Daily News Roundup, 12/03/07: Speeches and More Speeches

This week will be one full of speeches, notably coming from President Bush (on war funding, today) and from Mitt Romney (on his religion, Thursday).

The Bush speech will be from the Rose Garden, and media are reporting it will be full of criticism on Congress, congressional spending, and funding for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm guessing he will boldly call on Congress to do what he wants, as per usual.

What isn't likely to be the usual is Romney's speech. In what some pundits are calling a huge risk, Romney will address the fact of his religion and no doubt go out of his way to calm evangelical / religious-right fears that he isn't Christian enough for them.

His campaign is describing the address as an opportunity for Mr. Romney to “share his views on religious liberty, the grand tradition religious tolerance has played in the progress of our nation and how the governor’s own faith would inform his presidency if he were elected.”

Well, that too. He'll be delivering it from Bush 41's library right here in Texas, and the obvious comparisons are to Kennedy's speech about his own religion, Catholicism. The support for such a speech by Romney has been generated in large part by evangelicals that already support him, the same voting bloc he would be seeking to reassure in the wider political world.

The usual relationship between fundraising and probability of election continues to be destroyed by Ron Paul, who will apparently raise somewhere near $12 million in the last quarter of 2007. Money gives you the ability to make some noise, certainly, so Ron Paul may end up being more of a factor in Iowa than anyone could have initially imagined just through force of dollars. He won't win — I can't imagine that's even a remote possibility — but he might be able to change the dynamic in the lower tiers.

Some other news from Iowa: lots of negative robocalls which attack a big chunk of the Republican field and support Mike Huckabee are underway. It is essentially a push poll, although it is by some other group that isn't officially associated with Huckabee's campaign. Officially.

The Houston Chronicle has an item of interest concerning Phil King, the state representative from in and around Weatherford, who will face a primary challenger in the form of Joe Tison, the current mayor of Weatherford. Like some other Texas Republicans, King has yet to face a primary challenger, so it will be as interesting as it always is to see an incumbent face competition for the first time. The Texas Parent PAC has a hand in recruiting Tison to run against King, and they've made more than a few waves in the last few years in support of public schools.

For those of you that are interested in international politics, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez was denied the constitutional right to run for president forever this weekend as a referendum on reforming the nation's constitution was defeated. This was first brought to our reader's attention by George late last night, including some information about coups and US attempts to exert influence in Venezuela in the last several years. I wanted to add to that and point out that, earlier in the weekend, Chavez said in a speech that he would stop oil exports to the US if the US interfered in the election, which I took to mean "if Chavez loses." We'll see what happens in the aftermath, but it looks like a movement is underway that rejects Chavez' style of governing. For your reference, we get a good amount of our oil from Venezuela.

Lastly today: how would you like it if Paul Wolfowitz, leading architect of the Iraq War, were given a position on a major State Department panel? If your answer was anything like mine, then Condoleezza Rice's recent job offer to Wolfowitz is bad news for us.