Photograph by Brynn Anderson/The Palm Beach Post/Zuma Press

Morning Joe’s host Joe Scarborough, center, shares a laugh with show guests in Boca Raton.

Joe Scarborough is a lot of things.

He is a former Republican congressman from Florida’s far-West, far-right Panhandle.

He is a successful co-host of the most popular morning program on cable news, “Morning Joe.”

He’s a doting father and passable guitar player, too.

And now, by his own count, he’s also a “loser.”

I just posted my 20,000th tweet. It’s official. I’m a loser.

— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) May 6, 2013

Today, Scarborough — who was missing in action this morning on the set of that MSNBC program, where co-host Mika Brzezinski was busy launching her new book about the addiction of junk food — has been busy tweeting about Al Gore’s wealth, a story that Bloomberg News explored today, and which New York magazine is weighing in on as well. It’s the lead item on the Drudge Report. Which makes it quite tweetable.

Damn! RT @chuckmeg @joenbcIf W had stolen your election you might be as rich as #AlGore

— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) May 6, 2013

All of which adds up to one successful promotional media strategy for a self-styled loser.

Original post is Joe Scarborough: ‘Loser’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Jonathan Alcorn/Bloomberg

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore speaks during an interview at the annual Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California.

Ken Wells and Ari Levy report for Bloomberg News today:

In 1999, Al Gore, then U.S. vice president and a Democratic candidate for president, sold $6,000 worth of cows.

The former senator, who spent most of his working life in Congress, had a net worth of about $1.7 million and assets that included pasture rents from a family farm and royalties from a zinc mine, remnants of his rural roots in Carthage, Tennessee. Funds from the cattle sale went to three of his kids, according to federal disclosure forms filed as part of his presidential run.

Fourteen years later, he made an estimated $100 million in a single month. In January, the Current TV network, which he helped to start in 2004, was sold to Qatari-owned Al Jazeera Satellite Network for about $500 million. After debt, he grossed an estimated $70 million for his 20 percent stake, according to people familiar with the transaction.

Two weeks later, Gore exercised options, at $7.48 a share, on 59,000 shares of Apple Inc. stock that he’d been granted for serving on the Cupertino, California-based company’s board since 2003. On paper, it was about a $30 million payday based on the company’s share price on the day he claimed the options.

That’s a pretty good January for a guy who couldn’t yet call himself a multimillionaire when he briefly slipped from public life after his bitterly contested presidential election loss to George W. Bush in late 2000, based on 1999 and 2000 disclosure forms.

Gore isn’t finished exercising his Apple stock grants. Those 59,000 are part of 101,358 Apple options and shares of restricted stock Gore has amassed, according to company filings, giving his total holdings a gross value of more than $45.6 million today.

Albert Arnold Gore Jr., 65, is a lot of things to a lot of people. Among friends and fans, he’s the progressive Democrat who should have been president, visionary author and Internet prophet, the man who more than anyone drove climate change to the center of public consciousness.

Detractors see Gore as a limousine liberal, tiresome pedant and climate alarmist who lives a jet-setting, carbon-profligate lifestyle while preaching asceticism for everyone else.

 For the full report on Gore, see Bloomberg.com.

Original post is Al Gore is Romney-Rich by Political Capital.

Al Gore in Davis Guggenheim’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Al Gore liked what he heard today.

The former vice president wrote a short entry on his blog thanking President Barack Obama for his inaugural address mention of climate change.

“Obama spoke powerfully and eloquently about the critical importance of solving the climate crisis,” Gore wrote. “His forceful commitment to take action will rekindle the hopes of so many that we are at long last approaching the political tipping point, beyond which we will finally start transforming our economy to sharply reduce global warming pollution and safeguard the future.”

Gore, who did not attend Obama’s inauguration ceremony today in Washington, posted excerpts of Obama’s speech on his journal at his blog.

He also tweeted his approval.

“ We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” Obama said today. “Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms. ”

“The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult,” he said. “But America cannot resist this transition, we must lead it.”

The thumbs up from Gore comes about a month after the former vice president called on Obama to do more in a Dec. 6 speech in New York City sponsored by the League of Conservation Voters and the Regional Plan Association.

