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Karl Rove has been rather chatty of late. He’s taken a hammer to Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) over the birther nonsense and to Herman Cain for basic unpreparedness. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell thought Rove was “trying to circle the wagons around Mitt Romney as an inevitable nominee.” While I saw where he was coming from, I had a different take. Rove isn’t circling the wagons around Romney. He’s circling the wagons around the Republican Party as a legitimate political party in the United States. Rove is not alone in this endeavor.

Herman Cain pushed back hard at Karl Rove's recitation of his recent campaign fumbles and miscues - which he presented on a whiteboard on Fox News this morning - and accused the operative of trying to do him intentional damage in a Byron York interview: "It's a good thing the voters are not looking at Karl Rove's little whiteboard," Cain said in a phone conversation from a stop in Chicago Monday afternoon. "I believe it is a deliberate attempt to damage me because I am not, quote unquote, the establishment choice. But why not go with the choice that the...

DES MOINES, Iowa: Republicans Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann took veiled swipes at surging presidential rival Herman Cain Saturday as six of the party’s White House hopefuls courted social conservatives at an Iowa forum. Appearing separately before about 1,000 conservative activists, the Republican candidates all pledged to protect the unborn, defend traditional marriage, limit government and bring an end to the presidency of Democrat Barack Obama. But Cain, the former pizza executive, came under indirect fire for seeming to suggest earlier this week that while he opposed abortion, government should not be trying to tell a woman what to do...

In a new website, in a controversial ad that was launched and then quickly pulled, and in the now-infamous touching episode during Tuesday’s debate, Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney is handling rival Rick Perry as if the Texas governor’s poll numbers were not at a paltry single digit. He is, in short, treating Perry more and more like Perry has Herman Cain’s numbers. Why? Because despite the terrible reviews of Perry’s debate performances and the ugly polling data that show him struggling even in his base in the South, Perry is still Romney’s biggest threat. Perry did, after all, best...

The Iowa caucuses are now just 72 days away. Once Iowans vote on Jan. 3, the 2012 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination ceases to be about debates and gaffes and spin, and begins to be about actual results. This week’s uproar over Herman Cain’s CNN interview with Piers Morgan will likely be a distant and irrelevant memory by Jan. 3. Despite Cain’s rhetorical difficulty in consistently articulating a pro-life position, his bona fides on the issue have long been established, as demonstrated in 2006 when he led a $1 million effort to encourage black voters to vote pro-life. What...

The campaign of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, which said Wednesday it had underpaid wealthy donors for use of their private jets, has another ticklish plane problem. For a campaign swing that started late last month, Mr. Perry’s campaign chartered a Gulfstream III owned by a California Mexican-food company, Marquez Brothers International, according to flight records and a Marquez Brothers executive. The same plane was used in a major cocaine-smuggling ring involving a well-known hip-hop music executive that was busted by federal officials last November, according to federal court filings. A pilot who flew the Marquez Brothers plane was among those...

His business acumen, his conservative credentials and his plainspokenness drove his popularity up quickly. But as with many politicians on both sides of the aisle, the more the public sees of him, the less appetizing he becomes. He has repeatedly revealed his lack of understanding of key issues. CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked Cain if he could imagine as president giving in to an al-Qaida demand to free all of the hundreds of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay in exchange for freeing one American soldier. "I could see myself authorizing that kind of transfer, but what I would do is, I...

Mitt Romney is going negative on Rick Perry, and he's using one of the most tried-and-true methods: the Internet. Today, Romney for President Inc. launched (snip) an anti-Rick Perry website aimed at undermining the former Massachusetts governor's best-funded opponent. snip The Washington Post shows other anti-Perry Web domain names are being gobbled up snip While no one is claiming ownership of the anti-Perry domains, The Post's Philip Rucker and T.W. Farnam note that the same day the domain names were purchased, Romney's campaign bought $2,851 worth of domain names at GoDaddy.com, which was the same vendor that sold the anti-Perry...

When Florida defied Republican National Committee rules to move the state’s 2012 presidential primary from an RNC-approved March date to Jan. 31, conservatives immediately suspected that state party insiders had orchestrated the move to help former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney thwart the momentum of Tea Party-backed candidate Herman Cain. Some Florida activists focused their suspicion on moderates in state party leadership – former Gov. Charlie Crist — as orchestrating the change in the date. The move was seen as helping the centrist Romney, whose superior fund-raising resources would enable him to score an early knockout in the Sunshine State before Cain could fully...

Well, first let me just say that the novel is by no means meant to build a case against Sarah Palin. However, to the extent that the people around [the fictional vice president] Tara watched in this troubled state of confusion, despair and helplessness as she flailed around — that was something I experienced. Palin vacillated between extraordinary highs on the campaign stage — she ignited more enthusiasm than our side had seen at any other point — to debilitating lows. She was often withdrawn, uncommunicative and incapable of performing even the most basic tasks required of her job as...

