Mitt Romney goes urban.

(According to the Times, he also "admired a child's gold necklace" by saying, "Oh, you've got some bling-bling here.")

Liveblogging the South Carolina debate!
(Because I haven't done one of these in years.)

8:00: Myrtle Beach: "Where Pittsburgh Goes on Vacation."

8:01: Wolf explains that the arrival of the candidates will be "a big photo opportunity," and then says that "we thought we'd bring you that, as well, tonight," and brings each candidate out onto the stage, one by one. ... I'm not sure I'm going to make it through more than thirty minutes of this.

8:02: Now the three candidates are standing in an awkward little group while the various CBCI-types are introduced to the crowd. The camera stays with the stage, but Wolf and the rest of CNN's crack political team couldn't care less; they're jabbering away somewhere off-camera.

8:04: Wolf has said "photo opportunity" at least thirty-eight times. Does he realize that these people are photographed pretty regularly?

8:07: Wolf promises "no rules" during the second half of the debate. I hope one of the candidates takes advantage of this opportunity to punch Wolf in the stomach.

8:08: Joe Johns takes himself very seriously.

8:10: "These adjustable-rate mortgages, if they keep going up, the problem will just get compounded." Hillary's a punster!

8:14: Both Clinton ("green-collar jobs") and Edwards ("green infrastructure) have responded to a question about the economy by mentioning the environment. Somewhere, an Al Gore just got its wings.

8:16: First mill reference. And it's from Obama! ("You travel around South Carolina, and you see the textile mills, that John's father worked in, closed, all over the region.") Edwards clearly couldn't tell if he was being made fun of or not.

8:19: Wolf's been trying to interrupt Hillary for about 70 seconds now. Every three or four seconds, he'll say, "Alright," but she just plows on ahead. Take the driver's seat, Wolf-man!

8:21: Edwards: "The problem with Peru, Barack, is you are leaving the enforcement of environmental and labor regulations in the hands of George Bush. I wouldn't trust George Bush to enforce anything. Certainly no trade obligations."
Obama: "Well the only point I would make is that in a year's time it'll be me who's enforcing them." Boom, bitch!

8:26: Hillary/Obama has gotten pretty rough in the last couple of minutes (I wish we were in the no-rules portion of the program, so that they could use start swinging the podia), including this from Obama: "While I was working on those streets, watching those folks see their jobs shifting overseas, you were a corporate lawyer, sitting on the board at Wal-Mart." Damn, yo!

8:27: They are shouting at each other.

8:28: Clinton: "I did not mention [Reagan's] name."
Obama: "Your husband did."
Clinton: "Okay, well, I am here, he is not."
Obama: "I can't tell who I'm running against sometimes."

8:28: CNN's odd choice of camera angle would seem to indicate that Barack Obama is four and a half feet taller than Hillary Clinton.

8:29: Seriously, I'm starting to fear for the safety of innocent bystanders once the no-rules rule takes hold. Clinton: "I was fighting against those [Reagan] ideas when you were practicing law and representing your contributor Rezko in his slum landlord business in inner-city Chicago." Lowest blow of the primary season?

8:30: Edwards whines, "There are three people in this debate, not two," but turns it into a big hit with, "how many children is this [kind of squabbling] going to get health care?"

8:32: Edwards: "...which is why... no, let me finish this, Lord knows you let them go on forever." Laughter.

8:41: Hillary makes hay out of Obama's opposition to an amendment that would have capped credit card interest at 30%. Obama says he opposed it because 30% was too high. Edwards calls bullshit, and Hillary smirks. You know things are crazy when Edwards is willing to team up with Hillary.

8:43: First boos. Hillary: "Senator Obama, it is very difficult having a straight-up debate with you, because you never take responsibility for any vote." (She's so fed up, she won't even call him by his first name anymore.)

8:44: Here's a sentence that seems creepier when it's typed out than it did when Obama said it out loud: "Nobody has worked harder than me in the Illinois legislature to make sure that victims of sexual abuse were dealt with, partly because I've had family, uh, members, who were victims of sexual abuse, and I've got two daughters who, uh, I want to protect."

