Pennsylvania

In a poll just released by Quinnipiac University, Hillary Clinton is running ahead of John McCain in Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio—three swing states that, according to electoral lore, are necessary to win the presidency.

The poll also shows McCain would beat Barack Obama in both Florida and Ohio:  read more »

The April 22 Pennsylvania primary breathed new life into an underdog presidential campaign that had been on the ropes, ensuring that the race would continue at least through the Indiana primary in two weeks and raising new concerns within the party about the front-runner’s ability to close the deal.

Yes, this is old news—28 years old, to be exact.  read more »

Hillary Clinton got a temporary boost out of Pennsylvania last night, and today, her surrogates are likely to be arguing to superdelegates that her comfortable victory in a swing state is yet more proof that she is the superior general election candidate.  read more »

Forget Pennsylvania—the cruel joke for the last six weeks was that it mattered at all.

Hillary Clinton’s win in Pennsylvania is worth a two-week stay of political execution for the former First Lady—and nothing more. In victory, she can justifiably proceed to Indiana, which will vote on May 6, and try to cobble together enough new cash to keep her million-dollar-a-day machine churning until then (a task not made any easier by her 10-point victory tonight).  read more »

It's called.

Thank God it’s just about over. The 42-day gap between Mississippi’s March 11 primary and today’s contest in Pennsylvania has taxed the patience and energy of even the most dogged political junkies, mostly because, when all is said and done, so little is actually at stake.

Obviously, if Barack Obama were somehow to engineer an outright victory, then something very significant will have been decided in Pennsylvania: the Democratic primary. But that’s not likely.  read more »

PHILADELPHIA—Barack Obama’s final push through Pennsylvania has shown the combative, angry side of a candidate and campaign that had once been defined by its good cheer and condemnation of negative tactics.  read more »

STATE COLLEGE, Penn.—Hillary Clinton, speaking on the Penn State campus here on Sunday night, once again sought to exploit Barack Obama's declaration that John McCain would make a better president than George W Bush.

She was met with cheers when she told the crowd, "We need a nominee who is going to take on John McCain, not cheer him on."  read more »

PAOLI, Penn.—Barack Obama offered an especially sharp criticism of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in Paoli this afternoon as part of his train tour through Pennsylvania:

“Senator Clinton’s essential argument in this campaign is that you can’t change how the game is played in Washington. Her basic argument is that the slash-and-burn, say-anything, do-anything, special-interest-driven politics is how it works. And so she has taken more money than any other candidate, Democrat or Republican combined.  read more »

It feels like we’re counting down to something momentous in Pennsylvania. The candidates have practically moved into the state, each new day brings at least one new poll, and Ed Rendell is on one of the cable news channels every 12 minutes or so.

“I keep being told by the press that you people are going to decide this thing,” Stephen Colbert, broadcasting from the City of Brotherly Love, told Mayor Michael Nutter on Monday night. “Do you think that one state should have that kind of power?”

The mayor, a Clinton backer, smiled and replied, “Yeah.”  read more »

Hillary Clinton suggested at an event in Philadelphia today that Barack Obama looks down at people who live in Pennsylvania.

The Clinton campaign just sent out to reporters Clinton's remarks, which were made in response to Obama's much-discussed comments that, given economic hardships facing Pennsylvanians, "it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Speaking at an event in Philadelphia, Hillary said, "I saw in the media it's being reported that my opponent said that the people of Pennsylvania who faced hard times are bitter. Well, that's not my experience."

She added, "Pennsylvanians don't need a president who looks down on them, they need a president who stands up for them, who fights for them, who works hard for your futures, your jobs, your families."

In a speech to union members in Philadelphia today, Hillary Clinton said that she would create three million jobs over the next decade as part of her plan to rebuild much of the country’s eroded infrastructure.

“We're trying to run today’s economy on yesterday’s infrastructure – and we’re jeopardizing tomorrow’s prosperity,” said Clinton. “So I will rebuild America – by rebuilding, repairing and modernizing our infrastructure.”

