"A step in the right direction." That's what Barack Obama said in Poland, Ohio, about Friday's Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment report, which showed only 80,000 net new jobs and unemployment remaining at 8.2 percent.
That's more or less what happened last Sunday in Mexico, at least as far as most American journalists (including me) are concerned.
The Supreme Court's 5-4 decision upholding the Obama administration's health care legislation was a victory for the president, his administration and his party. Their most ambitious legislative achievement has not been nullified, and they are not left in obvious disarray.
The Supreme Court's 5-4 decision upholding the Obama administration's health care legislation was a victory for the president, his administration and his party. Their most ambitious legislative achievement has not been nullified, and they are not left in obvious disarray.
The Supreme Court's decision announced Monday in the Arizona v. United States case opens the way for sensible reform of our immigration laws.
As Barack Obama's lead over Mitt Romney in the polls narrows, and his presumed fundraising advantage seems about to become a disadvantage, it's alibi time for some of his backers.
His problem, they say, is that some voters don't like him because he's black. Or they don't like his policies because they don't like having a black president.
What's up with the white working class vote? For years, the horny-handed blue-collar worker was the star of the New Deal Democratic coalition. It was for him, and his wife and family, that Democrats taxed the rich, invented Social Security and supported militant labor unions.
There has been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth as, in the spring, it appeared that forces supporting Mitt Romney would be able to raise about as much money as those supporting Barack Obama. There's even more now that it seems likely that the pro-Romney side will raise and spend more money than the pro-Obama side.
Who does Barack Obama listen to?
Not Republican politicians. Evidently weeks go by between his conversations with Speaker John Boehner, who determines what legislation comes to the House floor.
Not Democratic politicians. We have it on good authority that he seldom talks to Democratic members of Congress. Lyndon Johnson used to be on the phone constantly, cajoling and inveigling but also on the alert for shifts in opinion.
We pundits have been busy crunching the results in last Tuesday's Wisconsin recall election and have noted that the public-employee unions sustained a huge defeat.
The results are in, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has beaten Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in the recall election. That's in line with pre-election polling, though not the Election Day exit poll. Even before the results came in, we knew one thing, and that is that the Democrats and the public employee unions had already lost the battle of ideas over the issue that sparked the recall, Walker's legislation to restrict the bargaining powers of public employee unions.
Demographic forecasts generally take the form of predicting more of the same. Old people have been moving to Florida for the past several years, and old people will move there for the next few years. Immigrants have been streaming in from Mexico, and they will continue to do so. You get the idea.
"Axelrod is endeavoring not to panic." So reads a sentence in John Heilemann's exhaustive article on Barack Obama's campaign in this week's New York magazine.
The ham-handed Barack Obama campaign attack ads on Mitt Romney's former firm Bain Capital have drawn a lot of ire from other Democrats.
In the run-up to this weekend's G-8 summit at Camp David, journalists have unfavorably compared European "austerity" with Barack Obama's economic policies.
Is it panic time at Obama headquarters in Chicago? You might get that impression from watching events -- and the polls -- over the past few weeks.
Last week, I wrote about the standings in the presidential race and said it looked like a long, hard slog through about a dozen clearly identified target states, much like the contests in 2000 and 2004. Call it the 2000/2004 long, hard slog scenario.
Just as the political air is filled with talk of the inevitability of Barack Obama's re-election -- we are told that the kids at his Chicago headquarters are brimming with confidence -- in come some poll numbers showing him behind.
Washington Post editorial writer and liberal blogger Jonathan Capehart is puzzled. Why does the "non-issue" of Harvard Law professor and Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren's Native American ancestry "require so much attention?" he asked last week.
It has been reported that the Obama campaign this year, as in 2008, has disabled or chosen not to use AVS in screening contributions made by credit card. That doesn't sound very important. But it's evidence of a modus operandi that strikes me as thuggish.
