Ron DeSantis Drops Out of Republican Presidential Race

THE GUARDIAN: Hard-right Florida governor at one point thought to be future of party ends campaign to be GOP nominee

Ron DeSantis, the hard-right governor of Florida, has ended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and endorsed Donald Trump.

“It’s clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance,” he said in a statement posted on X. “He has my endorsement because we can’t go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear, a repackaged form of warmed over corporatism that Nikki Haley represents.”

DeSantis’s withdrawal in the days ahead of the New Hampshire primary follows a disappointing result in the Iowa caucus, where he finished second place but trailed Donald Trump by a large margin. In New Hampshire, his numbers were far behind former South Carolina governor Haley and Trump.

The withdrawal was the culmination of a long, agonising decline. » | Martin Pengelly in Washington | Sinday, January 21, 2024

Elizabeth Warren, Once a Front-Runner, Drops Out of Presidential Race

THE NEW YORK TIMES: Ms. Warren, a senator and former law professor, staked her campaign on fighting corruption and changing the rules of the economy.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts dropped out of the presidential race on Thursday, ending a run defined by an avalanche of policy plans that aimed to pull the Democratic Party to the left and appealed to enough voters to make her briefly a front-runner last fall.

Though her vision excited progressives, it did not generate enough excitement among the party’s working-class and diverse base, and her support had eroded by Super Tuesday. In her final weeks as a candidate she effectively drove former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, a centrist billionaire, out of the race with debate performances that flashed her evident skills and political potential.

She entered the race railing against the corrosive power of big money, and one long-term consequence of her campaign is that Ms. Warren demonstrated that someone other than Senator Bernie Sanders, and his intensely loyal small-dollar donors, could fund a credible presidential campaign without holding fund-raisers. » | Astead W. Herndon and Shane Goldmacher | Thursday, March 5, 2020

France Presidential Race: Fillon Placed Under Formal Investigation Over 'Fake Jobs'

France Presidential Race: Candidate François Fillon Gives Press Conference amidst Series of Scandals

France's Penelopegate: Presidential Race Upended by Scandal (Parts 1 & 2)

France Presidential Race: Fillon Will Not Abandon Candidature Over Penelopegate

Kasich: I Might Not Vote GOP for President

John Kasich says he's no closer to endorsing Donald Trump for president, cementing his place as one of the most prominent holdouts in the Republican Party.

Mike Pence Explains Why He Is Running with Donald Trump

On 'Hannity,' 2016 vice presidential running mate discusses his decision to enter the race for the White House

‪Sophie&Co: America's Unpopularity Contest‬

Clinton has to go further left, or she's not going to make it to White House - Ed Schultz. The race for the White House is nearing its final stage - and it looks like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are to face each other in the fight for the presidency. However, both candidates are quite unpopular with the American public, tired of overseas wars, the rule of big banks, and divided over issues such as immigration and gun control. In this turbulent environment, is there no alternative to pandering populism and condescending establishment? What sort of a choice does America have to make this time around? We ask progressive commentator, prime-time TV and radio show host, Ed Schultz. Recorded from RT, SophieCo, July 11, 2016

Donald Trump Widens Lead Over US Republican Presidential Field: Poll

NDTV: WASHINGTON: Republican Donald Trump is pulling away from the pack in the race for the party's US presidential nomination, widening his lead over his closest rivals in the past week, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed on Friday.

Republican voters show no signs they are growing weary of the brash real estate mogul, who has dominated political headlines and the 17-strong Republican presidential field with his tough talk about immigration and insults directed at his political rivals. The candidates are vying to be nominated to represent their party in the November 2016 general election. » | Reuters | Saturday, August 22, 2015

Sickly Sweet Garbage? Dorothy

Read the Telegraph article here

Bobby Jindal Becomes 13th Republican to Run for US Presidency

The governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, has become the 13th Republican to throw his hat into the ring and join the presidential race. Jindal criticised the establishment in Washington, saying, 'It's time for the folks in Washington to admit the truth. You can't grow the economy and the government at the same time.' He pitched himself as a Republican candidate with a difference, saying 'the Republican party in Washington DC has been beaten into submission. It is increasingly afraid to speak the truth. It is time to say what everybody is already thinking. The emperors in Washington, they are not wearing any clothes.' Jindal is the first person of Indian-American heritage ever to run for the presidency

Mitt Romney Gains Four-point Lead Over Obama In Post-debate Poll

THE GUARDIAN: Republican candidate makes especially dramatic gains with female voters after strong performance in first debate

The storm clouds gathering over President Obama's bid for re-election have thickened with the release of a new poll from the respected Pew Research Center that gives Mitt Romney a four-point lead among likely voters.

