Jason Horowitz

Theodore Sorensen, who was John F. Kennedy's speechwriter and one of his closest advisers, approves of the speech Barack Obama delivered yesterday to 200,000 Germans in front of the Victory Column in Tiergarten.

"I thought it was a magnificent, historic speech," said Sorensen, who helped draft Kennedy's famous 1963 "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech. "It was a comprehensive declaration of new American foreign policy which will close the chapter on the nightmares of the last seven and a half years and hold out hope for sensible Europeans that America will once again be a collaborator."

Asked how Obama's speech echoed Kennedy's decades earlier, with its tone and repetitive references to freedom and Berlin, Sorensen said, "Of course there are parallels between two, young, aggressive internationalist-minded Democrats speaking in that historic place.  read more »

In the course of reporting on Barack Obama's aggressive new media operation, I heard some of the same gripes from traditional news outlets that The New Republic writes about today in an article titled "The End of the Affair: Barack Obama and the Press Break Up."

One D.C.-based reporter who covers Obama said that, even contrasted with the oft-bemoaned Clinton campaign, “the [Obama] press shop is unresponsive, unorganized and less accessible - taking a few questions on infrequent conference calls and bristling when you ask about something not on their agenda or talking points list of the day.”

“That said,” added the reporter, “If it was not so infuriating from a reporter's standpoint, I would almost admire their discipline and ability to rapid respond and the like in a way that controls the news cycle better than their opponents.”

The McCain campaign just released another statement taking issue with what they argue is the presumptuousness of Obama's speech in Berlin today:

"While Barack Obama took a premature victory lap today in the heart of Berlin, proclaiming himself a 'citizen of the world,' John McCain continued to make his case to the American citizens who will decide this election," McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said in a statement. "Barack Obama offered eloquent praise for this country, but the contrast is clear. John McCain has dedicated his life to serving, improving and protecting America. Barack Obama spent an afternoon talking about it."  read more »

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After Der Spiegel reported that Barack Obama canceled a trip to visit injured American troops in Germany, campaign spokesman Robert Gibbs said it would have been inappropriate to go on a campaign-funded trip.

Not surprisingly, the McCain campaign does not agree.

“Barack Obama is wrong," said McCain spokesman Brian Rogers. "It is never ‘inappropriate’ to visit our men and women in the military.”

Here's the prepared version of the speech Obama is giving now in Berlin, in which, like John F. Kennedy, he emphasized the theme of freedom, and like Ronald Reagan he spoke about the tearing down of the Berlin wall.

Citizen Obama attempts to pick up where those presidents left off, saying that the great danger in a globalized world with the threat of international terrorism is building new walls.

"That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another," he said. "The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand.  read more »

At last week's Netroots Nation convention in Austin, online-politics innovator Andrew Rasiej told Obama deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand that the campaign had still not demonstrated clearly to netroots supporters that an Obama administration would commit to online transparency and an open line of communication with them.

(It was perhaps an indication of the campaign's failure to convey that commitment that no more than about 30 people attended that particular panel discussion -- despite it being one of the few sessions during the four-day convention which featured potential powerbrokers in an Obama administration.)

In a follow-up conversation, Rasiej argued, as he did in his remarks to Hildebrand, that the campaign needed to do a better job of telegraphing to online activists that there would be greater openness and more opportunity for them to provide meaningful input in an Obama administration.  read more »

Steve Hildebrand was getting an earful.

Barack Obama’s soft-spoken deputy campaign manager had just finished a panel discussion at the Netroots Nation convention in Austin, Texas, on July 19, during which he had called on liberal bloggers to help meet the demands of the 24-hour news cycle by beating back criticisms of the candidate. The more people there were participating in the campaign, he argued, the greater the likelihood of Mr. Obama’s election and an enduring Democratic majority.

Much of the audience applauded, but one high-profile attendee took exception to Mr. Hildebrand’s portrayal of an enlightened, democratic campaign.  read more »

A reader loyal to Hillary Clinton points out that of the roughly 300 Hillraisers who bundled money for her, it appears only a few gave money to Barack Obama or the D.N.C. in June, according to the F.E.C. filing.

