NewsBreak: First S.C. polls since Iowa show solid Obama gains

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama leads rival Sen. Hillary Clinton in the battleground state of South Carolina in two polls released Monday — the first surveys in the South after Obama’s surprising Iowa caucus win last week.

Obama leads Clinton 42 percent to 30 percent in a telephone poll of South Carolina voters conducted Sunday by Rasmussen, with former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards trailing at 14 percent support. Obama and Clinton were tied at 33 percent in the poll in December.

The Illinois senator now synonymous with “change” in the Democratic race is ahead of former front-runner Clinton by 20 points in a separate poll in the state.

A poll by SurveyUSA released Monday afternoon shows Obama ahead 50-30 percent over Clinton.

“There is across-the-board movement away from Clinton to Obama,” the SurveyUSA report read.

In the first state in the Democratic nominating process with a sizable black population, the polls indicate surging support for Obama among blacks. The SurveyUSA poll had Obama ahead among blacks by 46 points, up from 20 percent almost a month ago. Obama got 58 percent support among blacks in the Rasmussen poll.

Clinton had hoped to regain traction in South Carolina, where Obama wasn’t previously well-received. Edwards, a North Carolina native, also had hoped for a better performance.

Whites are mostly split in the Rasmussen poll, with Clinton taking 32 percent, Edwards 29 percent and Obama 27 percent — still a 13 percent improvement from the December poll. Obama leads among women voters in the state for the first time, coming ahead of Clinton by 8 points in the Rasmussen poll.

National polls are tightening up as well; Clinton enjoyed a comfortable, double-digit lead over Obama before she finished a disappointing third in the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3, but a USA Today/Gallup poll released Monday shows Obama and Clinton tied with 33 percent support apiece.

The national poll asked 499 Democratic voters who they support for president and had a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

Polls in New Hampshire, where the nation’s first primary will be held Tuesday, show Obama with as much as a double-digit lead over the former first lady.

Clinton and Obama campaigned tirelessly — driving Clinton almost to tears — all day Monday in a cold New Hampshire ahead of the important contests.

For Clinton, the second consecutive primary loss could be disastrous, but her campaign aides have said they will “push on.”

The South Carolina Democratic primary will be Jan. 26.

Clinton fights tears on N.H. campaign trail

Presidential hopeful and former Democratic front-runner Sen. Hillary Clinton got emotional the day before the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primaries:

Competitor John Edwards didn’t comment directly on Clinton’s soft moment, but he said, “I think what we need in a commander-in-chief is strength and resolve, and presidential campaigns are tough business, but being president of the United States is also tough business.”

“You know, this is very personal for me,” Clinton said in Portsmouth, N.H., fighting back tears and her voice cracking. “It’s not just political. It’s not just public. I see what’s happening, and we have to reverse it. And some people think elections are a game. They think it’s like who’s up or who’s down.”

In the next breath, she criticized Barack Obama for not being experienced enough.

Clinton was responding to a woman at a roundtable discussion who asked the senator how she’s doing and who does her hair.

I think it’s rather safe to say this is the sound of desperation.

Trail Mix: The Obama boost

When Barack Obama won the Iowa Democratic caucuses Jan. 3, he re-invigorated American voters. Or, rather, he made the political process accessible for the first time to thousands of young people.

Young caucus-goers gave Obama the win in Iowa this week, clearly. They voted overwhelmingly for the first-term Illinois senator, who is black, in a place where 96 percent of voters are white. Obama’s win is no surprise to the young people, hoping for political change, who’ve followed this race. It rocked the establishment to its core.

Hillary Clinton should’ve been anointed the Democratic nominee in Iowa. Would she have won, she would’ve all but sealed her eventual nomination. Now, the Clintons are trying — again — to re-invent themselves as the comeback kids. With husband Bill Clinton tagging along the New Hampshire campaign trail before the Granite State’s primaries on Jan. 8, that’s a misnomer: How can Clinton say she’ll be an agent for change in Washington when her husband symbolizes the political environment of the 1990s.

In many ways, Barack Obama is post-partisan, just in the way postmodernists are beyond Modernism and post-rock musicians supersede the rock genre. Obama — in many ways like California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger — transcends political party, conjuring remnants of hope long departed. That hope, which has become a staple of his campaign, is reminiscent of Robert Kennedy’s inspiration to bring the people to Washington.

