
WASHINGTON (CNN) - Child journalist Damon Weaver, who landed a coveted interview with President Obama, said Wednesday that CNN's Wolf Blitzer is his role model.
In an interview with Time magazine after his interview with the president and a subsequent media blitz, 11-year-old Weaver said he didn't get a chance to tell Blitzer that he wants to be like him after his interview on CNN because "it was my first time meeting him and I tried to answer his questions."
Read: Damon's Q&A on Time.com
"I would like to be Wolf Blitzer," Weaver told Time in an interview published on Wednesday.
And what did he think of his interview with Blitzer?
"It was very fun," said Weaver. "He was nice. He was asking me questions like, 'What was it like with the President? How could I get in touch with him? And can you put in a good word for me?'"
Watch Wolf Blitzer's interview with Air Force One pilot Col. Mark Tillman today in The Situation Room at 5 pm ET.
ANDREWS AIR FORCE BASE, Maryland (CNN) - Driving to this sprawling base just outside Washington, D.C. this week brought back lots of memories. Covering a president often means traveling with a president aboard this extraordinary aircraft, and as CNN's Senior White House Correspondent during the Clinton administration, I used to come here all the time to board Air Force One.
This week, I had a rare chance to catch up with Col. Mark Tillman, who's been flying the giant Boeing 747 since 1992, the final year of George H.W. Bush's presidency. He continued to fly for President Clinton’s full eight years, and became the chief pilot when President George W. Bush took office in 2001. Col. Tillman, who is now getting ready to retire, agreed to sit down with me and reflect on those years.
Watch Wolf Blitzer's interview with Air Force One pilot Col. Mark Tillman today and tomorrow in The Situation Room at 6 pm ET.
ANDREWS AIR FORCE BASE, Maryland (CNN) - Driving to this sprawling base just outside Washington, D.C. this week brought back lots of memories. Covering a president often means traveling with a president aboard this extraordinary aircraft, and as CNN's Senior White House Correspondent during the Clinton administration, I used to come here all the time to board Air Force One.
This week, I had a rare chance to catch up with Col. Mark Tillman, who's been flying the giant Boeing 747 since 1992, the final year of George H.W. Bush's presidency. He continued to fly for President Clinton’s full eight years, and became the chief pilot when President George W. Bush took office in 2001. Col. Tillman, who is now getting ready to retire, agreed to sit down with me and reflect on those years.
(CNN) – Once again, the U.S. Supreme Court has reached a 5-4 decision with Justice Anthony Kennedy as the decisive swing vote.
The latest case involves the right to own a handgun in the District of Columbia. In this case, Kennedy went with the conservatives, including Chief Justice John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas. The majority concluded that the D.C. law violated the Second Amendment to the Constitution – the right to bear arms.
But Kennedy sided with the liberals in two other major 5-4 decisions, including Wednesday’s ruling that the death penalty could not apply to child rape victims. Last week, he sided with his liberal colleagues, Ruth Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, David Souter, and John Paul Stevens in concluding that terror suspects at the Guantanamo Bay detention center have certain legal rights to stand trial.
All of which once again underscores the fragile balance of the court and the fact that the next president probably will have an impressive opportunity to change that balance for the next 20 or 30 years.
As I have pointed out before, John McCain says he likes justices like Roberts and Alito. Barack Obama says he likes justices like Ginsburg and Breyer.
This will be a major issue in the election for lots of Democrats and Republicans. The ramifications on a whole host of issues, not just abortion rights for women, are enormous.
(CNN) - There are two intriguing third party candidates running for president his year: Ralph Nader and Bob Barr. Both are well known here in Washington. But will they have an impact around the country if the election between Barack Obama and John McCain is close?
Nader, a long time populist and liberal consumer advocate, has been here before. He won more than 90,000 votes in the Florida election in 2000 and was widely accused of helping George W. Bush beat Al Gore by just more than 500 votes in the state. Gore’s supporters believe that he would have won the state and the election if Nader had stayed out. Nader denies that, insisting he took votes from both Democrats and Republicans.
Barr is a former Republican Congressman from Georgia and is now running on the Libertarian Party ticket. In the House of Representatives, he was always an outspoken conservative. He took the lead in initiating impeachment charges against President Bill Clinton.
Given that conservative track record, he is likely to take votes away from McCain, especially in Georgia where he is relatively well-known.