Giving to Obama's Victory Fund were Mark Aronchick, Clarence Avant, John Emerson, John Graham, Chad Griffin, Marc Nathanson. Contributors to the D.N.C. included Rashid Chaudhary, Gary Gensler, Ambassador Arthur Schechter and Maureen White.

Other Clinton donors subsequently have given to Obama, and bundled a lot of money for him too. But the paucity of names so far illustrates how slow-going the unity efforts have been.

AUSTIN, Texas -- During a panel at the Netroots Nation convention on Saturday afternoon, Barack Obama’s soft-spoken deputy campaign manager, Steve Hildebrand, talked about how he hoped that this, his 22nd year working on political campaigns, would be his last one because it offered the opportunity to register “millions and millions of new Democrats, new progressive voters.”

In other words, this would be the election that would provide an enduring Democratic majority.

“We’re never going to have it as good as we have it right now,” said Hildebrand, who wore a grey t-shirt with Obama's face on it . “So get behind this effort, let your readers know how important this is.  read more »

AUSTIN, Texas—By Sunday morning, most of the speakers and bloggers attending the Netroots Nation convention had gone home. In preparation for the convention's final key note—a plenary on "eco-equality"—volunteers in the convention center's gaping main exhibit hall distributed leaflets against various outrages ("No Forced Vaccination" or "Put Impeachment Back on the Table.") Ed Madej, a digital cartographer who blogs on the Daily Kos under the name Ed in Montana, sat alone at one of the tables blanketed with such fliers, checking weather maps on his laptop for any possible disturbances on his way home to Helena.

 

Under jumbo screens featuring freeze-framed poses of panelists talking about "marketing and monetizing your blog" or taking "online engagement to offline activism," or Howard Dean lecturing in an open-collared shirt and tan jacket, Madej offered his own impression of this year's convention.  read more »

The $52 million the Obama campaign raised in June is a good deal more than John McCain's $22 million, and much better than the $30 million number reported earlier in the week, which an Obama bundler had advised me was very low.

But the relevant bar is really whether it’s enough to fund the 50-state, mega-scale campaign Obama is running, and enough, compared with what McCain has, to make up for the loss of public financing.

At least in the opinion of one Democratic consultant I spoke to today, it is.

The consultant, speaking on background, said the total amount of money at Obama's disposal, when combined with the D.  read more »

Barack Obama’s Iraq speech on July 15 was comprehensive, forward-looking and unapologetic.

Which, for some of his supporters, prompted a basic question: What took him so long?

“I’ve been dealing with people sending me e-mails about his faith-based initiatives, and asking me about his statements about choice, his various votes and gun issues—this is now a whole month of this now,” said one major fund-raiser for Mr. Obama, describing some of the many gripes his liberal supporters have had with him during his transition to the general election. “This is the first big speech as the presumptive nominee that shows that he is ready to lead.  read more »

The reported estimates of Barack Obama’s June fund-raising totals have been lowball figures, according to a major bundler to the campaign with knowledge of its haul.

“We’re going to report the June number in a couple of days and it is very good,” said the bundler. While the fund-raiser refused to name an exact figure, he dismissed the roughly $30 million reported by the Wall Street Journal as much too small.

“Don’t even think about that,” said the bundler. “It’s in excess of that. I think it’s a very, very good number.”

Hillary Clinton's campaign is sending out letters to donors asking permission to roll a $2,300 contribution to Clinton's 2008 general election coffers to her 2012 senate election fund instead of offering a refund.

The letter, read to me by one recipient, includes a photocopy of a handwritten note from Clinton that says, "Dear friend, your commitment has meant so much to me over the course of my presidential campaign. You were there for me when I needed you the most and I'll never forget it. I hope you'll help me continue to fight for the issues and causes we believe in by filling out the enclosed form in support of Friends of Hillary.  read more »

Here's Joe Biden on an Obama campaign conference call earlier arguing that John McCain had no idea what he's talking about when it comes to foreign policy:

"Quite frankly, I've known John for over 32 years. I don't understand anything about John's policy here. John talks about the central concern is the war on terror yet it's in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda, we know where they live, where they're building, it's in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And John's policy in Iraq prevents us from having a larger strategy to deal with that."