“For many months, we’ve been teased, even derided for talking about hope,” Obama said during his Iowa victory speech. “But we always knew that hope is not blind optimism. It’s not ignoring the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path.”

Obama is more than Oprah and his background. He’s sincere. When he smiles, rooms enliven. When he smiles, crowds believe him. When he speaks, he stands on the shoulders of an entire generation’s aspirations to change the establishment — even when Hillary Clinton is trying so hard to make herself into the populist candidate she’s not.

A poll commissioned by CNN and the New Hampshire television station WMUR shows the top two Democrats are in a dead heat for the win, each with 33 percent apiece. John Edwards comes in third with 20 percent support.

The poll underscores the tightness of the race, and despite Obama’s 38 percent to 30 percent win over Edwards in Iowa (Remember Clinton finished an astonishing third), Obama must not rest on his laurels if he seeks to win in a state where the motto is “Live free or die.”

Multimedia: Video of Barack Obama’s speech after winning the Iowa caucuses

Britney Spears’ sister talks about her Nickelodeon show, her pregnancy

I find it particularly ironic that 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears, sister of Britney Spears, said yesterday that she is pondering life after high school — the day before the announcement that she’s pregnant went public.

“One of TV’s favorite schoolgirls is starting to grapple with some growing pains, and so is her real-life counterpart, 16-year-old Jamie Lynn, sister of that other Spears,” an AP reporter wrote Monday, a fortuitous foretelling of the younger Spears’ new, um, development.

“I kind of just keep my options open,” she says. “I have a bunch of friends that I always hang out with, a bunch of guy friends.”

She declines to discuss her famous sister, Britney, although she says she has no plans to follow her to California.

“No! Never will,” Spears says, laughing at the idea of living in Los Angeles. But her reluctance, she quickly adds, doesn’t have as much to do with avoiding the paparazzi as it does with leaving Louisiana.

“It’s, you know, it’s my friends,” she says. “It’s where I grew up. I want to stay here.”

— AP via MSNBC

Elsewhere in the story, Spears says her character Zoey in her Nickelodeon show has something happen to her.

“Something definitely happens,” Spears concedes. “But I guess you’ll just have to wait and see what comes of it all.”

(So, is this a gentle hint of a sex tape?)

Now the younger Spears says she’s 12 weeks pregnant in OK! Magazine.

“It was a shock for both of us, so unexpected,” Jamie Lynn said. “I was in complete and total shock and so was he.”

Spears, who lives in rural Louisiana, says she’ll keep the baby there.

“We respect Jamie Lynn’s decision to take responsibility in this sensitive and personal situation,” Nickelodeon wrote in a release. “We know this is a very difficult time for her and her family, and our primary concern right now is for Jamie Lynn’s well being.”

On the same day, a judge revealed the custody battle over Britney Spears and Kevin Federline’s two children won’t be resolved until next year. That was partly because Spears was too sick to go to court one day last week.

Trail Mix: Clinton combats perfection; Huckabee surges, wishes Republicans ‘Merry Christmas’

With the Iowa Caucuses just weeks away, Barack Obama has cut Hillary Clinton’s lead in the state — and nationally — to near nothing, leaving the Democrats scrapping for every vote. On the Democratic side, it’s a challenge of change.

Obama has been championing himself as an agent for change since the beginning of his campaign. He’s said Washington needs a new generation of leadership — a jab at Clinton, who represents the old guard. Certainly both candidates want to change policies enacted by President Bush, but the change voters are looking for is more substantive; they’re tired of the way business is done.

At last week’s debate, Clinton raised the issue of change that is gaining so much traction among Obama supporters, saying, “Everyone wants change. Well, everybody on this stage has an idea about how to get change,” Clinton said.”Some believe you get change by demanding it. Some believe you get it by hoping for it. I believe you get it by working hard for change.”

Obama scored when responding to a question about touting himself as an agent of change while hiring several former Clinton administration advisers, the Illinois freshman senator said he’d welcome Hillary Clinton into his administration. Obama has shunned lobbyists and Washington’s “culture of corruption,” as he calls it, but he’s embraced an endorsement from The Boston Globe, filmmaker Ken Burns and media mogul Oprah Winfrey.

Obama may have Oprah, but Hillary’s got magic.