Obama’s supporters are hoping he does. They believe Georgia is fertile ground for the Democratic candidate, especially if the Democrats can register hundreds of thousands of new young and African American voters in the state.
So let’s see how Nader and Barr do this time around.
(CNN)–Barack Obama says he’s going to run a 50-state race for the White House. His aides say he will aggressively seek to make inroads in some of the traditionally Republican presidential states. It’s an ambitious quest but one that would be made easier if he raises hundreds of millions of dollars.
We’ll see in the coming weeks and months how that works out. My instinct tells me he won’t be spending lots of time in Utah and Wyoming, for example.
Still, I do think Obama will campaign actively in North Carolina and Georgia – two states with large numbers of African Americans. His campaign as well as the Democratic National Committee will try to get hundreds of thousands of new voters registered, especially African-Americans and young people. That is potentially very fertile ground for Obama and could make a critical difference in November.
Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic Party, was criticized in recent years by some fellow Democrats for spending scarce DNC money in some of the Republican states. He said he wanted the Democratic Party active across the United States. His critics thought that was a waste of money and time.
But now, that investment seems to have paid off. Witness the recent Democratic successes in those three special Congressional elections in Mississippi, Louisiana and Illinois where seats long held by Republicans, including the former Speaker Dennis Hastert, were captured by Democrats.
(CNN) – In some of the more recent public opinion polls, Barack Obama comes out doing much better than John McCain on several domestic issues. McCain, on the other hand, does better when it comes to the war on terror.
The latest USA Today-Gallup Poll, for example, shows that Obama is seen as doing a better job than McCain on health care (51 percent to 26 percent), the economy (48 percent to 32 percent), energy (47 percent to 28 percent), and taxes (44 percent to 35 percent).
In this same poll, they basically tie on such matters as the war in Iraq (43 percent to 43 percent), moral values (40 percent to 39 percent) and illegal immigration (34 percent to 36 percent).
But it’s a totally different situation when it comes to the war on terror. McCain is seen as doing a better job by a 52 percent to 33 percent margin.
All of which suggests that Obama probably would win the election if the biggest issues involve the economy and other domestic matters. But that could change if the war on terror were to emerge as issue number one. Under that circumstance, voters might flock toward McCain.
It’s a fascinating insight into the minds of voters – but remember: it’s only a current snapshot. Things can easily change between now and November 4. They always do.
WASHINGTON (CNN) - There’s nothing wrong with people changing their minds. We all do it – all the time. But as Luke Russert reminded us at his father’s funeral this week, politicians have a hard time admitting that they ever change their minds. They are apparently afraid that they will be accused of flip-flopping, which supposedly is bad for a politician.
Luke said that Tim Russert would also point out that the Americans are a very forgiving people. They will certainly accept politicians changing their minds as long as they are up front about it. What’s wrong with political leaders simply saying they’ve had a change of heart? “I used to think one way, but now think another.”
I was reminded of this when Barack Obama announced this week that he was opting out of the public financing of his general election campaign despite earlier expressing support for the public finance system. His decision certainly made financial sense, given that he could probably raise at least $300 million for the campaign compared to the roughly $85 million available in public financing.
In explaining his decision, Obama insisted the current presidential general election finance system was “broken,” something Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, a leader in campaign finance reform, denied. Would it have been so bad politically for Obama if he would have just said: “The country needs me in the White House and this decision will help make that happen. We can’t take any chances. As a result, I changed my mind”?
WASHINGTON (CNN) – Bill and Hillary Clinton attended the memorial service for Tim Russert at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington on Thursday. That was the first time I have seen them since Senator Clinton dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Barack Obama. She was very enthusiastic that day. It dawned on me yesterday that we still haven’t heard the former President formally endorse Senator Obama. I am sure he will be on the Obama bandwagon openly and energetically fairly soon. But I wonder what’s taking so long. Then again, is it really all that long?
As our CNN contributor and Democratic strategist James Carville has pointed out, it was only the other day when Al Gore endorsed Obama. We shouldn’t be surprised that Bill Clinton is waiting for the right moment to deliver his big endorsement speech. And having covered the Clinton White House, I can predict that it will be a major media event when he does. Bill Clinton is just one of those remarkable political figures. When he wants to do something, he has a knack of doing it in a spectacular way.
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But after that big endorsement is made, how active will the former President be on the campaign trail?


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