Asked what he thought of McCain's idea that Iraq could one day have a level of American troop presence like that in Korea, Biden said, "I love John, he has been my friend for 33 years.  read more »

Here is Obama's new communications team. Unlike the campaign's appointments in areas of policy and fund-raising, there is no integration with the Clinton campaign.

 

Obama Campaign Unveils New Communications Staffing for the General Election New Additions in Chicago and Denver Bolster Efforts Chicago, Il – The Obama Campaign today announced its general election communications operations which includes several new additions and new roles for several long-time aides. The campaign also announced that Democratic consultant Jenny Backus will be the senior Obama communications official in Denver working on the Democratic convention working with Obama aide Liz Oxhorn. Other changes include: Robert Gibbs, one of Senator Obama’s longest-serving and closest aides, has been elevated to Senior Strategist for Communications and Message taking on a broader strategic portfolio for the Fall campaign while continuing to serve as senior communications aide travelling with Senator Obama.  read more »

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The McCain campaign just responded, with a conference call, to Barack Obama's rearticulated plan for an end to the war in Iraq by arguing that Obama's intention to withdraw troops, despite the security improvements, amounts to political posturing, and that he is more concerned with winning the presidential election than winning the war.

Senator Lindsey Graham, one of McCain's chief surrogates, said that Obama was sending this message to American soldiers returning from Iraq: "Appreciate your service, but you didn't do any good."

Obama has always carefully couched his calls for withdrawal from Iraq with talk of the heroism of American troops, and has blamed a lack of political progress in Iraq, which is what the surge was supposed to accomplish, for many of the country's problems.  read more »

In his media column today, David Carr revisits the hubbub surrounding Barack Obama's decision to allow Access Hollywood to interview his daughters. Obama eventually told Matt Lauer that the family "won't be doing it again," but Carr suggests that the whole incident ultimately worked to the Obama campaign's advantage.

To be sure, the Obamas haven't shied away from softer media outlets, and at least one expert thinks that is a good thing for them.

In an e-mail exchange last week, I asked Jin Chon, Hillary Clinton's press secretary for specialty media, who had a fair amount of success putting Clinton in the generally friendly confines of entertainment shows, about the merits of politicians using entertainment-focused media.  read more »

Charlie Rangel is not pleased with The New York Times.

Dogged by a Times reporter after a just-ended press conference in which the dean of the New York Congressional delegation claimed he did nothing wrong by combining a series of rent stabilized apartments into one residence, Rangel bristled at the suggestion that his low rent amounted to an illegal gift from his landlords.

“Paying the legal rent is not a gift. Are you doing this deliberately or are you just stupid? Listen -- if you are paying a legal rent and without the law the rent would be higher, just what school did you go to that could misinterpret that as a gift?”

When the reporter tried to push Rangel, asking if he declared the rent on his income taxes, Rangel said to the reporter, Jeremy Peters, “Don’t make yourself look more dumb than you want.  read more »

Donors to Barack Obama expect his campaign to raise just over $30 million in June, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Even if that estimate is a tactial lowball, the number is well below the astronomical figures reported during the primary. And when contrasted with the $22 million June haul the McCain campaign reported yesterday, and the additional $95 million McCain campaign aides hope to raise by the end of the summer through the RNC and state victory accounts, it seems to diminish the notion of the Obama campaign's Internet fund-raising operation as a bottomless well.

And if the $30 million number is at all accurate, it could prompt questions not only about whether the substantial editorial hit Obama suffered for his reversal on the issue of public funding was worth it, but also about the significance of the super bundler, a species that some of Obama's own bundlers said had been put out to pasture by the Internet tidal wave.  read more »

"There may be somebody special here today," said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Barack Obama's sister, upon observing the large audience in the Hilton ballroom this morning. Then she abruptly added, "Two somebodies."

It seems the Obama family is having a hard time remembering Hillary Clinton this week. Last night, Obama painfully forgot to make an appeal for the cancellation of Clinton's debt to his supporters at a fund-raiser that was billed as a unity event in which he would make an appeal for the cancellation of Clinton's debt. This morning, in front of roughly 2,000 donors, mostly women, who had donated between $200 and $23,000 to a variety of Obama-related funds, the two former rivals appeared together to argue that equal pay and rights for women was a crucial aspect of any plan for American progress, and that party unity was a critical step to winning in November.  read more »

The night of Wednesday, July 9, was supposed to be when Barack Obama appealed directly to his supporters to help Hillary Clinton erase her campaign debt.