The Pew survey of 1,511 adults was carried out over four days starting on the day after the first presidential TV debate last week. Its findings – including evidence that the Republican nominee is making dramatic headway with female voters, young people and those in the heartlands of the mid-west – appear to confirm that Obama's listless performance at the debate, and by contrast Romney's strong showing, has translated into a powerful political force.

"We found a dramatic shift from a significant Obama lead to a slight Romney edge among likely voters – and this is the first evidence that the debate appears to have impacted the race," said Carroll Doherty, Pew Research Center's associate director. » | Ed Pilkington in New York | Tuesday, October 09, 2012

Rick Perry: My Wife Prodded Me to Enter Presidential Race
Governor Rick Perry, the Republican presidential contender, has said that "the reason" he is running for the White House was that his wife told him "to do your duty".

Read the article here

Trump NOT Running for US President
RUSSIA TODAY: After creating much controversy and a circus of media frenzy over the past few months billionaire Donald Trump has announced he will not be running for the office of US President in 2012.

“After considerable deliberation and reflection, I have decided not to pursue the office of the Presidency. This decision does not come easily or without regret; especially when my potential candidacy continues to be validated by ranking at the top of the Republican contenders in polls across the country,” he said in a public statement.

Trump argued he would have won both the Republican primary and the general election, but he could not commit to a campaign at this time.

In the end, business beats politics for Trump. » | Monday, May 16, 2011

White House Dismisses Donald Trump's 'Sideshow' Presidential Run
THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH: The White House has dismissed Donald Trump's potential presidential run as a "sideshow", saying there is no way the billionaire businessman would be "hired" by the American people.

Mr Trump, renowned for his New York bluster, is considering a tilt at the White House and according to some polls is running second among prospective Republican candidates, behind former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

As part of his flirtation with a presidential bid, Mr Trump has controversially brought up the non-issue of Mr Obama's birthplace.

The president was born in the US state of Hawaii and released a certificate of live birth to prove it in June 2008, but some on the right-hand fringes of American politics still like to pretend it is an issue.

"I think I saw Donald Trump kind of rising in some polls and given his behaviour with respect to the last couple of weeks I hope he keeps on rising," Mr Obama's campaign adviser David Plouffe told ABC's "This Week" program.

"I think there's zero chance that Donald Trump would ever be hired by the American people to do this job." » | Sunday, April 10, 2011

Iran's Presidential Candidate Seeks Votes by Campaigning with Wife
THE TELEGRAPH: If his performance in the television studios is anything to go by, Mir-Hossein Mousavi is scarcely the obvious choice to oust President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and bring Iran back in from the cold.

Iranian presidential candidate Mir-Hussein Mousavi and his wife Zaghra Rahnavard on a campaign rally in the north western Iranian city of Tabriz. Photo courtesy of The Telegraph
A former hardliner, whose plodding style evokes comparisons from John Major to Leonid Brezhnev, he is as much a blast from Iran's revolutionary past as a breath of fresh reformist air.

Yet the bespectacled 67-year-old, who was Iran's prime minister during its revolutionary heyday in the 1980s, has come out of retirement in an attempt to end what he describes as Mr Ahmadinejad's "disgraceful" presidency.

And in his bid to convince voters that he himself is now an agent of change, he has deployed a weapon no Iranian politician has dared use before. He is the first Iranian politician in 30 years to campaign with his wife alongside him - a bold nod to equality that has given credibility to his pledges to take Iran down the liberal, pro-Western route that Mr Ahmadinejad rejects.

