CLEVELAND — Two southern delegates discussed Ted Cruz’s speech last night in the slow-moving cattle drive toward the security perimeter exit outside Quicken Loans Arena last night.
Donald Trump has sewn up the Republican presidential nomination. This presents something of a dilemma for the many Republicans who have spent the last few months going on television and saying very unkind things about Donald Trump.
For the past several days, including today, the most trafficked piece of content on Politico.com has been a slideshow of 17 wire pictures featuring Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton and her long-time aide Huma Abedin in various settings, including the 2008 campaign trail and several countries Clinton visited as Secretary of State. Its description refers to Abedin as Clinton’s “body woman”—an appellation borrowed, it seems, from a 2006 Observer article—and Abedin’s job as “assisting the former secretary of state’s move back into her private life.” Its title is, “How close are Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton?”
A “wake up,” for the unfamiliar, is a term used by soldiers and prisoners in the U.S. when discussing the remainder of their service or sentence. Or, per a user in this Yahoo! Answers thread: “It’s a way of counting how many more days there is left until something happens.”
On Thursday, Hillary Clinton delivered a fundraising speech at the private residence of Colorado’s governor, John Hickenlooper, in Denver’s Park Hill neighborhood. The venue, a tent pitched on Hickenlooper’s lawn, was positioned close to the nearest street, which would have (theoretically) enabled non-guests to listen in on Clinton’s remarks. According to an on-scene reporter, however, the Democratic frontrunner’s campaign used a “static noise machine”—i.e., a larger speaker blasting static interference—to prevent such eavesdropping:
Table tennis semipro and cannabis enthusiast Susan Sarandon is among the most prominent celebrity endorsers of Bernie Sanders, which makes her public statements matters of great import to political commentators, columnists, and assigning editors. Today, everyone is mad because she said she’d support Trump if Hillary Clinton won the nomination.
This week, the National Enquirer published a story claiming Ted Cruz may have been involved in as many as five extramarital affairs. But the general allegations are nothing new. People have been talking publicly about, well, something involving Cruz for weeks.
The wreckage of Jeb Bush’s foredoomed campaign has already inspired dozens of articles about the mistakes and miscalculations that led donors, consultants, and Bush himself to believe he had a shot at winning the 2016 race. This genre of journalism reliably offers revealing anecdotes and bitchy anonymous quotes about a campaign’s internal dysfunction. The journalists on Bush’s case, however, seem preoccupied not with behind-the-scenes drama, but with the question of Bush’s soul. Indeed, four reports published in the last four days have emphasized that Bush is “human.” That seems like a trend!
After failing to break ten percent in tonight’s South Carolina primary—and blowing through millions of dollars thrown at his own Super-PAC, Right to Rise—Jeb Bush is formally suspending his presidential campaign.
Millennial favorites (?) Demi Lovato, Lena Dunham, and Katy Perry have all campaigned for Hillary Clinton this election cycle, and according to a new report from The Free Beacon, at least one of them has gotten paid. The Clinton campaign reported paying Perry’s company, Kitty Purry, Inc., almost $70,000 in December for “event production.”
A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll has Donald Trump in second place, at 26 percent, to first-place Ted Cruz, at 28 percent. This is, as Philip Bump notes, “the first major poll in which Trump hasn’t led the field nationally since October.” That is another way of saying this poll is an outlier.
At last night’s Democratic debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton invoked an unexpected figure: Henry Kissinger. “I was very flattered when Henry Kissinger said I ran the State Department better than anybody had run it in a long time,” she said, in an off-hand aside. It wasn’t an endorsement of Kissinger, or really much of anything. It was just a little brag that would have played well in a different room.
A longstanding fear among Hillary Clinton’s supporters is that U.S. authorities will attempt to indict the front-runner candidate for mishandling classified information as Secretary of State—a move that would almost certainly help derail Clinton’s entire campaign. Today is not a good day for those supporters! Among this morning’s revelations:
This morning, the smart money had it that Donald Trump would win Iowa, and Ted Cruz would come in second—but it was possible that Trump could under-perform and Cruz would win. Well, Ted Cruz has won Iowa. Donald Trump is in second, and Marco Rubio is in third. But according to “the narrative,” Donald Trump is tonight’s big loser, and Rubio the upset victor.
The Iowa caucuses are tonight. What’s going to happen? On the Republican side, either Donald Trump will win, or Ted Cruz will win. According to a poll conducted by Ann Selzer, unanimously considered the best pollster in Iowa, Trump will win. That’s a good reason to feel confident in a Trump victory.
Vermont senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is in “very good health,” according to a letter from the attending U.S. Senate physician. But there’s one fact in Sanders’ health history that belies his image as a maverick populist unbeholden to monied interests: Sanders has been treated for gout.
Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, who is currently polling at one percent in Iowa, has a message for those who think she has zero chance of winning the election. “Polls don’t win elections,” she said at a campaign event in Iowa City today.
Someone at the Daily Caller had a good idea: call John Rocker, the retired former Atlanta Braves relief pitcher, and ask him if he supports Donald Trump. As luck would have it, John Rocker indeed supports Donald Trump. “I think he has really woken America up,” Rocker tells the Caller’s Scott Greer.
Jeb Bush—a man whose campaign has, one imagines, not followed the trajectory he hoped it might—has a new talking point: his daughter, Noelle, and her struggles with drug addiction, a subject he once explicitly requested the media not report on.
