Free Republic

Inside the Strangest Job on the Campaign Trail "What about your gaffes?" Campaign trackers make sure candidates can't escape slipups.By Emma RollerKelli Farr remembers running through a cornfield after getting yelled at by a crowd of Sarah Palin fans.It was 2008, and Farr was working as a campaign tracker—someone employed by an opposing political party to follow a candidate on the campaign trail, documenting his or her every move, in hopes of capturing a slipup......Farr is now the vice president and director of tracking at American Bridge, a Democratic organization that is sisters with Media Matters and Correct the Record,...

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee would like you to donate. Right now. The campaign organization, hoping to lead Democrats to control of the House come November, has spent the past week sending out a series of strongly-worded, seemingly desperate, fundraising e-mails trying to get supporters to donate. "All hope is lost," reads the subject of one such e-mail. "We're in serious trouble," it continues. "Karl Rove and the Koch Brothers are massively outspending us...If we get blown out right now, we might as well give up hope until 2016." Another e-mail says Democratic campaigners weren't ready for Republican attack ads....

RUSH: There was a story -- I intended to already be into my media Stack here 'cause it's great, but something just struck me. I didn't go into detail on it yesterday. I intended to, I just didn't get to it. There's another thing I didn't get to yesterday. There's a bunch of polling data out, and I saved it for today, that American people and African-Americans think race relations are worse today than since Obama was elected, and even an Obama pollster is admitting this, and I've got the sound bites. But there was another story yesterday that I...

Is it just me or does this look a little bit like campaign finance fraud? Liberal darling and free-birth-control advocate Sandra Fluke is her own biggest donor in her state Senate race, according to official California campaign finance reports.Fluke donated $12,000 to her campaign and $4,826.27 in non-monetary contributions. While $16,826.27 may not sound like a lot, Fluke also loaned her campaign $100,000.Where does a 2012 law school grad working as a social justice attorney get a loan that size? Her campaign never responded to a Washington Examiner inquiry, so weÂ’re left to speculate. The Examiner piece by Ashe Schow...

Soon there will be three anti-Clinton books on the market, which is apparently enough to have gotten under the skin of Team Hillary. The First Family Detail by Ronald Kessler, set for release next month, will join Clinton, Inc. by the Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halper and Blood Feud by Ed Klein on bookshelves. Yesterday we reported that Clinton, Inc. has shot up the charts and now both Halper and Klein’s books are outselling Hillary Clinton’s recent memoir Hard Choices. “With Klein, Halper and Kessler, we now have a Hat Trick of despicable actors concocting trashy nonsense,” Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill...

Republican threats to impeach President Barack Obama are guaranteed to generate two things: Democratic outrage and Democratic cash. Sarah Palin this week joined a long line of Republican firebrands in raising the specter of impeachment against the president, writing in a Breitbart.com op-ed: “The many impeachable offenses of Barack Obama can no longer be ignored. If after all this he’s not impeachable, then no one is.” And like clockwork, the Democratic outrage machine sprang to life — using her comments to mobilize grass-roots supporters and raise small dollar campaign donations from Obama die-hards. The result was a flood of grass-roots...

An IRS employee was suspended for 100 days for using his job at the agency’s help line to try to convince callers to vote for President Obama, a government watchdog agency announced Thursday. The employee, whose name wasn’t mentioned in the announcement from the Office of Special Counsel, admitted to using his job for political purposes and agreed to the settlement that involved a 100-day suspension. “OSC’s complaint alleged that, when fielding taxpayers’ questions on an IRS customer service help line, the employee repeatedly urged taxpayers to re-elect President Obama in 2012 by delivering a chant based on the spelling...

Racist attack on GOP House challenger Glo Smith follows recent pattern of hate toward black Republicans.A Florida Republican congressional candidate’s campaign sign was vandalized with whiteface paint last week in a district with overwhelmingly Democratic voter registration. The attack follows a string of bias incidents against black Republicans. Glo Smith, who reports that she has also had a number of signs stolen, tells National Review Online she became aware of the racist defacement of an eight-foot-by-four-foot sign Tuesday. The sign was situated on private property in view of Interstate 10 in Jacksonville. The vandal sprayed white paint over the face...

Two gaffes bookended Clinton’s week: Comments that she and former President Bill Cilinton were “dead broke” when they left the White House took hold of the coverage of her book tour on Monday, and a contentious exchange with NPR’s Terry Gross on gay marriage again derailed the focus of her memoir “Hard Choices” on Thursday. The rollout drew criticism not just from Republicans, but also nonpartisan reporters that have covered her for years. Mark Halperin, part of the reporting team that produced “Game Change,” an in-depth look at the 2008 campaign, said the one-time candidate was “very rusty.” The book...

DENVER — Rep. Cory Gardner of Colorado said Thursday he supports granting citizenship to people who enter the country illegally and serve in the U.S. military. Photo - Rep. Cory Gardner is challenging Democratic Sen Mark Udall and has been criticized for not favoring a broader path to citizenship for people living in the country illegally. (Denver Post file) + caption The Republican is challenging Democratic Sen Mark Udall and has been criticized for not favoring a broader path to citizenship for people living in the country illegally. Gardner's statements, in an interview with The Associated Press, came a day...

