Daily News Roundup, 11/26/07: Winners At The White House

Al Gore is on his way to the White House, but not for the reason everyone thought he would be.

The former Vice President will roll into town and accept some presidential accolades for winning the Nobel Prize. Other Nobel winners will be there, but of course the focus will be on Bush and Gore. Now, on the other end of seven years, Bush is hugely unpopular while Gore is the environmentalist version of a rock star. Who knew things would work out like this in the end?

Speaking of Republican candidates, there's a new trend that the media's been eyeing lately: the Republican Party is cash-poor and is thus attempting to recruit very rich candidates, in an effort to kind of proactively solve two problems at once. The party needs candidates and money, and rich candidates offer that all in one. I don't know how effective that will turn out to be, and I would wager that it largely depends on the candidate anyways. The ability to self-finance is always a boon but the candidate still has to go out and get other support.

If you equate the cash flow problems with business abandoning the GOP, you'd be right on a national scale and wrong statewide. Big corporations in Texas, of which there are many, love the Republican Party. From the Chron:

According to a Houston Chronicle analysis of Federal Election Committee data, the 46 Texas companies that are included in the Fortune 500 gave 73 percent of their political action committee contributions to Republican House and Senate candidates in Texas, while donating just 27 percent to Lone Star Democrats in the first nine months of 2007.

You can make much of that fact, or the fact that companies give more to national campaigns and organizations on the GOP side as well.

Over in Mississippi, the Republican retirement party continues to collect honorees, this time in the form of Trent Lott. Lott is the second most powerful Republican in the Senate, and the reasons for his resignation aren't clear, just that he has "other opportunities," which seems like an awfully low-key reason to bail on your Senate seat.

It is probably not a great pickup opportunity for Democrats, but an open seat is expensive to defend no matter what, and Lott's retirement is the sixth among GOP Senators, to boot. The fight over his Senate leadership role should be entertaining.

Lastly today, Australian Prime Minister and strident conservative John Howard, a staunch ally of President Bush and supporter of his policies, was ousted this weekend when his coalition lost badly to the Australian Labor Party. It is also possible Howard lost his own seat, which is a big deal and adds insult to injury. The new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has said his top priorities are signing the Kyoto Protocol and getting the country's combat troops out of Iraq. So Australia has that going for it, and beaches too.