The key here is that Clinton is continuing to attach specific numbers to her broad economic proposals (five percent to ten percent of income to insurance premiums, $100 billion in tax cuts to the middle class) to make starker the contrast she says exists between her and Barack Obama, who she accuses of being vague and all talk.  read more »

Hillary Clinton celebrated April Fool’s Day by having some fun with the press.

At a press conference just now, she came out looking serious and even a little somber and stared out from behind the podium.

“I want to take a moment to say that this has been a very hard-fought race,” Clinton started. Reporters clicked away furiously on their laptops. “We clearly need to do something so that our party and our people could make the right decision.

“And I have a proposal,” she said. Dramatic pause.“Today I am challenging Senator Obama to a bowl-off,” she said.  read more »

Gerald McEntee just now at an AFL-CIO event in Philadelphia introduced Hillary Clinton by defending her on Nafta, saying he wanted to put to rest any talk that she supported the trade agreement in the White House.

“I’ll tell you this, and maybe she doesn’t even remember this,” he said. “On the day that they had the votes, Hillary Clinton called me—I was in California at a union meeting. this sort of sums it up. She called me and she said, ‘We lost.’”

He added, “So anyone who tries to hang it around her neck is hanging it on the wrong neck.”

Hillary spent the morning touring a sheet metal factory in Philadelphia. She's using "Eye of the Tiger" as her theme song and referencing Rocky in her remarks.

John McCain leads Huckabee 33-23 in South Carolina, with Mitt Romney in third place with 20 percent. Barack Obama leads Hillary Clinton 44-38, and John Edwards trails at 9 percent. [ARG]

McCain leads Mike Huckabee 28-20 in South Carolina, with Romney at 18 percent and Fred Thompson at 17 percent. [Public Policy Polling]  read more »

To all the snowbound hounds that received a few extra hours of pampering at the all-too-pooch-friend  read more »

Speaking of Chuck Schumer, here, after some ado, are a few passages from his new book.

"One of the open secrets in Washington is that senators of the same party and same state rarely get along. Hillary and I are both ambitious hard working politicians who occasionally step on each other's toes. We have had out high point and our low points. But we have the bonds of my campaign in 1998 and hers in 2000 that are unique to our relationship."

The book starts with some curious little tidbits. For example, Schumer, aka Mr. 1600,reveals that in 1964, as a 14-year-old, he worked the mimeograph machine for Stanley Kaplan of the eponymous SAT prep course and that he nervously munched on "Cold calamari and oversized cookies" in the Hyatt Regency Washington on midterm election night. At Harvard, he originally planned to be an organic chemist and, much less surprisingly, what he looks for in a restaurant is a place where the "food is good and not very expensive."

(Hillary Clinton will be throwing Chuck his book party in his favorite haunt, a cheap Chinese restaurant in D.C.)

As far as the future of the Party, Chuck was not satisfied with the Democratic takeover of the Senate.

"Our victory was well deserved, but the Democratic Party still needs a new paradigm," he writes. And Schumer thinks he is just the person to provide it. His key to perpetual victory is encapsulated in the title for Chapter 2: "It's the Middle Class Stupid."

Chuck talks at length about Joe and Eileen Bailey, the middle class family he has conceptualized and who he feels should be the Party's target voters.

They live in Massapequa and are both 45. He's an insurance agent and she works in a doctor's office. They have two cars in the garage, are worried about terrorists, heath care property taxes and college tuition. They are infrequent church goers and "politically, they are up for grabs."

One of the reasons he recruited Casey over significant opposition, he said, is that "Casey was the guy who best represented the Joe and Eileen Baileys of Pennsylvania."

Chuck says that he was at first reluctant about taking on the head job at the DSCC.

"The DSCC job is not necessarily a plum assignment. It's like being elected resident of your condo association - someone's got to do it. It requires a lot of travel and a lot of time dialing for dollars.

"The number-one reason that I decided to take the job was because I worried that if we had another bad election, if we lost another two or three seats, it would be over...The Supreme Court would take this nation backward 130 years."

The major cause for the 2004 electoral losses, Schumer says, was losing touch with middle class voters.

"We were competitive among the middle class - voters with household incomes between $30,000 and $75,000 - only because of near- unanimous support among middle-class African-American voters. Meanwhile, among white middle-class voters - a third of the electorate - Bush beat Kerry by twenty-two points. Twenty-two points!"