“I deeply respect our president, and I am grateful for the steps that he has taken,” Gore said. “But we cannot have four more years of mentioning this occasionally and saying it’s too bad that the Congress can’t act.”

Gore, in a June 2012 Rolling Stone essay, criticized Obama for not using the bully pulpit of the presidency to push for solutions to climate change.

Original post is Gore Warms to Obama Climate Talk by Political Capital.

Photograph by Candice Towell/Getty Images

National Rifle Association (NRA) President Charlton Heston holds up a rifle during his address at the 131st NRA convention at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center in Nevada, in this April 27, 2002 file photo.

Wayne LaPierre was channeling Charlton Heston today.

LaPierre, the longtime executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, issued a defiant speech today in Washington with the NRA’s answer to the schoolhouse shootings that felled 20 first-graders in Newtown, Connecticut, a week ago: Arm the nation’s school guards.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said LaPierre, urging Congress “to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation.”

The answer to gun violence, the NRA suggests, is more guns.

“On the same day families lay three more children to rest in Newtown, the National Rifle Association wrongly called for increasing the number of guns around vulnerable children,” said Rep. Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts. “The NRA says they want armed guards in our schools.”

Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, a New York Democrat who lost her husband in a mass shooting on the Long Island Railroad in 1993, said she was “saddened” by LaPierre’s speech: “The NRA’s leadership had an opportunity to help unite the nation behind efforts to reduce gun violence and avert massacres like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School but it instead showed a disconnect between it and the majority of the American people.”

It was 12 years ago, during another presidential campaign year, when then-NRA President Charlton Heston, the actor, warned that the organization was under attack. Al Gore “is going to smear you as the enemy,” Heston said at the NRA annual convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, on May 20, 2000. “He will slander you as gun-toting, knuckle-dragging, bloodthirsty maniacs who stand in the way of a safer America. Will you remain silent? I will not remain silent.”

Today, LaPierre was sounding a similar call to arms. He spoke of Americans as a modern-day militia.

“Sacred stuff resides in that wooden stock and blue steel, something that gives the most common man the most uncommon of freedoms,” Heston said, recalling farmers who rose to fight at Concord. “When ordinary hands can possess such an extraordinary instrument, that symbolizes the full measure of human dignity and liberty.”

Holding a shotgun in his right hand and then above his head, and naming Gore again, the old actor voiced an old refrain: “From my cold, dead hands.”

Jonathan Salant contributed to this report. 

Original post is NRA’s `Cold, Dead Hands:’ 2012 by Political Capital.

Photograph by Daniel Acker/Bloomberg

A collage of campaign buttons hangs on the wall while volunteers call potential voters to re-elect President Barack Obama at the campaign's Field Office in Chicago.

When all the votes from the Nov. 6 presidential election are counted — they’re still tallying ballots in California and New York — President Barack Obama will have beaten Republican challenger Mitt Romney by close to 5 million votes.

Yet it was the president’s combined margin of victory of 389,821 votes in just three states that magnified his victory in the Electoral College tally: 332 to 206.

Obama won by 74,309 votes and 0.9 percentage points in Florida (29 electoral votes), by 166,214 votes and 3 points in Ohio (18 electoral votes), and by 149,298 votes and 3.9 points in Virginia (13 electoral votes), according to official election data compiled by Bloomberg.

If those three states and their 60 electoral votes had gone to Romney, Obama’s Electoral College lead would have shrunk to to 272 to 266 — in line with the squeaker between George W. Bush and Al Gore in the 2000 presidential race.

Of course, had Romney really won those three states, he also would have been more competitive in states that were a bit further out of his reach on Nov. 6. Romney lost four states — Colorado, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Iowa — by between five and six percentage points. In fact, among the 10 states that were decided by fewer than 7 points, Romney won only in North Carolina, by 2 points.

Original post is Obama’s Favorite 389,821 Voters by Political Capital.

Photograph by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

A supporter of Rep. Ron Paul holds a poster in front of a sign that reads 'We Can Do Better' during the start of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida.

The Ron Paul Revolution will soon have a going rate of $50,000 an hour.

The retiring Republican congressman from Texas and erstwhile candidate for president “will follow the well-trod path of hitting the paid speaking circuit after his retirement from Congress — and will charge $50,000 per appearance,” BuzzFeed reports.