But he almost forgot to do it.

After finishing his speech to a room full of New York donors at the Grand Hyatt without any mention of helping Clinton with her debt, reporters ran over to Obama's spokeswoman Jen Psaki, who was already spinning hard that Obama's failure to make a pitch was no big deal. ("He said a lot of things," she said.) Then the music stopped and Obama, very awkwardly, started speaking again.

"Hold on a second, guys -- I was getting a little carried away," he began.  read more »

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's joint fund-raiser this evening at the Grand Hyatt may have some unwanted guests.

A diehard Clinton loyalist is trying to organize a picket at the meeting to demand that Clinton delegates not be obliged to declare support for Obama at the Democratic convention in August. A reader sent over one of the daily e-mails distributed by former Clinton campaign volunteer and fund-raiser Ricki Lieberman, who calls for other Clinton loyalists to assemble and protest.

"Wednesday we meet at 45th and Park Ave at 5:00pm. We then march to the Grand Hyatt at 42nd and Park at 5:30. Then we flyer and hold signs demanding that Hillary be on a full roll call," the email begins.

It goes on to cite a bunch of negative newspaper articles about Obama and argues that Clinton is still the Democrats' best chance of winning the White House.

Before donors to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton meet this evening to raise money for his candidacy and her campaign debt, there will be a special meeting for the smaller, powerful group of top New York bundlers to Clinton and Obama at around 5 p.m. at the Grand Hyatt, according to major fund-raisers from both camps.

Said one Obama donor with knowledge of the meeting and its attendees, "This one seems to have more traditional Clinton people involved. And that's a good thing."

 UPDATE: The 5 p.m. meeting has apparently been cancelled because both Obama and Clinton are in D.C. voting on FISA reform.

The wholesale absorption of Hillary Clinton’s best and brightest campaign advisers has begun.

In the weeks since Mrs. Clinton officially suspended her candidacy, the Obama campaign has recruited the services of the Clinton campaign’s director of national security, Lee Feinstein, as well as foreign-policy advisers Mara Rudman, the deputy national security advisor under Bill Clinton; Robert Einhorn, a former assistant secretary for nonproliferation at the State Department; and Stuart Eizenstat, an international-trade specialist who was policy director for Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign. On the domestic side, Gene Sperling, who was the top economic adviser on the Clinton campaign, has begun consulting with the Obama policy team.  read more »

Hillary Clinton wasted no time in hitting the campaign trail as a surrogate for Barack Obama after their joint appearance earlier in the day, telling an auditorium of black teenagers that Obama sends "each and every one of you his best wishes."

Speaking Friday evening at Columbia University for the first graduation of The Eagle Academy For Young Men, a school she helped start, Clinton said, "Earlier today I had the great pleasure of being in a place called Unity, New Hampshire." She added, "We declared that we would go back together to Unity, New Hampshire to pledge our commitment, together, to change this country.  read more »

As Ben reported earlier today and the Obama campaign just officially announced, Neera Tanden, a senior policy adviser to Hillary Clinton, is moving over to the Obama campaign.

One of Clinton's health care advisers told me he was encouraged by the hire, saying that Tanden, a major architect of Clinton's health care policy, would have a substantive impact on the Obama plan for achieving universal health care. Throughout primary season, Clinton's supporters -- and some prominent advocates of universal health care -- had criticized the Obama plan, which doesn't include a universal insurance mandate, as insufficiently bold.

"The progressive doctors and other health professionals were extremely attached to the notion of universal coverage," said Irwin Redlener, a professor at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia university who organized a group of medical professionals for Hillary.  read more »

After Michelle Obama delivered a measured speech to gay and lesbian leaders at a Manhattan fund-raiser last night, Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean abandoned his prepared remarks in favor of some more pointed observations.

“ I frankly don’t believe the John McCain of 2000 would even consider voting for the John McCain of 2008, I really don’t,” said Dean.

