HuffPost's Howard Fineman appeared Monday on MSNBC's 'The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell' to discuss the field for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.
Regarding Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels' decision to stay out of the 2012 presidential race, Fineman said:
"Well what we know is that his wife was dead-set against it, doesn't like politics and is uncomfortable in the limelight in general. I think just as important if not more important were the kids. 4 kids, 4 daughters, 3 of them married, I don't think any of those children or in-laws or son-in-laws wanted to spend the next several months talking about the private life of the family."
Fineman concluded, "in the end it wasn't to be, he just couldn't do it given the complexity of his family."
Summing up the current situation, Fineman explained, "we now pretty much have the field we're going to have. Yes, Michele Bachmann may decide that the allure of Iowa and the Evangelical Christians there are so great, and she has 7 generations worth of family there that she's going to go in and try to mix things up. That's unclear. But we basically have the field and we can begin kind of seeing how the race might run."
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Bill Schneider: The GOP 2012 Catch-22
The Republicans who have decided, for whatever stated reason, not to run in 2012, know they can't beat Obama. Whoever runs against Obama is dumber than a post.
Mitt, Newt, T-Paw--not as smart as you think you are!
Journalists need to dig a little bit, to see that Pawlenty is not what he pretends to be.
LBJ
If anybody could beat Obama in 2012 s/he'd have entered the contest by now.
Clark has a great following, and made a lot of headway. Give her time.
Fox is the most trusted television news network in the country, according to a new poll out Tuesday.
A Public Policy Polling nationwide survey of 1,151 registered voters Jan. 18-19 found that 49 percent of Americans trusted Fox News, 10 percentage points more than any other network.
Thirty-seven percent said they didn’t trust Fox, also the lowest level of distrust that any of the networks recorded.
There was a strong partisan split among those who said they trusted Fox — with 74 percent of Republicans saying they trusted the network, while only 30 percent of Democrats said they did.
CNN was the second-most-trusted network, getting the trust of 39 percent of those polled. Forty-one percent said they didn’t trust CNN.
Each of the three major networks was trusted by less than 40 percent of those surveyed, with NBC ranking highest at 35 percent. Forty-four percent said they did not trust NBC, which was combined with its sister cable station MSNBC.
Thirty-two percent of respondents said they trusted CBS, while 31 percent trusted ABC. Both CBS and ABC were not trusted by 46 percent of those polled.