Election 2008: What’s At Stake?

Colorado Senate Candidates Square Off

The race to fill the seat of retiring Colorado Sen. Wayne Allard (R) received national attention Sunday as Rep. Mark Udall (D) and former Rep. Bob Schaffer (R) took part in the first of a series of senate debates on Meet the Press (transcript). The 17-minute mini-debate focused primarily on the economy, with both candidates shifting the blame for the current economic crisis to his opponent. Schaffer focused on the last two years when the Democratic party has controlled congress while Udall pointed to deregulation policies going back to the Reagan administration.

“This is the result of years and years of Republican leadership, or lack thereof, in Washington,” Udall said.

“Mark, I’ve been out of Congress for six years. You’ve been there for 10. Tell us what you’ve done,” Schaffer responded.

The Colorado Independent’s David O. Williams called Schaffer “combative and relentlessly interrupting.” The Denver Post said Schaffer’s style was “aggressive [and] sometimes hectoring.”

Columnist Mike Litwin of the Rocky Mountain News said the debate was “uglier than the Broncos game” and suggested that “if political races come down to the candidate you’d rather have a beer with, Schaffer would win only if it were the race for the guy who’s more likely to throw that beer in your face… Udall might have helped himself if he’d once said something like, I don’t know, maybe ‘Bob, shut the hell up.’”

Denver Westword concisely summed up the debate in a blog headline: “bully vs. sloucher.” The posting suggested that while Schaffer may have been offputting in his over-aggressiveness, Udall “exuded weakness visually as well as verbally.”

One commenter on a DailyKos post about the debate wrote, “That Udall guy came off as a whimp. I hope that people really don’t like the other guy because he made the Dem look pretty bad.” Another commenter found a silver lining, saying he “thought Udall really was losing this thing. Then at the end Schaffer was so over the top and vicious that perhaps he got a bit of a sympathy vote.”

Recent polls have “Boulder Liberal” Mark Udall ahead of “Big Oil” Bob Schaffer, but the margins are getting smaller.

Meet the Press will continue its senate debate series when New Mexico hopefuls Reps. Tom Udall (D) and Steve Pearce (R) meet up October 12.

Another Day, Another GOP Resignation Firing

A good spokeswoman chooses her words carefully. Unfortunately for them, it looks like the Clark County Republican Party could have done better than communications director Didi Lima.

“We don’t want [Hispanics] to become the new African-American community,” Lima told the AP. “And that’s what the Democratic Party is going to do to them, create more programs and give them handouts, food stamps and checks for this and checks for that. We don’t want that.”

Lima was fired over the weekend. She also lost her volunteer role as a Hispanic community liaison for John McCain’s presidential campaign.

Republican and Democratic reactions were recorded by the AP:

“She was speaking for herself, not the Clark County Republican Party,” county chairman Bernie Zadrowski said. “And she won’t be speaking for the Clark County Republican Party anymore.”

Obama campaign spokeswoman Kirsten Searer said the remarks were “proof of how out of touch John McCain and Republicans are with the issues facing all Americans today.”

Election Preaching

Calvary Chapel of Rio Ranch, New Mexico, is the only church in the Battle for the West states that took part in the Pulpit Freedom Sunday challenge to IRS rules against churches endorsing candidates, according to a press release from the conservative Alliance Defense Fund who has vowed to fight any legal challenges. But that doesn’t mean other churches aren’t speaking out about campaign ‘08.

At Albuquerque’s Legacy Christian Church, pastor Steve Smothermon stopped short of endorsing a candidate, but told his congregants to vote their values and provided a handy voter guide showing how McCain andObama stack up on the issues, according to the New Mexico Independent.

A cursory check of the guide showed that John McCain appeared to be on the right side on all 15 issues, while Obama was on the wrong side on 14 of the 15.

The list included the usual suspects: a state constitutional amendment to protect traditional marriage, a constitutional right (or not) to abortion and nomination of pro-life Supreme Court Justices. But there were also some lesser known biblical issues such as the right to private gun ownership, reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil, government control of health care, and immigration reform and border security.

Earlier this month, pastor Brady Boyd of the 10,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, told the Denver Post that Gov. Sarah Palin’s opposition to abortion and her other strong Christian family values would help “Evangelicals get much more comfortable with the [Republican] ticket” following the announcement of Palin as McCain’s veep pick.

McCain-Palin may still have the lead among evangelicals, but survey data released today shows all is not lost for Obama-Biden. The survey, conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner for PBS’s Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, found McCain tops Obama among white evangelical Christians, 71 percent to 23 percent. But McCain’s lead narrows, 62 to 30 percent, for evangelicals under 30.