True, Mr Mousavi's partner, Zahra Rahnavard, a grandmother, painter and ex-university chancellor, is no Michelle Obama. While the US president's wife raises eyebrows with dresses that show her bare arms, Ms Rahnavard, 61, sticks to the chador, the all-encompassing charcoal cloak that has long symbolised Islamc [sic] conservatism.

But that has not stopped supporters hailing her as Iran's first-ever "First Lady", and on the campaign trail, her speeches in favour of greater women's rights have stolen the show for her quietly-spoken husband.

"Why are there no women presidential candidates or cabinet ministers?" she asked her audience last week in the city of Tabriz, referring to a political scene still dominated largely by bearded clerics.

"Getting rid of discrimination and demanding equal rights with men is the number one priority for women in Iran."

Thanks to the "Zahra factor", Mr Mousavi is now the strongest of the three challengers to Mr Ahmadinejad in this Friday's poll, which is proving one of the liveliest presidential contests in Iran's post-revolutionary history. Mr Ahmadinejad's bellicosity on the nuclear issue, threats to Israel and quasi-Soviet economic policies has both alienated many of his own hardline followers and galvanised the reformist camp, which suffered in the 2005 elections from disillusionment and apathy.

"In your foreign policy, you have brought shame upon Iran," Mr Mousavi told Mr Ahmadinejad during a televised election head-to-head on Wednesday. "You have created tension with other countries, and heavy costs have been brought on the nation in these four years." >>> By Colin Freeman in Tehran | Saturday, June 06, 2009

THE SUNDAY TIMES: Can Iran’s Young Ring the Changes?

As a crucial election looms, young Iranians are once again standing up against a repressive and brutal regime

Four layers of curtains prevented Havva from ever seeing out of the window of the small apartment in an affluent neighbourhood of central Tehran that she once shared with her husband and young daughter. More importantly, as far as her husband was concerned, the thick folds of material ensured nobody could ever see in to catch sight of her — even though their apartment was on the second floor and overlooked only by a tall willow tree.

Not once in nine years of marriage was Havva allowed to pull those curtains back.

When I ask Havva gently what drove her to finally try to take her own life, she wrings her hands, revealing scars on her wrists. Over a period of four months she made numerous suicide attempts. The first were undoubtedly cries for help. The final time she thought she had ensured success by swallowing 140 tranquillisers and barricading herself in her home. But a last-minute call to a relative to say goodbye raised the alarm. Emergency services broke in, and she was rushed to hospital, where she remained on life support in a coma for several days. “There was no one incident that pushed me to do this, just very heavy pressure for a long time until I understood I couldn’t take it any longer,” says Havva, a strikingly beautiful 31-year-old who asks to be identified only by this pseudonym (meaning “Eve” in Farsi), since she comes from a rich and prominent Iranian family. “All my dreams were destroyed when I married at 17. There was no light, no hope in the way I was forced to live,” she says. She talks in a low voice of how she could never leave the house without her husband’s permission, nor make friends, work or resist him forcing himself on her several times a day. “But it is the traditional way. I thought that was all there was.”

Havva’s experience is far from unusual in modern-day Iran. Despite some advances in women’s rights over the past decade, and the fact that 60% of the country’s university graduates are now female, legally and socially women are still considered far inferior to men. In the words of the lawyer Shirin Ebadi, winner of the Nobel peace prize, “criminal laws adopted after the revolution took away a woman’s human identity and turned her into an incapable and mentally deranged second-class being”.

When Havva refers again to the curtains that she felt symbolised the crushing restrictions imposed on her by her marriage, the apartment feels claustrophobic and suffocating. It’s an all-too-common feeling in Iran today. As the country sits on the cusp of what many regard as the most significant presidential election since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini deposed Reza Shah Pahlavi from his Peacock throne at the start of the Islamic revolution 30 years ago, denouncing westernisation and ordering every woman to cover herself with the chador, there is wide acknowledgment that Iran is sitting on a powder keg of barely suppressed fury at the stifling political, economic and social constraints its citizens have had to endure under the leadership of the current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. >>> Christine Toomey | Sunday, June 07, 2009