Bobby Jindal
National Review Essentials Party Like It Was 2008
ST. PAUL—Jack Fowler, the publisher of the National Review, was leaning back in a chair in a banquet hall at the St. Paul University Club.
The party he’d just held there was breaking up, and he was talking to a reporter about President George W. Bush as Jay Nordlinger and Claremont Institute fellow and Power Line blogger Scott Johnson looked on.
“There’s lots of clichés,” he said. “Everybody loves a winner, right? Who wants to be involved with a loser, or a guy who isn’t liked? I like the president. I’m alive, I go to New York City every day, and I take freakin’ Metro-North to Grand Central Station every day and my ass has not been blown up by Al Qaeda. read more »
Republicans Congratulate Republicans for Nonpartisan Disaster Preparation Effort
ST. PAUL—The latest word is that Hurricane Gustav has been downgraded to a Category 1 storm and that water levels in New Orleans are receding – strong and encouraging signs that the Crescent City and the rest of the Gulf Coast will be spared tragedy and destruction on the scale of Hurricane Katrina.
And now, at the Republican National Convention, the effort is underway to portray this good news as a triumph of Republican leadership.
Just before 5:00 p.m. (E.S.T.), with the scoreboards in the Xcel Energy Center prominently displaying the words “Country First,” First Lady Laura Bush was called to the stage, where she spoke of the human toll that the storm threatened to exact and the need for support from all Americans for any recovery effort. read more »
John McCain's Dwindling Outside-the-Box V.P. Options
Yesterday, Barack Obama lost one of his better V.P. options when Jim Webb backed out of the running, apparently deciding that the rigorous vetting process and the intense scrutiny of a national campaign weren’t for him. read more »
Around the same time, one of John McCain’s most intriguing options might also have removed herself – but not intentionally. That would be Carly Fiorina, whose nonchalant mentions of Viagra and birth control at a breakfast with reporters yesterday are reverberating in the blogosphere today, seemingly confirming the conventional wisdom that the ousted Hewlett Packard C.E.O. would simply be too risky an addition to the G.O.P.’s national ticket.
