CJR

The entirely predictable failure of Americans Elect

Fri, 18 May 2012 11:03:33 -0500

By Brendan Nyhan On Thursday, the board of Americans Elect folded its presidential nominating process after the set of declared candidates repeatedly failed to muster the support required to receive the group's backing. Despite spending $35 million on "swank offices", a fancy website, and expensive ballot access drives, Americans Elect ultimately attracted neither a credible...

The Obama camp serves up a Bain story

Fri, 18 May 2012 07:31:43 -0500

By Jay Jones NEVADA — One of the moments in the 2012 presidential race that we all know was coming arrived this week: the Obama campaign launched its first round of attacks on Mitt Romney over his tenure at Bain Capital. Unsurprisingly, there was a swing-state emphasis to the offensive. In addition to new TV commercials and a website targeting “Romney...

Out of the living room, onto the trail

Thu, 17 May 2012 15:14:00 -0500

By Walter Shapiro The Living Room War was launched this week—the ferocious bombardment of attack ads that will make turning on a television in an up-for-grabs state like Ohio a high-risk, wear-a-metal-helmet venture for the next 25 weeks until Election Day. But to cover the biggest TV advertising blitz in American political history smartly and to understand its strategic implications, reporters and...

Debating Amendment One in North Carolina

Wed, 16 May 2012 15:30:34 -0500

By Andria Krewson NORTH CAROLINA — Last week, North Carolina voters overwhelmingly passed Amendment One to the state constitution, defining marriage as between one man and one woman only. The May 8 vote—coming a day before President Obama’s declaration of support for gay marriage—produced renewed national debate about gay marriage as well as jokes portraying this state as backwards. Amendment One...

Health costs: Is Mass. the only model?

Tue, 15 May 2012 15:19:50 -0500

By Trudy Lieberman We all know Obamacare is Romneycare and Romneycare is Obamacare and that the Bay State has set the standard for everything health reform—from the individual mandate right down to ways to cut its gigantic medical bill. Or at least the media have passed along that narrative. The Wall Street Journal’s recent piece, “Same State, New Stab at Health...

For TV, campaigns create big winners, (relative) losers

Tue, 15 May 2012 06:50:00 -0500

By Erika Fry When Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum suspended his presidential campaign last month, the former Pennsylvania senator all but sealed Mitt Romney’s easy victory in the state’s April 24 primary. Santorum also dashed the expectations of his home state’s broadcasters, who were counting on the candidate to keep the race competitive and their ad inventory—much of which had already been reserved...

What it takes to win the White House

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:00:19 -0500

By Jordan Michael Smith The Candidate: What It Takes to Win—And Hold—The White House | By Samuel L. Popkin | Oxford University Press | 350 pages, $27.95 Academic political science and Washington policymaking once had a close relationship: during the Franklin Roosevelt and Kennedy administrations, for example. No longer. As Karl Rove writes as a blurb on this book, most contemporary political science...

Pushing back, making connections

Mon, 14 May 2012 11:29:39 -0500

By Anna Clark MICHIGAN — Quinn Klinefelter is a longtime news editor at WDET, the National Public Radio station in Detroit. His voice is easily recognizable, and so, apparently, is his face. Klinefelter recalls walking down a block, absorbed in his thoughts, when he passed a man he’d never met. They were several yards past each other when the man turned back and...

In Nevada, a candidate’s fecklessness on full display

Fri, 11 May 2012 15:42:02 -0500

By Jay Jones NEVADA — In this state, where it’s legal to carry an unconcealed handgun, John Oceguera, the Speaker of the Nevada Assembly, didn’t even need to unholster his pistol to shoot himself in the foot. He’d probably prefer to imagine taking aim at the messengers—the political journalists who roasted him on two television programs, and in print, this week. Oceguera, a...

Mapmaker, mapmaker, make me a map...

Thu, 10 May 2012 12:07:16 -0500

By Walter Shapiro For a newspaper that believes that a decent fraction of its readers know that Kurt Weill wrote the music for The Threepenny Opera (51 Down in Wednesday’s Crossword), The New York Times curiously assumes complete amnesia when it comes to presidential campaigns. The hanging-chad long count in Florida that decided the 2000 election—down the memory hole. The 60,000-vote shift in...

How an anti-tax HIT squad employs the press

Thu, 10 May 2012 11:42:25 -0500

By Trudy Lieberman The small-business community has revved up its campaign to repeal a tax on insurance companies intended to help finance subsidies for the uninsured, a part of President Obama’s healthcare reform that would take effect in 2014. Congress expected the tax to raise some $87 billion over the 10 years the subsidies were funded. It is aimed at...

In Ohio, political money gets around

Thu, 10 May 2012 00:20:00 -0500

By T.C. Brown OHIO—A thorough peek behind a curtain of campaign cash this week by the Dayton Daily News shed real light on one way that political money moves. The newspaper, in a story crafted by Jeremy P. Kelley, walked readers through the legal, but perhaps not widely-known, practices by which money donated to a candidate on cruise control is diverted...

A (blurry) snapshot of influence peddling

Wed, 09 May 2012 11:15:51 -0500

By Mary Winter COLORADO—A CBS News undercover video of a Republican fundraiser earlier this year gave viewers a tantalizing glimpse of a $10,000-a-head political shindig at one of the most exclusive resorts in the country. The sometimes-grainy footage showed a dozen GOP congressmen in shorts and sandals enjoying a sun-splashed weekend at the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo, Florida. “But...

Obama 'evolves,' Romney 'flip-flops'

Tue, 08 May 2012 12:00:00 -0500

By Brendan Nyhan

Reporting on the hand that feeds

Tue, 08 May 2012 11:30:00 -0500

By Andria Krewson NORTH CAROLINA—On April 27, the Federal Communications Commission made what CJR called “a good step toward transparency in the realm of money and politics” by ruling that local TV stations must move online their paper data on political ad buys. Network-affiliated stations in the top 50 markets will have to do this likely in the...