Obama-Biden campaign leads with early voters

The Obama-Biden campaign today announced a very confident and committed position in the presidential election. With several million volunteers around the country. the Obama-Biden campaign manager, David Plouffe, said “we like what we’re seeing in all the states with the early vote.”

Today the campaign released two 30 second TV ads in Arizona, North Dakota and Georgia. Plouffe said that even though the McCain-Palin campaign has criticized the Obama-Biden campaign about heavy advertising, “the McCain spending levels this week have been quite high. In the Tampa market, they’re spending over 5,000 points of television, which may be the most amount of television ever bought in a political race.”

Through advertising, voter contact, and resources, Plouffe said he feels the Obama-Biden campaign is doing everything they need to do in the swing-states. Plouffe also said the campaign is organizing polling information at popular locations that youths hang out at in the swing states.

Plouffe said that in the tossup state of Nevada, 43% of democrats voting early are new or sporadic. In North Carolina, 19% of democrats voting early never voted in an election before. In Florida, 1/4 of sporadic voting democrats have voted early. Plouffe said the campaign is putting special focus on voters who recently committed to Obama, because they’re known as “sticky” and still vulnerable to vote for McCain. Even though the campaign feels confident in their state of the race, Plouffe said this does not take away from “the fierce urgency of trying to win Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia, Florida, and Ohio.”

Senate Republicans: It's economics stupid!

New Mexico Republican Senator Pete Domenici said that the energy bill offered by his state's junior senator is "not a very big solution to a big problem." The reconfigured energy bill, written by Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) features a component that encouraged energy companies to "use it or lose it," when it comes to lands that are already under lease. "Use it or lose it doesn't mean anything," said Domenici at a press conference with Senate Republican colleagues.

Majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has offered little debate on the bill and is not allowing much room for amendments, said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D). Domenici said that their amendments are a good way of "finding more and using less." He cited the Repubicans' strong support for electric cars. Bob Bennett (R-Utah) said that oil shale is not addressed and that other countries, like Brazil, are taking advantage of this technology while oil shale is off limits in Utah and Colorado. He called for "massive" investment to recover oil shale, which he said is equal to 800 billion barrels of recoverable petroleum.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said that speculators represent about 20 percent of the problem when it comes to the current energy prices. He said that he spoke with billionaire Warren Buffet, a prominent U.S. businessman and investor, who told Cornyn that this problem will be solved with the simple law of supply and demand. Cornyn said that the Senate Republicans are dedicated to addressing the problem of supply and demand by drilling for more oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the oil shale of the American West.