That’s after expenses — hotel, meals, transportation for two.

Represented by the Greater Talent Network Speaker’s Bureau, Paul will collect more than Jon Huntsman, Mike Huckabee or Joe Scarborough, Buzzfeed notes, yet less than Al Gore and Arnold Schwarzenegger, both in the six-figure fee-range.

Original post is Ron Paul Revolution: $50,000 a Pop by Political Capital.

Photograph by Daniel Acker/Bloomberg

A trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange looks over a newspaper on Nov. 3, 2004, the day after Election Day.

That’s how many states backed the White House winner by fewer than five percentage points in the past three presidential elections that also were decided by fewer than five percentage points.

In 2004, when President George W. Bush defeated Democrat John Kerry by 2.5 points, 11 states gave the victor a winning margin of victory of fewer than five points.

In 2000, when Bush won an Electoral College majority despite losing the popular vote to Democrat Al Gore by five-tenths of one point, 12 states were decided by fewer than five points.

In 1976, when Democrat Jimmy Carter unseated President Gerald Ford by about two points, 20 states sided with the winner by fewer than five points. Those states included California, New York and Illinois, which are today safely Democratic, and Texas, Oklahoma and Mississippi, which are strongly Republican.

Nine states were decided by fewer than five points in both 2000 and 2004. They are Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The Nov. 6 election between President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney probably will be decided by fewer than five points, polls suggest. In how many states do you think the winner and loser will be separated by fewer than five points?

Original post is Bloomberg by the Numbers: 11, 12, 20 by Political Capital.

Photograph by Sam Hodgson/Bloomberg

The Otay Mesa Port of Entry in San Diego, California.

The nation’s gross domestic product grew by 2 percent in the last quarter.

The Obama White House hailed this as “further evidence that the economy is moving in the right direction” — Council  of Economic Advisers Chairman Alan Krueger’s words in a blog-posting.

Republican challenger Mitt Romney called it disappointing — Obama inherited an economic problem, Romney said campaigning in Ohio today, but  “what he did with what he inherited made the problem worse.”

Bloomberg data show that good growth generally favors the incumbent in a re-election campaign, or the candidate of the incumbent’s party:

Obama’s numbers: GDP grew by 1.3 percent in the second quarter of 2012, and 2 percent in the third quarter.

The recent record of GDP and elections:

– GDP grew 1.3 percent in Republican George W. Bush’s second quarter of 2008, and fell by 3.7 percent in his third quarter. Obama won the White House in a contest with Republican John McCain.

– GDP grew by 2.6 percent in Bush’s second quarter of 2004, and 3 percent in his third quarter. Bush beat Democrat John Kerry.

– GDP grew by 8 percent in Democrat Bill Clinton’s second quarter of  2000, and by 0.3 percent in his third quarter. Vice President Al Gore lost to Bush.

– GDP grew by 7.1 percent in Clinton’s second quarter of 1996, and 3.5 percent in his third quarter. Clinton beat Bob Dole.

–  GDP grew by 4.3 percent in Republican George H.W. Bush’s second quarter of 1992, and by 4.2 percent in his third quarter. He lost to Clinton.

– GDP grew by 5.2 percent in Republican Ronald Reagan’s second quarter of 1988, and by 2.1 percent in his third quarter. His vice president, the first Bush, beat Democrat Michael Dukakis.

Two percent was good enough for Reagan’s party in 1988.

Nov. 6 will tell whether it’s good enough for Obama’s in 2012.

with thanks to Bloomberg’s Chris Middleton for the data.

Original post is GDP and Presidential Elections: 2 Pct Worked for Reagan’s Party by Political Capital.

Photograph by Will Vragovic/Tampa Bay Times/Zuma Press

President Barack Obama gets a hug from a firefighter at Station 14 during a stop in Tampa, Fla. on Oct. 25, 2012.

All-nighters, early morning campaigning in Tampa.

It’s like deja vu all over again.

President Barack Obama, making a 48-hour, nonstop tour of swing states and stopping at home-town Chicago today to vote early,  opened a campaign rally at Centennial Park in Tampa, Florida, this morning at 9 am following a donut-shop stop and 7 am basketball with fire fighters.