Former Los Angeles Magic star Magic Johnson told a noisy crowd in Davenport, Iowa, on Tuesday, “You don’t want somebody in there that is young or a rookie at politics. We want somebody in there that knows what they’re doing because this job is so huge.”

Johnson — along with ever-increasing appearances by Clinton’s husband and former president Bill Clinton — is helping Hillary Clinton appear more approachable, less calculated and less the product of a machine. Likely voters have criticized Sen. Clinton’s demeanor, saying her responses to questions often sound rehearsed.

The newspaper endorsement battle mirrors the campaign. The Des Moines Register picked Clinton, but The Boston Globe — widely read in New Hampshire, where the nation’s first primary will take place in January — backed Obama.

Clinton’s decisive margin of popular support has mostly been erased, and Obama and Clinton are now in a statistical dead-heat in Iowa, with the latest poll commissioned by MSNBC showing Clinton at 27 percent and Obama at 25 percent. The margin of error for the poll was ± 5 percent. John Edwards isn’t far behind at 21 percent.

In recent days, Clinton has focused her campaign on making her appear more human, much like Al Gore tried to do in the 2000 race. Clinton has recently brought in old friends, family members and of course, her husband Bill Clinton to make the Clinton candidate sound more approachable. Her voice doesn’t even sound as sharp and confrontational as before.

Clinton even launched a Web site to help in the effort, thehillaryiknow.com, which is loaded with videos from friends and politicians alike — “those who know her best.”

She even dragged her mother and daughter Chelsea onto the Iowa campaign trail.

“It goes straight to the perception that she is cold, calculating and devoid of human warmth,” Dennis Goldford, professor of political science at Drake University in Des Moines, told The Associated Press. “Many Democrats either believe those things are true or they know people who believe them to be true, and that speaks to concerns about her electability.” (Check out the AP story here.)

The problem may lie with Clinton’s polarizing character; even before she announced her candidacy, polls showed her to be either well-liked or well-hated. There was hardly an in-between, and that may be why Clinton is hardly any voter’s second choice. We may be seeing Dodd, Biden, Richardson and even some Edwards backers breaking for Obama in the last days before the Jan. 3 caucuses. It remains to be seen how Bill Clinton’s enormous popularity among Democrats translates to success for his wife.

Meanwhile, things are even less clear on the Republican side.

Nationally, Rudy Giuliani has also seen his lead dwindle. Giuliani and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee are now statistically tied. Giuliani sank 4 percentage points in the latest CNN-commissioned poll, but Huckabee soared ahead by 12 percent. Their support levels are at 24 and 22 percent, respectively. Mitt Romney is only a few points behind.

Why the sudden attention for Huckabee?

He’s the rock star of the conservative, religious right.

Huckabee is all grassroots; he doesn’t gallivant around Iowa and New Hampshire with huge staffs, and he doesn’t sound too scripted. Huckabee is a former Baptist preacher and hasn’t been accused of waffling on the right’s touchstone issues, particularly abortion rights. The right sees him as a clean alternative to the rabble-rousing Giuliani and the Mormon and unsure-about-abortion Romney. Conservatives in Iowa, after all, are really conservative.

Huckabee is airing a controversial ad in target states (Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina) that some have criticized as too much a mix of religion and politics. In the TV spot, Huckabee sits in front of a Christmas tree saying, “Are you about worn out by all the television commercials you’ve been seeing, mostly about politics? Well, I don’t blame you. At this time of year sometimes it’s nice to pull aside from all of that and just remember that what really matters is the celebration of the birth of Christ and being with our family and friends.” (See the ad on YouTube here.)

Huckabee may alienate the less-religious moderates in the party, though, which could hurt him in New Hampshire. Huckabee also is riding a wave of sudden popularity, but there are elements of Huckabee’s past he’d rather not be discovered. Among them is his staunch, almost militaristic aversion to gays in an AP questionnaire from 1992. He also was against any military action against Saddam Hussein and women serving anywhere in the military. Huckabee said homosexuality was a “public health risk.”

Mitt Romney, very much in a three-way battle for the nomination, has paid for an ad that calls Huckabee too liberal, an effort to characterize Romney as the conservative choice.

But Romney is also battling old ghosts. Romney on Tuesday rebuffed criticism for appearing at a Planned Parenthood convention in 1994. This picture of Romney at the fundraising reception appeared this week on the Internet. Romney’s wife Ann contributed $150 to the abortion-rights group, fundraising records show. The abortion issue — no matter how often he so fervently tries to downplay it — continues to haunt Romney among conservatives.

