South Chicagoland Young Democrats: The Blog

Everyone knows the leading contenders in the Democratic Presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama, and John Edwards. Few people, however, know much more than their names. As a result, and given that I have to do this as part of an assignment for my political science class, I am going to begin posting news about the presidential race on a weekly basis. I am also going to add the results of weekly national polls on who the leaders are.

With President Bush’s announcement that he will follow General Petraeus’s advice and begin withdrawing troops from Iraq, 30,000 by July of next year, many of the Democratic presidential hopefuls spoke out against his plan. Hillary Clinton called this plan “too little, to late,” and added that she believes the president should be doing more as the Commander in Chief to expedite the process of troop withdrawal. Barack Obama shared Clinton’s negative view of Bush’s new plan calling it a return to the original failed military policy in Iraq. He in turn proposed his own plan for a drawdown of troops that would involve the withdrawal of one to two brigades a month every month, which would mean to complete withdrawal of American forces by the end of next year. John Edwards called for the immediate withdrawal of 40-50,000 troops, while also calling Obama’s plan a copy of the president’s. Chris Dodd also criticized Bush’s plan but did not offer any ideas of his own.

In other news, Hillary Clinton rejected criticism over her acceptance of campaign contributions from lobbyists. Both Obama and Edwards used her acceptance of this money as proof that she is too firmly involved in the Washington institution. Both men, however, have accepted contributions from the employers and family members of lobbyists, a fact that greatly weakens their criticism of Clinton.

This weeks polls (excluding Al Gore):
Clinton 39%
Obama 20%
Edwards 13%
Richardson 1%
Kucinich 2%
Biden 1%
Dodd 1%
Unsure 11%

From the brilliant mind of Mike Kean, your friendly soon to be ex-Sargeant at Arms.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 16th, 2007 at 6:34 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.