“Saddest of all," Dean added, "John McCain was against torture until he supported the president’s veto of the Democrats anti-water-boarding bill. This is a guy who appears not to have principles. And if you don’t have principles when you are president, you shouldn’t be president.  read more »

Not everyone in the crowd at the Waldorf Astoria last night, where Michelle Obama addressed gay activists at a fund-raiser for the Gay and Lesbian Leadership Council of the Democratic National Committee, was bowled over by her talk of “robust civil unions,” even as she received a generally warm response for the rest of her speech.

Obama, who followed New York first lady Michelle Paterson and took the stage to the theme song “Michelle, My Belle,” mostly spoke about how her husband would continue to hold onto his principles through the campaign. She made no explicit mention of his calculated decision to absorb a big editorial hit by opting out of the public financing system, except to say how happy she was about the large number of small donors the campaign had attracted.  read more »

The slow pace of bundler integration between the Obama and Clinton campaigns is picking up, however slightly.

On July 1, Obama's national finance chair, Penny Pritzker, will be in New York for a series of meetings and fund-raising events with major Clinton bundlers, according to one Obama donor familiar with the plans. And Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett met yesterday with Clinton bundlers at a get-together organized by former treasury secretary and Clinton supporter Robert Rubin.

Barack Obama will appeal to Hillary Clinton's base of support in New York on July 9 with an event designed to woo women voters, according to a New York-based donor to the Obama campaign.

Who says John McCain's web operation isn't hip?

After the McCain campaign's "Dr. No" hit on Barack Obama for what they depict as his naysayer approach to energy solutions got a modicum of traction in the press, the campaign has produced a short web video called Dr. No.  read more »

The spot includes a series of Obama's remarks disapproving of various proposals to address the energy crisis, with a soundtrack obviously intended to evoke the James Bond theme. The typography, orange and green backgrounds and psychedelic circles around Obama's head are perhaps the funkiest visuals ever used in a Republican presidential candidate's ad. At least since

The McCain campaign continues to push back on the devastating L.A. Times-Bloomberg poll that showed Barack Obama with a 15-point lead.

McCain spokesman Brian Rogers just sent out an email directing recipients to today's Gallup tracking poll, which has the two candidate tied with 45 percent of the vote.

The McCain campaign thinks that all the attention Barack Obama is putting on his opposition to the gas-tax holiday is a winner for them because the proposed holiday polls so well.

But the Obama campaign obviously thinks the issue is still worth pressing, and has now set up a new web site (or a section of his usual web site, anyway) to draw contrasts about what they are calling "The Choice on Energy: Poll-Tested Gimmicks vs. Real Solutions."

John McCain used to be Lincoln Chafee’s kind of Republican.

In 2001, Mr. McCain and Mr. Chafee were the only two Republican senators to vote against George Bush’s tax cuts.

Now, Mr. McCain favors making them permanent, and Mr. Chafee thinks the Arizona senator has lost the right to call himself a maverick.

“Technically, the definition of maverick in the dictionary is an unbranded calf, which is appropriate—you got no brand on your flank,” said Mr. Chafee, a former Republican moderate from Rhode Island who lost his seat to a Democrat in 2006 and switched to independent. “McCain just made a calculated decision to pander.  read more »

A reader sends over this letter from former Clinton bundler Yashar Hedayat calling for contributions to erase Hillary Clinton's campaign debt--and it includes this whiff of a threat to Obama supporters: " I don’t think any of us (including my Obama friends on this list) want her to be saddled with debt while she continues to do so much good for our country."

 

Here's the letter:

Friends, 

In the past eighteen months, Hillary Clinton ran a historic campaign for the Presidency. And thanks to so many of you on this list, there are eighteen million cracks in that highest and hardest of glass ceilings.  read more »

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In light of the news that Barack Obama will be appearing with Hillary Clinton in Unity, New Hampshire on Friday, it's worth noting that Obama has already started borrowing from Clinton's campaign rhetoric.

"Germany, a country as cloudy as the Pacific Northwest, is now a world leader in the solar power industry and the quarter million new jobs it has created," Obama said today in Las Vegas.

That echoes Clinton's familiar, and sharper, line about Germany's solar power production. As she said in Fresno on October 24, "Explain to me why Germany gets more of its electricity from solar power than California.  read more »

With the Obama campaign about to begin another conference call attacking John McCain on energy issues -- and on the day that the Times runs a story on A1 documenting the ways in which Obama is captive to Big Corn -- the McCain campaign announces a web ad called "energy security" in which the candidate asserts that he is the more independent voice on energy.