Sen. John McCain has gotten a lot of breaks lately, from the support of several important newspapers in the race to Sen. Joe Lieberman’s endorsement this week. Lieberman ran successfully for re-election last year as an independent after he lost the Connecticut Democratic primary. Lieberman was the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee in 2000.

McCain was among the leaders when he announced his candidacy, but his cause has dwindled since then. He wasn’t helped by ardently supporting President Bush on Iraq and immigration because Bush’s name is nearly taboo among Republicans these days. But McCain is still here and still competitive, mostly avoiding the heated-up fray between Romney and Huckabee. McCain has become known for his quiet reserve.

Though Giuliani remains on top, it could be up to conservatives to push Huckabee over the line. In battleground states, it’s just too close to call.

Trail Mix — an analysis of the ongoing campaigning for the U.S. presidency — is written by Will York and will be an occasional feature at Factor of Production. E-mail me at warwithwords@gmail.com with suggestions.

Gore greens Nashville home

Red and green are synonymous with the Christmas season, but for Nobel laureate Al Gore, the emphasis is on the green.

Just in time for the holidays, Al Gore has fixed up his Nashville, Tenn., digs with solar panels, geothermal heaters and environmentally friendly Christmas lights, freezing critics who said the environmentalist icon wasn’t practicing what he preached.

Gore’s Christmas tree lights use LEDs — light-emitting diodes — instead of incandescent bulbs to save energy.

“Short of tearing it down and staring anew, I don’t know how it could have been rated any higher,” said Kim Shinn of the U.S. Green Building Council, which gave the house its second-highest rating for sustainable design.

Gore’s improvements cut the home’s summer electrical consumption by 11 percent compared with a year ago, according to utility records reviewed by The Associated Press. Most Nashville homes used 20 percent to 30 percent more electricity during the same period because of a record heat wave.

Shinn said Gore’s renovations are impressive because his home, which is more than 80 years old, had to meet the same rigorous standards as new construction.

Gore came under criticism by a conservative think tank in February for having an average monthly electric bill of $1,206. Gore called the criticism unfair because his 10,000-square-foot Belle Meade home was undergoing extensive renovation. He told CNN this week from Norway that “global warming denier” groups are targeting the “messenger” because they don’t like the attention his cause has gained.

“The only way to solve this crisis is for individuals to make changes in their own lives,” Gore said.

After he installed a geothermal pump, Gore’s natural gas consumption dropped 93 percent, The Associated Press reported. As more green features come online, experts expect Gore’s energy footprint to drop even more.

With the renovations, Gore’s Nashville home becomes one of the most environmentally friendly homes in the country. Only 14 homes in the country have attained the Green Building Council’s “gold” designation.

We all can’t spend an undisclosed amount of money to install geothermal pumps, but we can do a few things to our homes to make them more energy-efficient:

1. Replace incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent (CF) bulbs. The fluorescent bulbs save money and last far longer than their wasteful, primitive cousins. They cost less than $3 apiece.
2. Install organic floors, like those made from bamboo. They’re attractive and rather easy on the eyes.
3. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Keep recyclables away from the rubbage bin.
4. Use organic, biodegradable or nontoxic cleaning supplies. I made the switch to Method products sold at Target. They’re effective, smell nice, look really pretty (especially the ones designed by postmodern architects) and help the planet.
5. Turn off appliances you don’t use. Better yet, unplug them. All our high-tech electronics drain power, even when they’re only plugged in and turned off.

On the Net:
The U.S. Green Building Council
Gore gets green kudos for home renovation (The Associated Press, via MSNBC)

Gore accepts Nobel Prize for Peace

Former U.S. vice president and Tennessee native Al Gore accepted the Nobel Prize for Peace in Oslo, Norway, today, calling on world leaders — notably President Bush and rapidly developing China — to reduce climate-changing carbon dioxide emissions.

Sharing the prize with the U.N. intergovernmental climate change panel, Gore said humanity risks “mutually assured destruction” if it doesn’t work quickly to find meaningful solutions to climate change in a speech quoting Gandhi, the Bible and Winston Churchill.

“We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency — a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering destructive potential even as we gather here,” Gore said before the audience that included Norwegian royalty.

