Tag: George E. Condon Jr.

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida declared himself “honored” to be asked to give the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night. Given the sorry history of partisan rebuttals of presidential remarks, though, he just might want to reconsider.

In the 47 years since Republicans hatched the idea, Rubio is the 120th officeholder to tackle what most politicians consider an impossible task: to try to top a president of the United States on a night when the perks of the office are very much on display.

“It is actually an awful job to have,” said Norman Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who is an expert on Congress. “You are either speaking to the camera with no audience, or with an audience a media person conjured up. Either way, you look so much smaller than the president standing in the House chamber behind the presidential seal.”

via Homepage http://www.nationaljournal.com/daily/marco-rubio-s-state-of-the-union-rebuttal-may-be-a-tall-order-20130212

President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney will feel at home when they go to Florida for their final debate on Monday. That’s a state that has seen a lot of both candidates. But when their second debate concluded on Tuesday night, the two men sure left New York quickly. The president didn’t even spend the night and Romney was up at the crack of dawn to flee. After all, there was a campaign out there that demanded their return. And other than on a debate stage, it’s certainly not being waged in New York, the nation’s third most populous state. Or in California or Texas, the two biggest states. That’s 82.8 million Americans who are just bystanders in the most hotly contested presidential election in a decade.

Obama raced to Iowa and Ohio the day after the debate; Romney scurried off to Virginia. They were wooing voters in states totaling only 22.7 million residents, barely a quarter of the Big Three’s population. But their clout is bigger than their numbers; they — along with voters in Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, and North Carolina — are Campaign 2012.

Much has been written about the hardy band of “battleground states.” But little has been written about why the American electoral map has shrunk so dramatically, what it tells us about the nation and what it means for future elections.

via Homepage http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/it-s-down-to-just-8-states-for-obama-and-romney-20121018