8:53: On health care, Edwards says, "I think honestly none of our three plans cover [illegal immigrants]." And the audience... applauds? What the hell?

9:10: Commercial time! Wolf warns that when we come back, we'll have a different set (no more podia to swing), and no rules. (10:1 says Edwards is the one to get hit with the boulder.)

9:18: Despite the fact that Wolf made a point of emphasizing that they were taking a "short" commercial break... it took eight minutes.

9:19: And the podia have been replaced with what appear to be chairs from a science fiction movie from the early 1970s.

9:31: Is it just me, or has John Edwards' sense of humor been a bit off lately? Self-deprecation, John. Look into it.

9:41: There's a chyron on the screen right now that directs us to CNNPolitics.com so that we can "Watch voters react in real-time." Thank you, CNNPolitics. I am frankly sick and goddamn tired of always having to watch these same candidates during the candidate debates. I'd much rather watch people watching the candidates for me.

9:47: Commercials again. For a no-rules round, this one sure is a whole heck of a lot more tame than the last one.

9:51: Wolf: "I just want to alert our viewers out there, there's a raging discussion going on, CNNPolitics.com, people from around the country. They're writing in, they're sending their thoughts... you might want to be interested in following that at CNNPolitics.com." Thanks for the tip, Wolf.

9:54: Edwards has been pounding away at the "I'm best positioned to beat McCain because he's devoted his career to the cause of campaign finance reform, and I haven't taken money from lobbyists" attack for the last week or so, and I get why he's doing it, but I also think Jonathan Singer's point is a good one: maybe we oughtn't to be in such a hurry to endorse the McCain line on that.

10:05: Over, finally. The candidates all converge on Wolf to shake his hand (or maybe punch him in the stomach), but he just keeps on talkin' (about future CNN debates, incredibly), and so they give up and mill about with one another (a couple that I assume to be the Edwardses come up on stage; so that's what a life-long mill-worker looks like!), while Wolf wanders around the background, looking at nothing in particular, still talking (in voiceover). Cut his mic!

Tonight's winner: Obama, big-time.

Giuliani hit This Week yesterday in an impressive show of "look at me, I'm nonchalant"-itude, but reading between the lines, the campaign's in full-on tailspin. For example, they appear to have fired all of their professional makeup artists, and replaced them with the guy who runs the face painting booth at the Dade County Fair:


They also chose to perch the candidate in front of a crowd of slack-jawed, dull-eyed supporters (many of whom were all-too-obviously being reminded every four or five seconds that they're supposed to smile broadly), a strategy that wavered between "distracting" and "embarrassing" (mostly embarrassing).

Official Purple State prediction: fourth place in Florida, campaign officially dissolved by Feb. 1.

Yesterday was a big day for Huckabee bringin' the crazy. First, and most frighteningly, on religion:

"I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution," Huckabee told a Michigan audience on Monday. "But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that's what we need to do -- to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view."

Jesus Christ. (Literally.)

And on immigration:

"Every one of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 came here legally," he said, per NBC/NJ's Adam Aigner-Treworgy. "Our government welcomed them in. Well, there's a couple of things we're going to do differently. I say we ought to put a hiatus on people who come here and give them permits if they come from countries that sponsor and harbor terrorists. Let's say until you get your act in order, and we'll get our act in order."

In Huckabee's defense, he did backtrack on the immigration issue a bit. But still, he was really swinging for the fences yesterday, huh? (Let's hope that God quote goes mainstream; that's a pretty dramatic position to take, even for a former Baptist minister.)

(Also, he told Joe Scarborough this morning that "When we were in college we used to take a popcorn popper -- because that was the only thing they would let us have in the dorms -- and fry squirrels in the popcorn popper." The man's gone 'round the fucking bend.)

Legitimate national news or reasons CNN is a joke (à la McSweeney's)?

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Legitimate national news: 6, 10
Reasons CNN is a joke: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9

Giuliani is delightfully insane.



(Thanks to Atrios.)

John McCain is old.

