Press

Playing Hardball - A Reaction to Negative Advertising
By Campaign Insiders
Published by Campaigns & Elections
April 5, 2007

When you invite a lawyer for the Swift Boat vets, a Democratic consultant and an academic to talk about negative advertising, you’d better believe there will be a bit of hardball on display. Fortunately, the panelists at C&E’s April lunch seminar, “The Ethics of Hardball Politics: How Far is Too Far” all agreed on two things: The Web is making negative campaigning easier, and the ethics are just getting fuzzier. “It used to be that you would put a bomb in a room and run away,” said Van Parish, principal of The Parish Group, a Democratic consulting firm. “Now you have to manage the reaction. It’s no longer just the dirty tricks guy or gal, there’s a whole new division in politics that tries to manage reaction to negative ads.”
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Democratic Leaders Reject Idea of Draft
By Charles Babington and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, November 21, 2006

The new Democratic-controlled Congress will not seriously consider reinstating the draft, even if concerns about the military's strength and resiliency grow, party leaders said yesterday. Key Democrats, including the incoming House speaker, House majority leader and chairmen of the House and Senate armed services committees, said they do not support a resumption of the draft. They predicted that the idea will gather little momentum in the 110th Congress, which convenes in January. Pentagon officials also restated their opposition to a draft.
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Pelosi-Harman Friction Strains Democrats' Unity
By Johanna Neuman and Michael Finnegan
Times Staff Writers
November 21, 2006

WASHINGTON — When Jane Harman left Congress in 1998 to run for governor of California, her colleague Nancy Pelosi threw her a party — a chocolate-fudge sundae "social" in the House members' dining room. Two years later, Harman hosted a fundraiser in Los Angeles for Pelosi when she was running for minority whip, raising $400,000. These days the two rarely talk, much less throw parties for each other.
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