San Diego, CA—

Mitt Romney today spoke about where else he plans to compete besides California before the Super Tuesday contests. He revealed some of their strategy to defeat John McCain that was developed after their loss in Florida:

“We took the US in map form and in grid form and looked at all the states. Looked at where there are winner take all settings, where there are caucuses, where the states apportion delegates based upon districts. We looked at our figures, as to how well I’m doing in each of those areas,” Romney told reporters, “based on the preliminary information we have, we divided the nation in three major parts. One are states we think we’ve got a very good chance of picking them up, others that are states where it’s highly competitive and then there are others that are real long-shot states. And we’re going to focus our attention on those we think we’ve got a great chance of picking up, and a few of the competitive states and of then course you look at where the delegates are.”

The campaign expects to compete in California and to have strong showings in other states such as Colorado, Utah, Montana, Missouri, Idaho and Alaska. The former Massachusetts governor also hopes to do well in Georgia, Connecticut and in his home state. He will campaign in Colorado and Minnesota over the next few days. They believe the map looks good for them and the campaign is very clear that they don’t believe Super Tuesday is when the Republican nominee will be chosen saying, “This isn’t going to be decided on February 5th.”

If there was any doubt that Romney is still aggressively battling it out for a victory he told the press today that he is sending his son Josh to campaign for him in Alaska.

San Diego, CA–

Mitt Romney gave 18 million dollars of his own money to his campaign in the last three months of 2007. In total, he has poured 35 million dollars of his personal fortune into his campaign.

The Romney camp also reported raising 9 million dollars in donations in the fourth quarter equaling 53.5 million dollars for the entire year. The campaign spent 33.8 million during the last 3 months of the year equaling 87.6 million dollars spent in 2007. The camp reports having 2.4 million dollars cash on hand at the end of the year.

The campaign did not release any numbers for January meaning that Romney may have donated even more than 35 million dollars to his campaign. The camp launched an aggressive ad blitz today signaling that former Massachusetts governor may have used more of his vast wealth, which is estimated at upwards of 250 million dollars.

Campaigns were required to file their end of the year finance reports today with the Federal Election Commission.

San Diego, CA

The Romney campaign revealed today that they will hit the airwaves with a very large ad buy. This is after reports surfaced yesterday that they had not bought any ad space in February 5th states. The campaign won’t release what states besides California they will be advertising in, but Carl Cameron reported earlier today that it would be five other Super Tuesday states. Romney said it isn’t possible to advertise everywhere, even joking that maybe he should have spent less in the early states:

“I don’t think it’s possible to flood the airwaves in 22 states. I have authorized a seven-figure-I won’t give you the exact number-but seven-figure advertising buy for our campaign. We talked about which states they’ll be-California is among the states,” Romney said, “And so we’ll be advertising, but frankly at this stage, I don’t think anyone will be advertising on a per person basis at the level we did in Iowa and New Hampshire, Michigan, Florida-those were the early states. We all invested pretty heavily in those early states. I’m sure some of us wish we had invested less early and could do more now.”

The campaign re-launched an ad today in California that previously aired in December, “Experience Matters.”

Click here to see the ad:

A sign of things to come for this debate?

Obama started off by saying, “I was friends with Hillary Clinton before we started this campaign, I will be friends with Hillary Clinton after this is over.”

“We’re running a competitive race, but it’s because we both love this country,” he said. But he did get in a jab: “I think what is at stake right now is whether we are looking backwards or we are looking forwards. I think it is the past versus the future.”

And Hillary Clinton used a line she often breaks out on the stump — saying, “on January 20, 2009, the next president of the United States will be sworn in on the steps of the Capitol;” but rather than saying she hopes to be that president, she included her Democratic rival. “I, as a Democrat, fervently hope you are looking at that next president,” she said. “Either Barack or I will raise our hand and swear to uphold the Constitution of the United States.”

Most of the first third is about health care, and is a substantive, civil debate on policy differences — and that’s most likely by design. Obama reporter Bonney Kapp says a senior Obama aide cautioned reporters that this debate would likely be less acrimonious than the previous affair in South Carolina.

Kicking off the pre-program festivities at the Kodak Theater, the head of the California Democratic Party just compared this debate to the most important political face-offs of all time: “Lincoln-Douglas; Nixon-Kenney; and Obama-Clinton,” he said.

