Friday, January 30, 2009

Opinion: Who should the new GOP Chair be and what should his focus be?

GOP insiders say Friday’s contest to elect the next chairman of the Republican National Committee will be a long and drawn-out affair, with multiple ballots necessary to determine the winner.

In part, it’s a reflection of a party that, even after a nearly three month-long chairman’s race, remains deeply uncertain of which candidate can best lead the GOP back to power.

Linda Ackerman, the Republican committeewoman for California, said Wednesday that she was waiting to see the candidates interact with each other at the RNC meeting at Washington Capital Hilton hotel before making up her mind.

“They’re all saying pretty much the same thing. They’re all saying what we want to do for the party. They all have a little different twist, but they all know what we want,” Ackerman said. “Other than that, I just want to get a sense, a personal sense, of who would be the best one to lead.”

The RNC’s voting rules require a candidate to collect a simple majority of 85 votes in order to claim victory. In the absence of a consensus choice among the field of five candidates, though, the election appears destined for numerous ballots, involving many hours of deliberations punctuated by intense lobbying and political horse-trading between votes.

Public estimates of the five candidates’ support have tended to place incumbent RNC Chairman Mike Duncan at the head of the pack, followed by former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele and South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Katon Dawson, with Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell behind them.

This story continues at: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0109/18188.html

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Analysis: What does the new president need to say to the American people in his inaugural address? (not a prediction, but what he should say)

'I Was Summoned by My Country'
Nobody knows, yet, but maybe there's a clue in the inaugural addresses of the past. The headline of this post comes from George Washington's first:

Among the vicissitudes incident to life no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the 14th day of the present month.

On the one hand, I was summoned by my Country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love, from a retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection, and, in my flattering hopes, with an immutable decision, as the asylum of my declining years -- a retreat which was rendered every day more necessary as well as more dear to me by the addition of habit to inclination, and of frequent interruptions in my health to the gradual waste committed on it by time.

On the other hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies.

(Yes, those are some seriously long sentences.)

You can read every inaugural address ever made at a web site set up by Yale Law School.
By David Marino-Nachison November 19, 2008; 3:09 PM ET Category: Inaugural History