Not ‘Remainders’

I’m going to do these types of posts a lot, but I don’t want to call them “Remainders” because everybody else does that. What’s a good name? What’s in a name?

At Off The Bus, Ron Levitt talks about “shadow campaigns” being run by presidential candidate spouses in Florida, so as to avoid the appearance of violating the four-state pledge.

Volunteers are now running their own campaigns out of their homes, and fund-raising via the Internet is full speed ahead from out-of-state locations.

And, now, the latest surrogates to come to Florida are the spouses. From what we can learn, there is no objection to an Aspiring First Lady or First Gentleman to attend events, book signings, receptions, pass out bumper stickers and yard signs, to be interviewed by the Sunshine State media or to making news himself or herself.

Desmoinesdem has Part 5 of her “How the Iowa caucuses work” series, and she’s still not happy with the system.

Cate Edwards thinks it would be “creepy” if kids agreed with their parents all the time.

John McCain is $2 million in debt, but that’s not really that bad!

Marc Ambinder sums up the Republican numbers:

Giuliani and Romney will have enough money to compete through Feb. 5. Thompson has enough to run fully-fledged campaigns in the early states. Romney can write himself a check whenever he wants. The rest of the field is on fumes, money-wise.

And Republicans are raising much less than the Democrats.

And Pollster.com says don’t read anything into the Newsweek poll that has a “slight edge” for Barack Obama:

…the margins of sampling error reported by Newsweek — +/- 7% for the likely Democratic caucus goers and +/- 9% for he Republicans - means that statistically meaningful conclusions are all but impossible regarding Barack Obama’s “slight edge” (28% to 24%) over Hillary Clinton. Strictly speaking, even Mitt Romney’s 9 point advantage does not attain the usual 95% confidence level that pollsters require to describe a lead as “statistically significant.”