By The Prowler on 1.7.08 @ 12:08AM
Huckabee's salary perks. Mitt's image man. Obama's studious kids.
HUCKABEE DEPENDENCY
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee insists to
advisers that he will not release the CDs of his gubernatorial
records that were pulled from state-owned computer hard drives.
According to former Huckabee aides, some of the documents are
records that indicate Huckabee used state-owned facilities (planes
and cars) and personnel for personal business dealings, such as
speeches and appearances for book sales.
"It was never clear to me that he ever repaid the state for
those trips, and there were a lot of trips toward the end of his
term," says a former staffer still based in Little Rock.
Huckabee has recently had to admit to charging churches upwards
of $25,000 for speeches to subsidize his wife's salary and his
government pension while he campaigns for President. He is the only
candidate paying himself a salary while running.
Huckabee adviser Ed Rollins is said by some
Huckabee aides to now be in possession of a copy of the CDs, though
it is unclear if they are the originals given to Huckabee before he
left office, or a new set of copies Huckabee allowed to be
made.
NO MORE MR. NICE GUY
Rumors continue to fly that longtime Mitt Romney
media adviser Alex Castellanos is being pushed out
the door in favor of media consultants who have been pushing the
campaign to go negative harder and faster against Sen. John
McCain.
Castellanos was the first media adviser Romney had, and was the
creator of Romney's "positive" media image early in the campaign.
But as Romney has struggled to gain traction, Castellanos's images
have ended up on the cutting room floor.
VOTE STUDY
The Sen. Barack Obama campaign is trying to figure
how to leverage the huge support it is getting from college-age
students around the country, and to duplicate the youth vote it got
during the Iowa caucuses.
The Obama campaign actually bused in hundreds of
caucus-qualified college students from neighboring states to ensure
a strong turnout. Now the campaign is trying to figure out if it
can replicate those kinds of turnouts in other parts of the
country, particularly in other parts of the Midwest and in
Florida.
topics:
Barack Obama, Business, NATO
