Politics in brief: Clinton gets warm Harlem welcome
Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose quest to become the first female president is outpacing Barack Obama’s bid to become the first black president, took her campaign to the nation’s best-known black neighborhood, where the nation’s most powerful black politician was host.
Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., introduced the New York senator to a nearly full audience at the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem shortly after noon Saturday, telling people in the pews to turn to their neighbor and say, “We are making history.”
Clinton, who also was introduced by former President Clinton, promised that an America under her presidency would restore its image abroad by ending the Bush-Cheney “cowboy diplomacy.”
FORT MYERS, Fla.
Romney cites ‘House of Horrors’
Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney offered a verbal tour of “Hillary’s House of Horrors” on Saturday, conjuring images of Halloween houses to underscore his criticisms of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
“You go in one room, she wants to raise your taxes. You go in another room and she wants to have government taking over health care,” Romney said to a town hall meeting. “You go in the next room and she’s weakened homeland security by voting against the authority of our government to listen in to al-Qaida’s calls.”
Romney said he would keep Clinton from reaching the White House not by acting like her – an apparent dig at rival Rudy Giuliani – but by building on the conservative foundation laid by Ronald Reagan.
DES MOINES, Iowa
Thompson leery of long presence
Republican Fred Thompson warned Saturday that suggestions the U.S. could maintain a long-term presence in Iraq “would not be a good development,” and he conceded that mistakes were made that are only now being rectified.
President Bush has suggested there could be a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq, very similar to what the nation has in Korea. But Thompson, who has been a reliable supporter of the war in Iraq thus far, was leery of a long-term presence in an interview with the Associated Press.
“It’s hard to see that far in the future, but I would certainly hope not, that would not be a good development,” he said. “I would not want to predict that. I don’t know why he did.”
While Thompson said there are U.S. troops on long-term deployments in places like Germany and Korea, he said “of course not” when asked if a similar deployment should happen in Iraq.
“I don’t think that’s desirable,” said Thompson, though he did leave an opening. “What might be necessary in the future, you can never tell.”
Asked to assess the prosecution of the war, Thompson was able to find faults. “I think we clearly didn’t go in with adequate forces the first time. Clearly we didn’t understand the nature of what we were facing and that it was going to take a good while in order to get control of the situation.”