From the release:

blockquote>Script For "Energy Security" (Web 1:00)

CHYRON: A reliance on oil

A threat to our climate.

A threat to our economy.

A threat to national security.

JOHN MCCAIN: "Much of the world's oil supply is controlled by states, regimes and a cartel for which America's well being is not exactly a priority.  read more »

Patti Solis Doyle is expected to do some surrogate work for the Obama campaign to help woo Latino voters, according to the campaign's communications director, Robert Gibbs.

At the end of today's Obama conference call, Gibbs responded to a question from a Latino reporter who asked what surrogates the campaign might roll out in its effort to court the Latino community's voters. Gibbs said, "We will fold in surrogates that have been helpful to the Clinton campaign."

I asked him if Clinton's former campaign manager, Solis Doyle, would be one of those surrogates.  read more »

Barack Obama's communications director, Robert Gibbs, just said in a conference call that John McCain's apparently sympathetic remarks about comprehensive immigration reform to a group of Hispanic voters in Chicago amounted to more evidence of "John McCain being in a tortured debate with John McCain."

Gibbs pointed out that one of the attendees, who happened to be a member of the anti-immigration Minutemen group, said that McCain seemed to have one message for white Republicans and another for Hispanics.  read more »

Gibbs said that the remarks of McCain and his campaign on immigration, offshore drilling and

The Obama campaign wasted little time in showing how they are going to use all the money they expect to rake in now that they have opted out of the public financing system, by announcing the release of Obama's first general-election spot.

The 60-second advertisement, "Country I Love," will air in Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Virginia starting tomorrow, according to a statement by the campaign. That's 18 states.

The campaign goes on to say that, in the ad, "Senator Obama speaks to voters about the core values this nation was founded on and how they have guided him to work hard for his education, to bypass jobs on Wall Street to work as a community organizer, and to lead the fight for America’s families and veterans as an Illinois and United States Senator.  read more »

Governor Bill Richardson said today that he has spoken with former U.N. Ambassador Dick Holbrooke, a Clinton loyalist, about supporting Barack Obama and said that he will suggest to the Obama campaign that they include Holbrooke on Obama's foreign policy team.

At a Council on Foreign Relations event today, I asked Richardson why he thought Holbrooke's name was missing from the working group on foreign policy that Obama announced and met with today, and whether Holbrooke potentially had a useful role to play as part of such a working group.

"I think he does," said Richardson. "Getting the reintegration of the Clinton people, that will take a little time.  read more »

Bill Richardson thinks that when it comes to Barack Obama's position on Nafta, an agreement which he calls "a plus, a slight plus, at least for my state," voters should look at Illinois Senator's record.

"He voted for the Peru Free Trade Agreement," said Richardson, who immediately proceeded to make it clear that he was in no way speaking for Obama or his campaign. "You've got to be realistic," he said, and "you've got to deal with globalization."

Richardson said that during his ill-fated candidacy, he became more aware of the antagonism to Nafta in the Midwest, and the anxiety about free trade among the middle class around the country.

"I'm a free-trade Democrat. I'm also an endangered species in the Democratic Party," said Richardson.

Speaking at a Council on Foreign Relations event just now in Manhattan, Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico said that being picked as Barack Obama's Vice President would be an "honor."

"Look," said Richardson when asked by a moderator if he would take the job. "How can anyone turn down an honor like that, honestly?"

Richardson said that he loved being an ambassador to the United Nations, energy secretary and governor, but added, "of course, how can you turn something [like that] down?"

He then transitioned into a discussion about immigration policy, the topic for the day's discussion.

UPDATE: He was asked later on what attributes a vice president should have. His answer, in part: “Regional balance -- can you bring votes.” He went on to say, “We’ve ignored the Southwest Hispanic vote.”

He also said, “If John Kerry had won New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona…he’d be president today.”

Rudy Giuliani is back on offense.

Giuliani used his familiar offense-defense analogy to attack Barack Obama on a McCain conference call today. The call was intended to once again criticize Obama's remarks about the role of criminal prosecutions in combating terrorism.

Speaking about Obama, Giuliani said "He thinks that we're much better off using a defen