Conservative campaign finance nabobs Samuel Issacharoff and Pamela Karlan on why campaign finance reform is a bad idea:

"[Issacharoff and Karlan's] normative critique attacks the vision of politics that they see underpinning the reformers' case. To their minds, reform necessarily rests on an 'idealistic' or a 'republican-communitarian perspective' that is wrong-headed as a normative matter and unrealistic as a descriptive one. Reformers, they believe, think politics should be thoughtful, deliberative, and aimed at the public good. Such a view, they argue, violates equality because it devalues the ways many ordinary people actually make decisions and would shift power 'towards those individuals who are good at making political arguments for themselves and away from individuals who depend on others to make their arguments for them.... [I]t is hardly surprising that the scholarly argument for campaign reform would produce a world in which intellectuals would have more influence and the persons they have chosen not to be -- businessmen or the people who devote their working hours to earning a living in a fashion that does not involve having and disseminating deep political thoughts -- will have less.'"

In what incredibly bizarre world is that argument -- that campaign finance reform is a bad thing because it would shift power toward smart people and away from dumb people -- a legitimate one?

(The quote comes from this excellent book on campaign finance law, and in particular from a chapter written by the smartest man in the world.)

The John Edwards movie trailer. Clever.

Big giant (and not particularly flattering, from where I'm sitting) Huckabee profile in the upcoming NYT Magazine. Several fascinating insights (Huckabee, still, has no national finance director), as well as this gem:

Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, has no such reservations. He considers the "Left Behind" books, in which the world comes to a violent end as Jesus triumphs over Satan, a "compelling story written for nontheologians."

Which I think is basically saying, "It's like theology for dumb people."

...Or, in other words, theology. (Rimshot!)

Update: Those who get up in arms about such things are up in arms about this bit:

I was about to jot down this piece of boilerplate when Huckabee surprised me with a question of his own: "Don’t Mormons," he asked in an innocent voice, "believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?"

Despite that fact that one of the main points of the profile is "Mike Huckabee is meaner than he looks," I do actually buy his explanation here (that it was an honest question asked to a reporter who "frankly is fairly well-schooled on comparative religions"). But I think this is a pretty good illustration of why you may want to ask someone other than a reporter when you have a question like that.

Here are a few of the conclusions from this article that I find particularly surprising:

• "Not one of the Republican candidates is viewed favorably by even half the Republican electorate, the poll found."
• "Even after what her aides acknowledge have been two of the roughest months of her candidacy, [Hillary Clinton] is viewed by Democrats as a far more electable presidential nominee than either Senator Barack Obama or John Edwards." ("63 percent of Democratic voters said that of all the Democrats in the race, she would have the best chance in the general election, compared with 14 percent who named Mr. Obama and 10 percent for Mr. Edwards.")
• "Not only do substantially more Democratic voters judge her to be ready for the presidency than believe Mr. Obama is prepared for the job, the poll found, but more Democrats also see Mrs. Clinton rather than Mr. Obama as someone who can unite the country."
• "At 21 percent, the approval rating for this Democratic-led Congress is at a new low, reflecting the defection of independent voters, a potentially worrisome development for Democrats going into next year’s Congressional elections."
• "In fact, about as many of Mrs. Clinton’s backers say they are supporting her because of her husband as say they are supporting her because of her own experience."
• "Mr. Edwards is viewed favorably by 36 percent." (I guess that one's not so much "surprising" as "unfortunate.")
• "In a week when Mr. Romney delivered a speech intended to deal with concerns about his religion — he would be the nation’s first Mormon president — the poll found that little more than half of Republican respondents thought the United States was prepared to elect a Mormon to the Oval Office. That said, it also found that 45 percent were unable to say what Mr. Romney’s religion was."

People are so awesome.

Mitt Romney on religion:

"I will take care to separate the affairs of government from any religion, but I will not separate us from the God who gave us liberty," he said, drawing applause from an audience of about 300 invited guests, including supporters and religious leaders. "Nor would I separate us from our religious heritage."

In other words, he's more than happy to respect the Establishment Clause, except insofar as it applies to those dastardly atheists.