It was eerie for me to watch Gore receive his Nobel diploma because I couldn’t help but think about President George H. W. Bush in 1992 calling Gore “o-zone man” in an effort to cast him as an environmentalist fanatic to gain votes in his eventually unsuccessful bid for re-election. O-zone man has done well for himself, if I may say so.

“The future is knocking at our door right now,” Gore said. “Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask: ‘What were you thinking; why didn’t you act?’

“Or they will ask instead: ‘How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?’ We have everything we need to get started, save perhaps political will, but political will is a renewable resource.”

The speech was phenomenal, and the full text is available here on the Nobel Prize’s Web site.

As Gore points out, let’s not forget that in the Kanji characters used in Japanese and Chinese, the symbols for the word “crisis” are made up of two symbols: the first the symbol for “danger” and the second the symbol for “opportunity.”

Gore is the second Tennessean to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Cordell Hull won the prize in 1945 for laying the groundwork for the United Nations. Hull was also from Gore’s hometown of Carthage, a Middle Tennessee town of about 2,000 residents.

Gore also called for nations to adopt a worldwide CO2 market, where companies would be taxed based on their emissions.

How will Nashville grow?

Nashville is expanding at an enormous rate, with expensive, new condo units being flung up all around the city, the Predators professional hockey time avoiding a sell-out to a Canadian millionaire, the proposal of the tallest building in the South, the relocation of several corporate headquarters and other accolades.

Why the sudden growth?

The U.S. population is re-aligning itself toward the South and Southwest, and with population growth comes progress — or at least that’s the idea. Favorable climate and low taxes (and zero income tax) help attract companies to the city, and there’s plenty of room for growth. A string of two exceptional, pro-growth mayors helped direct the tempo of the city’s expansion.

Mayor Phil Bredesen (who then became Tennessee’s multi-term governor) and Bill Purcell helped direct a solid course of economic development, but not one very reliant on economic incentives. Some saw the absence of tax breaks and benefits as a good precedent for economic development, while others disagreed. Nashville’s new mayor, Karl Dean, is left with the daunting task of continuing the work of Bredesen and Purcell.

The City Paper takes an intelligent look today on what we may expect from the Dean administration.

Many cities across the country play the incentive game. Nashville has been fortunate in a certain respect. Its economy has been so good that the lack of incentives offered to attract companies has been overshadowed by success in attracting companies.

While Purcell was mayor, Nashville proper landed Caremark Rx, LP and Asurion. The first two located downtown. Those wins as well as other headquarters coming to the region made top Expansion Management magazine’s list of hottest cities for relocating companies two years in a row.

…

In Dean’s office, there is an internal mantra regarding economic development – “We’re open for business but in a thoughtful and responsible way.”

Now, that might cause some people to cock their heads a bit, thinking, wait, “We saw eight years of that already.”

Read the full article in The City Paper here.

WTF moment: ‘Beating’ up some cookies

Sometimes people do things that make you wonder, “WTF?!”

EDWARDSVILLE, Ill. (AP) _ Two students at Southern Illinois University in this St. Louis suburb kidnapped, paddled and burned a young man with freshly baked cookies after a drug deal went bad, prosecutors said.

(…)

Sheriff’s Capt. Brad Wells said that Friday night, three men went to James’ house to buy marijuana, but two of them grabbed the drugs and fled, leaving the third behind. The suspects held that man, who is in his late teens, and told him he needed to find $400 for the drugs, Wells said.

The suspects beat the man with a wooden paddle, burned his neck and shoulders with cookies immediately after taking them from the oven, shaved off some of his hair and poured urine over him from a soda bottle, Wells said.

“It was just sheer torture,” Wells said.

Keep your hot chips to yourself.

Observation: California wildfires

When scorching Santa Ana winds fueled towers of fire sweeping across Southern California this month, both rich and poor were victims, forced to evacuate their homes — mansions and hovels — to escape the flames sprawling across the land like spider webs.

More than 800 square miles of land burned from the Mexican border to posh Malibu last week under hazy, orange skies.

The fires destroyed some 2,000 homes and caused $1 billion in damage.

But loss goes beyond statistics.

These fires were not only destructive, but equalizing, disrupting the lives of both the poor and rich. Sometimes, it takes disasters such as this to put life into perspective: We are all subject to nature and misfortune, no matter our social status.