Most don’t expect tonight’s proceedings to enter that historic pantheon, but there is a lot of anticipation for the first head-to-head debate in the Democratic Party.

Two schools of thought: one, Obama continues to hammer away at Hillary, as he did in a speech in Denver last night and during the last debate in Myrtle Beach, SC — but without John Edwards to come to her defense, as Edwards often did in South Carolina. It’s plausible because she’s still the front-runner and the attacks could bring her down a peg, and because he seems to come off looking more presidential than she does when things get heated.

Or two, in the last debate before a massive contest on February 5th — where no matter who wins the most states, the delegate counts are likely to end up fairly close — both candidates could decide to play it safe, keeping it civil so as not to risk a disastrous misstep. If both candidates are feeling good about their standing going into Super Tuesday, we may not see the kind of fireworks that went off in the last debate.

One early indication of how things will go: some pre-debate smack-talk from Clinton spokesman Phil Singer, who asks “Which Barack Obama will show up at tonight’s Democratic debate?” — the one who Singer says once eschewed personal attacks, or the one who he says has been “personally launching or allowing his campaign to launch a series of personal negative attacks against Hillary Clinton.”

Read the full memo after the break.

(more…)

Long Beach, CA—

After last night’s testy debate, Mitt Romney said that John McCain, “took a sharp detour off the straight talk express” when McCain accused Romney of wanting to set timetables for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. He has consistently denied the charge and today said the tactic was “disingenuous and not honorable.”

“He’s a fine person, but I think it was a major mistake. Had he a question about this he could have raised it any time between April and now,” Romney said to reporters. “But to raise it outside a debate and to do it in a way with blasted out to people in Florida was something reminiscent of the Nixon era and I don’t think I want to see our party go back to that kind of campaigning. “

The campaign has admitted that the false charges may have hurt Romney in Florida, but they maintain that they believe it will hurt McCain in the “long-term.” Romney also addressed the battle over which candidate is most conservative and he took the opportunity to rail into his legislative record:

“There are a number of issues where I have a conservative view and others have a more liberal view. I would say that Sen. McCain has, over his career in Washington, demonstrated in very remarkable ways strong leadership, which has tended to be his most notable accomplishments, leadership towards-for liberal causes. Those things for which he’s received the greatest applause from the media and that for which he is best known: McCain-Feingold, McCain-Kennedy, McCain-Lieberman are all three liberal efforts, and I’m not calling him a liberal, but I’m saying those particular accomplishments were liberal.”

Romney campaigns in Southern California today hitting the conservative enclaves of Orange County and San Diego.

According to National Journal magazine (as forwarded by the RNC), Senator Barack Obama is ranked as the Senate’s most liberal member. Yes, that means he is considered more liberal than liberal Senators Kennedy, Kerry, Schumer, and Sanders. And, of course Hillary Clinton, who is ranked 16th. In his first two years in the U.S. Senate, Obama was ranked 16th and 10th, moving left in the run up to the race for the Democratic nomination.

This from the candidate who often touts his appeal to Republicans and Independents, saying he can bridge the divide between “Red States and Blue States. ” He also has been known to say that Democrats don’t have a “monopoly on wisdom,” and so would consider Republicans for Cabinet positions. This broad appeal, his ability to connect with Republicans, is something Obama hopes can help him in the general election, should he win the nomination.

Spokesman Bill Burton responded to the National Journal’s assessment, saying: “On 65 of the 99 votes that both Obama and Clinton voted on, they voted exactly the same way on all but two – with Obama voting to strengthen the ethics bill by creating an Office of Public Integrity and Clinton voting against it. Only in Washington can you get falsely attacked for being like Reagan one week and labeled the most liberal the next.  The tendency of Washington to apply a misleading label to every person and idea is just one of the many things we need to change about how things operate inside the beltway.”

If you want to read how National Journal came to their assessment - click here.

Los Angeles, CA-

After a debate where Mike Huckabee was largely left on the sidelines with Libertarian Ron Paul, due to a format that favored the two leading contenders, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, Huckabee is looking for a boost in the last days before the mega-state primaries on February, 5th. Huckabee today embarks on a pre-Tsunami Tuesday campaign swing that will lead him through many of the Southern, and Heartland states-like Alabama, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Georgia- that are at the center of his Southern state strategy; the last stand for this Little-Train-That-Could of GOP presidential campaigns.

