's sorely wrong--second-hand reports from fellow students and friends who interned with Mitt while he was governor indicate to me that some of those closest to him aren't the ones that love him the most, and in fact, some of the Republicans I know who jumped on the opportunity to work for the Republican governor left his office only months later as Democrats.
Where is that 36% going? Suggestions?
Rudy Giuliani - 29%
Fred Thompson - 15%
John McCain - 12%
Mitt Romney - 8%
Newt Gingrich - 7%
Tommy Thomson - 3%
Sam Brownback - 2%
Duncan Hunter - 2%
Tom Tancredo - 2%
UNSURE - 14%
The entrance of Fred Thompson into the race, in my mind, only shows that even fewer Republican voters are really commited to any one candidate at this point. Reagan did a pretty good job of balancing the actor with the president, but Thompson makes everything seem like it's primetime TV. Long and short of it, he won't get too far.
If you add Thompson's 15% to Gingrich's 7% (I know some people out there are convinced he might be able to take his campaign deep into 2008 (should he announce), but a vote for Gingrich at this stage is simply a vote for the Republican Platform 101) and the 14% camped in the "unsure" realm, and you've got yourself 36% of the Republican voting pool.
It's clear this 36% won't go to Giuliani--the candidates they are alligned with now don't represent the more liberal politics that Giulini has been attached with.
With a loaded wallet going into the summer months, Mitt Romney COULD be the recipient of a lot of attention and COULD start to move up in the polls, but if he thinks he can win this contest with his money he's sorely wrong--second-hand reports from fellow students and friends who interned with Mitt while he was governor indicate to me that some of those closest to him aren't the ones that love him the most, and in fact, some of the Republicans I know who jumped on the opportunity to work for the Republican governor left his office only months later as Democrats.
Where is that 36% going? Suggestions?
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