There’s a reason he was there: Tampa’s Hillsborough County has voted the way Florida has voted in every presidential election since the 1960s.

Democrats Al Gore and Joe Lieberman stumped there, too, during a 24-hour all-nighter tour on Labor Day 2000, with pre-dawn stops at an all-night diner, bakery and — of course — a fire house in Tampa.

“Thanks for waking up early,” Obama told his Tampa audience today, following a four-hour overnight flight from Las Vegas and an early morning stop at a Krispy Kreme in Tampa.

“You know, we are right in the middle of our 48-hour fly-around campaign extravaganza,” the president said. “We are pulling — we pulled an all-nighter last night.  We just came from Iowa, Nevada, Colorado.  We’re going to Virginia and Ohio. I’m going to stop in Chicago.  I’m going to do some early voting in Chicago.”

“And you notice, my voice is getting a little hoarse,” Obama said. “But I’m just going to keep on — just going to keep on keeping on — until every single person out there who needs to vote is going to go vote.  Because the stakes are just so high, Florida.”

It’s the biggest of all swing states, with 29 electoral votes at stake.

In 2000, when 27 electoral votes were at stake there, Gore based his first debate camps on Gulf-coast Florida and made Tampa a pivotal stop on his 24-hour Labor Day tour and other days as well.

Gore and Lieberman lost Hillsborough County by 11,203 votes that year — Tampa and environs casting 180,760 ballots for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and 169,557 for the Democratic ticket.

It’s the closeness of elections like that one — and the closing margins and dead-heats that Obama faces in his contest with Republican Mitt Romney in this and other swing  states — that add some breathlessness to the all-nighter pressure on Democrats to go vote early.

537 — the title of the Obama campaign’s new campaign ad — comes from Florida 2000.

They’ll be playing that one around the clock in Tampa.

Original post is Obama’s All-Nighter: Tampa Deja Vu by Political Capital.

Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Mitt Romney, left, Rep Paul Ryan greet supporters during a Victory Rally at the Daytona Beach Bandshell on Oct. 19, 2012 in Daytona Beach, Florida.

In the early Florida light, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan lingered on the tarmac as they said their goodbyes this morning, after a wild Friday night rally in Daytona Beech, a city that’s witnessed its share of passing ships.

Last night, Romney joined Ryan for an ocean-side rally that was originally supposed to be a Ryan-only event. But this wasn’t an intimate, quiet affair, for the two.

Wedged between the Atlantic Ocean and a strip of high-rise hotels with ground-floor bars, the Republican Party’s presidential ticket held a short rally for about 8,500 of Romney’s political faithful.

And they had some company that wasn’t dressed for a typical Republican rally: Bikers, some still in leather chaps; most without a collar.

A few roared their Harleys up and down Route A1A for what’s called “Biketoberfest” as Romney and Ryan spoke. Others were in no shape to ride, drinking in the beach bars, some getting sick from it.

When Romney finished, fireworks shot high above the ocean. The candidates watched them together, the Romney ralliers and biker rallies focused on the same thing.

They then retired to the upper floors of a nearby Hilton. The lower floors — and certainly the bar — belonged to the bikers.

Romney and Ryan were here for good reason:

Daytona Beach is the eastern book-end of the swing-voting Interstate 4 corridor in Central Florida, its Volusia County one of four counties where Democrat Al Gore  unsuccessfully challenged the 2000 presidential election in Florida, which he lost to George W. Bush by 537 disputed votes. In 2008, President Barack Obama defeated Republican John McCain not only in Florida, but also in Volusia County — by less than 14,000 of 240,000 votes cast there.

This morning, Romney and Ryan seemed sorrowful to be parting so soon. They posed for pictures with the drivers of their motorcades, signed the backs of (male) T-shirts, and made idle chit-chat.

For Ryan, it’s back to work: Rallies in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, then a hop to Newark and a long flight to Omaha, Nebraska, a state that apportions its Electoral College votes by congressional district. Only in a very, very close Electoral College contest does Nebraska’s first congressional district become important.

For Romney, remaining in South Florida for the weekend, it was time to hit the books before the final debate with Obama in Boca Raton on Monday night.

Original post is Romney, Ryan: Fireworks, Fly-Away by Political Capital.