” I am optimistic about our chances and the path forward seems clear,” Huckabee said, in a message titled “Full Throttle”, to supporters yesterday.”When I look at Super Tuesday, I see a number of key Southern states, and other strong  conservative states, that are likely to add to our delegate count and put us on the right track towards winning the Republican nomination.”

However, due to McCain’s  freight train-like momentum, after back to back primary wins, and gargantuan endorsements like the Governator’s today in California( a delegate-heavy Super Tuesday state), Huckabee’s effort, while herculean, could fall well short of it’s intended target. Verifiable signs of the tough road head for the Huckabee campaign are already appearing, like large hurdles in front of a sprinter, trying to catch up to the lead runner. According to poll numbers released today in some of those Southern states, McCain leads Huckabee by double digits.

Insider Advantage has McCain leading Huckabee in Tennessee, 33 to 25. In Georgia, where Huckabee campaigned recently, he is down 11 points, 35 to 24 (5% MOE).

(more…)

Standing before a crowd of supporters in the Ninth Ward neighborhood of New Orleans on Wednesday, John Edwards formally announced his plans to withdraw from the presidential race.

“It’s time for me to step aside so that history can blaze its path,” Edwards said.

Dressed in blue jeans, the former North Carolina senator ended his campaign in the place where it had begun. The setting was symbolic for a man who made poverty the soul of his campaign. His decision to withdraw came as a surprise to many—the American public, members of the press, and even those within Edwards’ campaign. Though the senator had yet to win a single primary, his advisers consistently stated they would continue campaigning all the way to the convention—hoping to acquire enough delegates to remain viable in the race. On Monday, the campaign announced an aggressive media buy in several of the states scheduled to hold February 5th contests, and boasted of the recent surge in online donations.

But today a different decision was reached. Campaign spokesman, Mark Kornblau, said Edwards realized “he had no real path to the nomination” at this point in the race and “it was time to step aside.” Kornblau said Edwards spoke with senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama the night before, asking them to make poverty a central issue in their general election campaigns and in their administrations. He added that Edwards had no plans to endorse a candidate as of yet.

Edwards may no longer hold a place on the presidential ballot, but his populism, often expressed with great zeal, has impacted the presidential race in innumerable ways, some of which have yet to be realized.

At the heart of Edwards’ message was the need to speak out for the poor and disenfranchised—those people whom the Senator often referred to as “the real underdogs in this election.” He was the first to propose a universal health care plan—ensuring coverage for all Americans—and the first among the Democratic candidates to make poverty and global warming a key focus of his campaign.

For Edwards, the need to combat these problems was a “moral test,” and he referred to such issues as “the causes of my life.”

Not without fault, Edwards was sometimes criticized for his changing positions on the Iraq war and for oversimplifying the problem of lobbyists. Yet he was honest in admitting that his initial support of funding the war “was a mistake.”

Upon leaving an event in Springfield, Missouri, on Monday, that drew over 1,000 Edwards supporters, a high-school English teacher related his message to a line from Shakespeare she had recently taught her 12th grade class.

“To thine ownself be true,” she said, quoting a famous line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “Edwards inspires because he’s pushed issues not always politically popular. And for that he deserves credit.”

Simi Valley, CA

The testiest exchange had to be when John McCain and Mitt Romney got back into their sparring that started over the weekend when McCain accused Romney of wanting to set timetables for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. Romney again denied the statements, which have been proven by the media to be an unfair charge. He even accused his rival of “dirty tricks:”

“By the way, raising it a few days before the Florida primary, when there was very little time for me to correct the record, when the question that was most frequently asked is, ‘Oh, you’re for a specific date of withdrawal,’ sort of falls in the kind of dirty tricks that I think Ronald Reagan would have found to be reprehensible.

But, that didn’t stop McCain from insisting it was true and accusing Romney of not supporting the troop surge in Iraq:

“He said he wanted a timetable. Before that, we have to understand that we lost the 2006 election and the Democrats thought that they had a mandate. They thought they had a mandate to get us out of Iraq. And I was prepared to sacrifice whatever was necessary in order to stand up for what I believed in. Now, in December of 2006, after the election, Governor Romney was asked what he thought about the surge. He said, at that time, “I won’t weigh in. I’m a governor.’ At the time, he didn’t want to weigh in because he was a governor.”

The Romney campaign admits the charges could have hurt Romney in Florida, but that he was able to get his point across and that the false accusations may hurt McCain in the long-term.
.