"We needed to do a better job of reaching the middle class, regardless of ethnicity, and, whatever we did, we could never ignore African-American voters."

Schumer attributes the decay of Hispanic support for the Democratic Party in 2004 to their increased incomes, which put them more in the middle class that he thinks the Democrats were ignoring.

The rest of the book targets the more wonkish reader, and consists of Chuck's "eureka moments" about how to "increase reading and math scores by 50 %," how to "reduce property taxes that fund education by 50%" how to "increase the number of college graduates by 50%," how to "reduce illegal immigration by at least 50% and increase legal immigration by up to 50%" "reduce our dependence on foreign oil by 50%" and how to reduce cancer mortality, abortions, tax evasion, child obesity and access to child pornography by 50 percent.

--Jason Horowitz

Governor Spitzer will announce today that Daniel Gundersen, an economic development official from Pennsylvania, will be the upstate chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation. - Matthew Schuerman

Stricken with anxiety as the polls continue to indicate a Democratic resurgence, certain Republicans  read more »

LAURIE: Ladies, gentlemen, listen up. You want all of your wedding vendors, and especially your cake maker, to think like (or be) Duff Goldman.

"I'm kind of the anti-wedding industry wedding vendor," said Mr. Goldman, proprietor of Charm City Cakes in Baltimore, Maryland. "The wedding industry is designed to rip people off. There's so much nasty stuff that goes on, so many line items. 'You want us to smile? That's a dollar a person. You want real silver or china? That's an extra fifty dollars a person.' The best wedding party I've been to was when a friend of mine got married in Alaska. They came back and we had a camp-out bonfire in rural Pennsylvania. Everybody wore shorts and T-shirts and we roasted a pig. The whole thing was potluck. I made his wedding cake, which was a huge totem pole. It was great because there was none of that weird wedding pressure to do the 'right thing.' Of course, weddings are our bread and butter, so I don't want to say that people shouldn't have weddings. But, you know, people are financing their weddings. Why are you gonna start off your new life together in debt, just because you wanted to have a big fancy party? Go to the justice of the peace, spend the money on a down payment on a house or go on a blowout vacation."

Bread and butter indeed: Goldman said that wedding cakes account for about seventy percent of his business at Charm City. In his massive workspace, peopled with his friends, who are also his employees, you'll see stoner cakes, pink cell-phone cakes (paging Paris Hilton!), handgun cakes. What kind of cakes won't he do? "The whole round- square-round-square thing," he said. "It's totally lame, and it doesn't look good. It doesn't have the effect that people want it to have." Also: cupcakes. "They're a pain in the ass. It's just not what we do." Amen to that. What about, you know, dirty cakes? Silence. Then: "No comment." Then: a knowing laugh. "Yeah, we've done a lot of that." Not so much for weddings, though. Mr. Goldman recalled a tattooed Baltimore rock musician who requested that an S&M-style ball gag be crafted from black gum paste and placed atop his wedding cake. "I was like, 'I can, but I would rather not,'" he said. "It's like, your grandma's gonna be there, dude." Duff Goldman doesn't need to be known among his core client base as they guy who upset the elderly guests with his dirty sex cake. The musician wisely reconsidered.

"This week we're doing a Mercury DA cop car, like a totally random cop car," Mr. Goldman said. "We're doing a space shuttle. We got a craps table. We got a bushel of crabs. Everyone's into what they're into." What would he refuse on principle? "If someone came in and asked for Hitler's birthday cake, I'd fucking step on their neck, and my whole staff would back me up," he said. "My last name is Goldman, for Christ's sake."

Mr. Goldman has a television show on the Food Network, called "Ace of Cakes." Fortunately, the allusion to poker in the show's title is just an attempt by Food Network types to attract the college educated Girls Gone Wild demographic; the host doesn't perform card tricks or play 5-card stud with Andy Dick or roadtrip to the Borgata on the air.

