Trail Mix

Occasional morsels from Campaign 2000

Gore gets endorsement

Al Gore, who has racked up the endorsements of most Democrats in the House of Representatives and Senate, picked up another congressional nod Friday--that of Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware. Biden said Gore “offers practical, workable solutions to the issues most important to Americans from health care to crime fighting to foreign policy.”

Biden once ran, unsuccessfully, for president himself, as did another old pol who endorsed Gore on Friday--Jerry Brown. Brown, former California governor and now mayor of Oakland, ran for president three times.

Voting by the Net

Arizona Democrats got the go-ahead this week from federal officials to vote by computer in their presidential primary March 11. It would be the nation’s first binding election for public office using the Internet.

In a letter to state party officials, the Justice Department said Atty. Gen. Janet Reno had no objection to cyber-voting.

The party still faces a hurdle: a lawsuit alleging that voting by computer would discriminate against minorities and the poor.

The Arizona Republican primary, which John McCain won, was held Tuesday.

Media muscle

On the way to an art center overlooking Puget Sound in Washington this week, the Bill Bradley press bus got trapped on a narrow asphalt road leading to the event. Stuck and not wanting to miss the event, several reporters, later dubbed the wrecking crew, piled out of the bus and muscled a stalled Mercedes sedan onto the grass shoulder.

Naturally, the car’s alarm started sounding, but nobody paid it much mind because, after all, the Secret Service was already there.

Freed, the bus moved on. “This is Bradley’s response to McCain’s plane in the mud,” someone called out on the bus.

Goldwater the liberal

It was this week four years ago that Republican conservative patriarch Barry Goldwater jokingly pronounced himself and Sen. Bob Dole “the new liberals of the Republican Party” and called commentator Patrick J. Buchanan “a good Democrat.”

Sitting in Goldwater’s living room, the two former Senate colleagues bantered with reporters about politics. Asked whether the party had moved to the right of him, Goldwater said: “I don’t think the party’s changed much. Same old party I’ve been working for all my life. There’s always little changes wherever you go.”

“Barry and I, we’ve sort of become the liberals,” Dole said.

“We’re the new liberals of the Republican Party,” Goldwater said. “Can you imagine that?”

By the numbers

12--Combined number of delegates at stake in Republican caucuses today in American Samoa, the Virgin Islands and Guam.

14--Number of delegates at stake in the Republican primary in Puerto Rico on Sunday.

7.1 million--Number of dollars spent in January by Steve Forbes on his failed bid for the GOP presidential nomination.

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Compiled from staff and wire reports