Gas-Tax Holiday

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."

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 »

Out on the campaign trail, town hall-style meetings are often held in barns, or factories or high school gyms. John McCain's "Town Hall Meeting in New York" on Thursday night took place under the vaunted marble dome and pillars of Federal Hall, where the audience mostly looked like they had wandered in directly from their Wall Street offices. Men wearing dark suits and long power ties and women, most of them blond, surrounded a wooden podium, next to a thigh-high speaker. In the quiet, show's-about-to-begin minutes before McCain arrived, Tony Carbonetti, the former chief political adviser to Rudy Giuliani and a good friend of McCain, twisted in his second row seat to chat with Senators Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman behind him.  read more »