It's a show about him and his friends joking around and nursing hangovers and cursing a little bit while they make really impressive personalized cakes, which they then deliver. It is obvious that they take pride in what they do, and are very good at it. Ace of Cakes is currently my second-favorite TV show. (First place: Fresh Meat. ) However, as talented as he is, Mr. Goldman will not be baking my wedding cake. Stay tuned for the story of that very special confection queen.

After the show, Justin Bond’s dressing room reeked with the powdery, meaty smell of foundation.  read more »

Carl Jung once wrote that nothing has a stronger influence on a child’s psyche than the unlive  read more »

Bloomberg reports on a Center for Responsive Politics study that shows Wall Street giving more to Democrats than Republicans in the present cycle.

The Iraq war, Republican scandals, and the growing influence of hedge funds are all cited as reasons. Read it; here, we just wanted to highlight a couple of former Bush 'Rangers' New Yorkers will know:

One Clinton supporter is Morgan Stanley Chief Executive John Mack, who gave her Senate campaign $4,000 last year, his biggest donation to an individual politician, according to FEC records. In 2004, as co-chief executive of Credit Suisse Group, he raised at least $200,000 for Bush, earning him a spot in the Ranger donor club.

Mack's only other individual candidate donation last year was $1,000 to Senator Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican, according to FEC records. Jim Badenhausen, a spokesman for Morgan Stanley, declined to comment.

Merrill Lynch, the world's largest securities firm, is home to another one of Bush's 2004 Rangers, Chief Executive Stanley O'Neal. Merrill's political action committee, which pools executives' donations, is on track to give more money to Democratic candidates than to Republicans for the 2006 election for the first time in the PAC's quarter-century history, if current trends hold.

- Tom McGeveran

Second Thoughts On Term Limits  read more »

There was an extraordinary concentration of what Bill Weld calls "terror power," and others would call "prosecutors," on the corner of 77th and Lex just now. Eliot Spitzer, serving as barker, stood outside the uptown subway station beside Pick a Bagel calling, "Meet Bob Morgenthau," while the District Attorney grinned and gripped and Morgenthau's right hand man, Dan Castleman, looked on from the wings in blue suit and pink tie.

For all their power and prominence, Spitzer and Morgenthau seemed to spread very little terror, and even faced a fairly high percentage of blank looks and hurried brush-offs. There was only one cameraman there, from UPN 9, who shot some quick footage and headed out.

"I live in Bucks County, Pennsylvania," the cameraman said. "I don't even know who the fuck these people are."  read more »

The difference between threat and bluster is the power to back up one's words.  read more »

During the 2004 election coverage, I repeatedly cringed at the unflattering ensembles I saw woman po  read more »

PHILADELPHIA-Wandering through a working-class neighborhood of Philadelphia as night fell on Tuesday  read more »

Neoconomy: George Bush’s Revolutionary Gamble with America’s Future, by Daniel Altman.  read more »

Admittedly, we live in dangerous times.  read more »

Agnes Gund, the president of the Museum of Modern Art and an elegant lady about town, sounded nervou  read more »

There was little question that Father's Day 2003 would be my father's last.  read more »

Like most Americans, I eat a significant amount of poultry-mostly supermarket poultry, that innocuou  read more »

Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973) enjoyed the kind of career that, from this distance in time, belongs as  read more »

Nature has its little ways of informing us that we're over the hill.  read more »

Pulling a Con in Six Easy Steps!Cops Recover How-To Manual  read more »

With Democrats gleefully making noise about taking on Michael Bloomberg in the 2005 Mayoral election  read more »

Once upon a time, Russell Baker wrote that he had discovered a country living in his cellar.  read more »

Among the Heroes: United Flight 93 & the Passengers & Crew Who Fought Back , by Jere Longman.  read more »

Wise though he was, Abraham Lincoln had no way of knowing in the summer of 1864 that the war he was  read more »

A Dollar And a…Dream?  read more »

Daniel M.  read more »

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New York's political classes, a group that includes all manner of soothsayers, layabouts and long-lu  read more »

Here we go again. In early February, John H.  read more »

Some left-wing lunatic Hillary Rodham Clinton is turning out to be.  read more »

As everybody knows, the far reaches of Chelsea, neighborhood of parking garages, grungy loft buildin  read more »