News politics 2008-05-04 Andanh.com

NC voter weighs the choices in Tuesday's Democratic primary Sat, 03 May 2008 20:00 EDT
All the swirling currents of a country at war and in the economic doldrums run through David Lutz's neighborhood in Trinity, N.C., just as they run through the presidential campaign.

Two houses down the street are being foreclosed. Poorly clothed kids play outside. An elderly couple he knows was attacked in a robbery and the woman died.

And Lutz's daughter, in the Army reserve, is due to go off to Iraq in October, to fight a war he opposes. "I don't like it but that's her choice," he said. "I'm not going to take her thoughts and ways from her."

Lutz, 53, is looking at his situation and his country's in figuring out whether to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama in the North Carolina Democratic primary Tuesday.

The Associated Press has been asking Lutz what he thinks about the campaign since late last year as part of an AP-Yahoo News series of polls seeing how opinions have evolved with the same group of voters.

Obama wins close race, beats Clinton in Guam Sat, 03 May 2008 23:29 EDT
Barack Obama defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton by seven votes in the Guam Democratic presidential caucuses Saturday. The count of more than 4,500 ballots took all night.

Neither candidate campaigned in the U.S. island territory in person, but both did long-distance media interviews and bought campaign ads for the caucuses.

Results of the count completed Sunday morning Guam time show delegates pledged to Obama with 2,264 votes to 2,257 for Clinton's slate. That means they'll split the pledged delegate votes. Obama's slate won in 14 of 21 districts.

Clinton issued a statement Saturday night promising, "I will continue to champion the issues facing the people of Guam, and when I'm president I will ensure that hard-working families of Guam have the resources and the opportunity to succeed." Obama's campaign had no immediate reaction to the results.

Eight pledged delegates will attend the convention, each with one-half vote.

SC Democrats selected superdelegate Sat, 03 May 2008 19:25 EDT
South Carolina Democrats have elected a supporter of Barack Obama for an open superdelegate slot.

Former state Education Superintendent Inez Tenenbaum beat out 14 other candidates by a wide margin Saturday for the slot as delegates at the state convention stood to be counted for their choice.

That would raise the Illinois senator's delegate count to 249 among superdelegates. Rival Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York has 269 superdelegates.

The race for an unpledged delegate slot pitted the current state Education Superintendent Jim Rex against Tenenbaum after he wouldn't commit to supporting Obama. Tenenbaum says Obama's landslide in South Carolina's primary means he deserves the extra delegate vote.

Small-town lawyer battles GOP for La. House seat Sat, 03 May 2008 15:29 EDT
A Louisiana congressional seat held by Republicans for more than three decades was up for grabs in Saturday's special election in which Democrats said a conservative, small-town lawyer finally has the edge over a Christian-right, former GOP legislator.

Democratic state Rep. Don Cazayoux, 44, has raised twice as much money as Woody Jenkins, 61, who spent 28 years in the Louisiana House. He's also led recent polls in the race for the Baton Rouge-area seat vacated when Richard Baker resigned in January to take a job in hedge funds.

If Cazayoux wins the 6th Congressional District, Louisiana's seven-member delegation would have three Democrats for the first time since 2004, and for only the second time in 12 years.

Voters in the 1st Congressional District, which includes a bit of New Orleans and several suburban parishes, also have a special election Saturday. But Republicans are not expected to have any trouble holding onto that seat, opened when Bobby Jindal was elected governor.

Republican state Sen. Steve Scalise, a 43-year-old computer systems engineer, faces Democratic college professor Gilda Reed and two independents, Anthony "Tony G" Gentile and R. A. "Skip" Galan.

Clinton takes time for girl talk Sat, 03 May 2008 23:50 EDT
Forget about policy speeches and wooing superdelegates. For Hillary Rodham Clinton, Saturday morning was devoted to chick chat - a panel discussion with a group of working moms on topics ranging from girl-on-girl violence to her daughter's early dating years.

"Chelsea was a teenager in White House, which meant that the Secret Service went on her dates," the Democratic presidential contender said on a panel hosted by the Web site momlogic.com. "A lot of her girlfriends' mothers loved it when they double dated because there was a guy with a gun in the front seat."

Clinton also acknowledged that for Chelsea's boyfriends, "It was really intimidating to talk to her father. And, I guess, to me."

Clinton joined the panel from North Carolina, where she was campaigning before the state's primary Tuesday. She took questions from a largely-female audience in a high school auditorium here.

The mostly lighthearted discussion focused mainly on how Clinton had balanced work and family when Chelsea, now 28, was growing up. But it also produced a few revelations.

GOP uses Obama to boost Republican candidates Sat, 03 May 2008 12:35 EDT
Turns out Louisiana and Mississippi weren't quite finished with the Democratic presidential campaign. Sen. Barack Obama won each state's primary earlier this year. But these days his face still appears in television ads in both states, this time from Republicans trying to turn him into a liability for Democrats in two looming special elections for long-held Republican seats.

Democratic victories would be a serious setback for Republicans. But it also would go a long way to reassure nervous Democrats, particularly undecided superdelegates, that Obama would not present a hardship to House or Senate candidates running in tough races.

Democratic losses would give Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton new ammunition to build her case for her presidential candidacy by questioning the sturdiness of Obama's coattails.

"I think people want to know what chances we're going to be having in November if Obama is the nominee," said U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Missouri Democrat who has endorsed Clinton.

"There are a host of judgments that superdelegates make," said Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has not endorsed either presidential candidate. "Certainly a special election held close to a contested primary like this one could be very relevant."

Obama.s appeal to working-class whites faltering, polls show Sun, 04 May 2008 00:15 EDT
Barack Obama's problem winning votes from working-class whites is showing no sign of going away, and their impression of him is getting worse.

Those are ominous signals as he hopes for strong performances in the coming week in Indiana and North Carolina primaries that would derail the candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton, his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination. Those contests come as his candidacy has been rocked by renewed attention to his volatile former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and by his defeat in last month's Pennsylvania primary.

In an Associated Press-Yahoo News poll in April, 53 percent of whites who have not completed college viewed Obama unfavorably, up a dozen percentage points from November. During that period, the numbers viewing Clinton and Republican candidate John McCain negatively have stayed about even.

The April poll - conducted before the Pennsylvania contest - also showed an overwhelming preference for Clinton over Obama among working-class whites. They favored her over him by 39 percentage points, compared to a 10-point Obama lead among white college graduates. Obama also did worse than Clinton among those less-educated voters when matched up against Republican candidate John McCain.

"It's the stuff about his preacher ... and the thing he said about Pennsylvania towns, how they turn to religion," Keith Wolfe, 41, a supermarket food stocker from Parkville, Md., said in a follow-up interview. "I don't think he'd be a really good leader."

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