Herman Cain leaving the campaign trail: Why now? Herman Cain is surging in popularity in a number of polls. So why is Herman Cain putting his campaign on hold for the next month? The Hermantor Experience is, by almost any measure, the hottest thing going in the GOP presidential primary (not named Chris Christie). < snip> But Cain seems destined to squander it. And here’s why. As NBC’s thoughtful First Read points out this morning, Cain's promoting a book - and appears to be taking himself off the campaign trail for almost a month. Cain won’t be back in the...

Herman Cain pushed back Monday against criticism that he had unfairly called opponent Rick Perry "insensitive" when asked about a rock displaying a racial epithet at a ranch leased by the Texas governor. “All I said was the mere fact that that word was there was ‘insensitive,’ ” Cain said outside Trump Tower in Manhattan, N.Y., according to the National Review. “That’s not playing the race card. I am not attacking Gov. Perry. Some people in the media want to attack him. I’m done with that issue!” Cain was in Manhattan to meet with businessman Donald Trump.

Eleven days before Michigan's candidate registration deadline. And we still don't know if former Gov. Sarah Palin is going, as she puts it, to toss her name into the hat. Here's Palin's problem: We don't know. She likes it that way. It's late by contemporary announcement standards. And many of us, even those fascinated by her refreshing rogueness, have stopped caring. Certainly her would-be Republican opponents have moved on, as they should. So, does it even matter now if SP drives her beautiful bus straight through the gates of tradition into a rogue race?

Just saw this story in the NYTimes speculating on whether Ms. Governor-of-Alaska-for-a-while Sarah Palin will announce she is running for president. I am fascinated that Utah’s Oct. 15 deadline for a list of potential candidates is the first hint that we’ll see, nation-wide, that she intends to toss her hat (expensive like last time?) into the ring.Other than that, who cares? All the other GOP candidates have flamed out — the latest Great Political Hope (a hint at the old “Great White Hope” construction, but Cain is black) Texas Gov. Perry is in the process of making a ass out...

In a severe embarrassment for the Republican presidential frontrunner, businessman Herman Cain tripped up Gov. Rick Perry in a straw ballot of Florida Republican activists Saturday. The vote has no bearing on the choice of a 2012 nominee but, along with recent campaign events, is likely to increase the chances that the Republican presidential contest will tighten. It comes on the heels of a poor performance by Perry in a Florida debate Thursday night that disappointed conservatives, including delegates who came to Orlando expecting to back the Texas governor. Cain received 37% of the vote, more than twice as many...

Ed Rollins, former campaign manager and current "informal adviser" to Rep. Michele Bachmann, told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell moments ago that Bachmann doesn't have the "ability or the resources" to go beyond Iowa. Rollins stopped working for the campaign day-to-day earlier this month in a staff shakeup, and criticized her comments on the HPV vaccine last week. Rollins said Texas Gov. Rick Perry's entrance into the race undercut her campaign, and that she was unprepared for the national stage running as a congresswoman.

I was in the middle of the controversial new book about everyone’s favorite Alaskan—The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin—when I began to fret that I’d accidentally fallen into a DeLorean and time-traveled back to 2008. Does our world really need yet another person to tell us that the former Alaska governor is a vicious, savage, vindictive, paranoid, lying, hypocritical Jesus freak? If that’s your thing, by all means run to your local bookstore before Matt Damon buys up all the copies. But perhaps you might take a moment for what Sarah Palin’s onetime running mate famously called a...

The Palin family is going on offense against author Joe McGinniss, whose forthcoming book about Sarah Palin broke into the headlines thanks to a Wednesday National Enquirer report. In a statement to reporters, Todd Palin described the book as "disgusting lies, innuendo, and smears." He cited the New York Times review of "The Rogue" as evidence the book should be discounted. "This is a man who has been relentlessly stalking my family to the point of moving in right next door to us to harass us and spy on us to satisfy his creepy obsession with my wife," Palin said...

<p>"This is a man who has been relentlessly stalking my family to the point of moving in right next door to us to harass us and spy on us. He traffics in innuendo and falsehoods. A few years ago he interviewed members of Sarah's administration for a magazine article, and afterwards they said that he was the most disingenuous and intellectual dishonest writer they'd ever dealt with. He's spent the last year interviewing marginal figures with an axe to grind in order to churn out a hit piece to satisfy his own creepy obsession with my wife. I'd ask that people consider these facts when evaluating his latest lies."</p>

A seemingly irreparable divide has developed between Sarah Palin’s key supporters in Iowa. On one side is Peter Singleton, the California lawyer who moved to Iowa ten months ago, traveled the state meeting with activists, and created Iowa’s Organize4Palin group. On the other side are several longtime Iowa political activists who volunteered countless hours to develop a grassroots network of support for the former Alaska governor. Both sides still support Palin and hope she runs for President. However, if she runs, Palin will have trouble rebuilding her Iowa team. The key differences stem from Singleton’s Iowa strategy. He has been...