Garance Franke-Ruta

Health care coverage is a “perk.” That’s the word from Edwards senior adviser Joe Trippi on why John Edwards‘s proposed bill to strip members of Congress and senior administration officials of health insurance is constitutional under the 27th Amendment, which bars changes to Congressional “compensation” between general elections. “It’s not salary compensation,” he said. “It’s […]

John Edwards, in a move that violates long-standing Democratic campaign protocol, won’t say that he’ll support the Democratic nominee for president if it is Hillary Clinton. This unusually sour and divisive move is clearly designed to undercut support for Clinton, whom Edwards is targeting in an increasingly bitter fashion in Iowa. As Chris Dodd said […]

Over at The Stump, Noam Scheiber mentions something that’s become part of the John Edwards Iowa lore but which, it was pointed out to me over the summer, is not actually correct: one reason people think Edwards is well-situated in Iowa (more so than the polls would suggest, in any case): He spent a lot […]

This hasn’t gotten much attention in the national press, but Iowa politics sites are starting to write about how Republican Iowa Rep. Tom Latham introduced a sense of the Congress resolution into the House a little over a week ago condemning state efforts to give licenses to illegal immigrants — a policy for which all […]

This is the new Iowa television spot from the John Edwards campaign:

A reader writes: I got an email from the Obama campaign today with an excerpt from his recent speech in Iowa that is gettting such good reviews. From the attached video I see that Obama’s intro music is the same as that of the Chicago Bulls (Alan Parsons Project “Sirius”), made famous during Michael Jordan‘s […]

The WSJ has a fascinating piece on how executive women identify with Hillary Clinton‘s struggles to make it in a man’s political world, then unpacks the reason that she’s not getting more support from women like her: They’re probably, like the majority of higher-earning people in America, Republicans. “Executive and professional women with incomes over […]

I have thought to myself on occasion over the course of this long campaign that someone could really write a full-time blog that consisted of nothing but corrections of misrepresentations of Hillary Clinton‘s positions and history, as some tried to do for Howard Dean back in the Dean days. Her campaign seems to have finally […]

The state director of the Ohio branch of the national Christian Coalition of America has released a statement distancing himself from the Rev. Pat Robertson‘s endorsement of Rudy Giuliani, as well. As in Iowa, the Ohio Christian Coalition broke with the national organization in 2006, changing its name and re-organizing as the non-profit Ohio Christian […]

Lest anyone reading my earlier item think I believe Jeff Dinelli‘s “preposterous conspiracy theory” that Joe Trippi is some kind of Barack Obama plant inside the John Edwards campaign working to take Hillary Clinton out, I’d like to make clear that I believe nothing of the sort. What I do know, however, is that Trippi […]