A federal judge on Monday blocked Minnesota officials from enforcing a state campaign finance law on donations. The Minnesota law's days were numbered, observers say, after a U.S. Supreme Court decision in a separate case last month. That ruling, in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, struck down aggregate contribution limits in federal campaigns. About a week after it was announced, a group of Minnesota candidates and donors filed a First Amendment challenge to the state's "special sources" limit, which says no more than 20 percent of the total raised by a candidate can come from political action committees, lobbyists and...

Illinois Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn says that his campaign did not actually read a controversial article comparing black Republicans to Jewish Nazi collaborators before tweeting it several times to the public. Quinn has been under heavy fire from the Jewish and black communities since the Washington Free Beacon first reported that his campaign had tweeted—and then quietly deleted—several messages urging backers to read a Chicago Sun Times article that compared conservative black voters to Jews who collaborated with the Nazis. Quinn—who would not address the controversy during a Holocaust memorial event yesterday evening—had his campaign issue a statement claiming that...

The One Word Democrats May Not Utter During the Campaign Posted By Rick Moran On April 19, 2014 @ 11:26 am In Politics | And it’s not “Obamacare.”As important as Obamacare is to the Republicans in the midterm elections, the economy still tops everyone’s list as the number one issue facing the country.Some Democratic political consultants are advising candidates to avoid using the term “recovery” when describing the economy — for obvious reasons. This Fox News poll from January shows that 74% of Americans still think we’re in a recession. Any Democrat uttering the word “recovery” is likely to...

A Houston businesswoman has rejected prosecutors’ efforts to get her to testify against Rep. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y., in exchange for a deal on the campaign fundraising charges against her, setting the stage for a trial in Brooklyn, N.Y., according to her lawyer. Attorney Stuart Kaplan said federal prosecutors were expected to seek a new indictment against Diana Durand, after cancellation of a scheduled court appearance on Monday to discuss the status of plea negotiations.

The philosopher Eric Hoffer once remarked that “every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Is this the current trajectory of the Tea Party and the conservative movement more broadly? People who care about liberty, opportunity, and preserving the constitutional system bequeathed to us by the Founders are frustrated with the path American politics is treading. They want a course correction. Since Barack Obama’s assumption of the presidency, and all the dreadfulness that has entailed, lots of organizations have gain prominence promising to take action against the administration and its enablers on...

Democrats are hyperventilating over a U. S. Supreme Court ruling on April 2, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi claims the ruling will turn politics into a "money war." Sorry, that happened a long time ago. For the past two decades, unions have poured massive amounts into super PACs and other legal vehicles for advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts, which favor Democrats. What's got Pelosi and other Democrats worried is competition. Last week's high court ruling could mean more money for Republican candidates, even tea party activists. The Supreme Court split 5-4 on the hot-button issue of...

The recent Supreme Court decision over-ruling some Federal Election Commission restrictions on political campaign contributions has provoked angry reactions on the left. That is what often happens whenever the High Court rules that the First Amendment means what it says — free speech for everybody. When the Supreme Court declared in 2010 that both unions and corporations had a right to buy political ads, that was considered outrageous by the left. President Obama called the decision "devastating" and said it "will open the floodgates for special interests." Those unfamiliar with political rhetoric may not know that "special interests" mean people...

The Supreme Court’s decision last week in McCutcheon v Federal Election Commission, eliminating the total limit that an individual can contribute in an election cycle to candidates and party committees, amounts to a shot of adrenalin to American democracy. The court ruled that such limits violate First Amendment free speech protection. Limits remain on the total funds that an individual can contribute to a given candidate in an election cycle. But the limit on the total contributions that an individual can make are now gone. The principle involved - that participation in elections and supporting candidates of one’s choice is...

A man convicted of making illegal campaign contributions to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would like to make a nightmare of one of the Nevada Democrat’s top lieutenants come true — by eliminating all campaign contribution limits. **SNIP** In a bit of irony perhaps, the same day that the Supreme Court issued the decision in the McCutcheon case, attorneys for Nevada developer and lobbyist Harvey Whittemore filed an appellate brief with the Ninth Circuit Court of the Appeals, seeking to overturn a federal conviction on illegal campaign contributions. The Reno Gazette-Journal reported that Wednesday was the deadline for Whittemore’s filing....

CHICAGO - On a politically focused trip aimed at revving up his base and raising cash, President Barack Obama on Wednesday urged supporters to help Democrats keep control of the U.S. Senate and declared this year to be his last campaign. Buoyed by good news over his signature healthcare program, Obama touted proposals to raise the minimum wage and spur job creation that have little chance of passage in Congress during a rally with students in Michigan. Later at a fundraiser in Chicago he underscored Democratic worries about their political vulnerabilities in the Senate and House of Representatives in November...