Thursday evening, AARP and Iowa Public Television cosponsored a Democratic presidential debate focusing on health care and economic security. There were no major position switches, although a few candidates used the event as an opportunity to unveil new policy proposals (I got press releases about proposals affecting retirees and/or health care from both Edwards [...]

I just received a press release from the Clinton campaign that is entirely in Spanish. It’s sent from their normal press address to, from what I can tell, their full press list. This is the first all-Spanish release I have received from a presidential campaign this year, and I find it interesting that [...]

Iowa Independent’s Jay Wagner was one of seven people to attend Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo’s appearance at the country club in Sibley, IA, over the weekend. The seven people included “two county Republican committee members, three journalists and a smiling couple wearing Tancredo for President t-shirts.”
And he insisted that although his focus on immigration [...]

Sen. Hillary Clinton has been receiving the most media attention among Democratic presidential candidates this week because of her new health care plan. Sen. Barack Obama was featured on NBC Nightly News Monday night to talk about, among other things, the tax proposal he is rolling out this week. Meanwhile, the national media [...]

As you may have noticed, I have completely redesigned Chase Martyn On Display. It started with small changes here and there, but on the way I decided that I might as well start from scratch. As has been mentioned to me by many friends, the old design didn’t exactly exude credibility. In [...]

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson says what he thinks his audience wants to hear. But he isn’t always good at knowing what that is. He said he thought homosexuality was a choice at the LGBT forum, he said Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status was God’s will in front of an Iowa crowd to whom that [...]

I was at Sen. Hillary Clinton’s health care policy rollout in Des Moines this morning. Maybe I’m just looking for pandering where I shouldn’t be, but the angle I took in my write-up on Iowa Independent has to do with the imminent SEIU endorsement decision. Clinton flies directly from Des Moines to Washington, [...]

A brief programming note: tomorrow, Iowa Independent will have nearly ten people at the Harkin Steak Fry in Indianola. I’ll be liveblogging over there.
The top six Democratic presidential candidates — Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson — will all speak, and Tom Harkin will likely unveil a [...]

Conservative e-rag WorldNetDaily broke the news this morning that Alan Keyes, best known for running two unsuccessful presidential campaigns, is running for President again this year:
Keyes told syndicated radio host Janet Parshall he’s “unmoved” by the lack of moral courage shown by the other candidates, among whom he sees no standout who articulates the “key [...]

Earlier today, I relayed a tip that Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign was set to announce legislative endorsements. A few hours later, they announced endorsements from state legislators Rich Olive, Frank Wood, Helen Miller, and Janet Peterson.
I wrote earlier that it would be a “major coup” for Obama to overtake Biden for second place in [...]