The Republicans' presidential debate Thursday night sponsored by Fox News and Google gave primary voters and caucus-goers at least one good reason to reject every candidate on the stage. The interesting question now is whether someone else will enter the race -- at just about the same point in the election cycle in which Bill Clinton entered the Democratic race in 1991.
As Barack Obama huffs and puffs about his tax plan, which is unlikely to pass in the Democratic-majority Senate much less the Republican-controlled House, Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, has provided a much broader view of where the United States stands amid great changes in the world and some useful guidance on what direction public policy ought to take.
Barack Obama has been at pains to convince voters that he cares about jobs. It seems to be a hard sell.
One factor favoring President Obama's re-election, according to a recent article by political scientist Alan Lichtman, is the absence of scandal in his administration.
What is there to say about Barack Obama's speech to Congress Thursday night and the so-called American Jobs Act he said Congress must pass? Several thoughts occur, all starting with P.
The race for the Republican presidential nomination finally seems to be gelling. On Wednesday night, candidates debated at the Reagan Library in California -- the first of five scheduled debates over the next five weeks.
I can't remember a more stunning rebuke of a president by a congressional leader than House Speaker John Boehner's refusal to agree to President Barack Obama's demand -- er, request -- that he summon a joint session of Congress to hear the president's latest speech on the economy at 8 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, Sept. 7.
Some of society's most intractable problems come not from its failures but from its successes. Often you can't get a good thing without paying a bad price.
Not long ago, I wrote about how the private sector outraces and laps government. While governments dither and dispute, the private sector discovers.
One of the few issues on which opinion has moved left over the last few years is same-sex marriage. In 1996, Gallup found that Americans opposed it by a 68 percent to 27 percent margin. Last May, Gallup found Americans in favor by 53 percent to 45 percent. That's a huge change in 15 years.
Pundits lately have been comparing Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter, suggesting he is a likely loser in 2012. But my American Enterprise Institute colleague Norman Ornstein, writing in The New Republic, compares Obama to Harry S. Truman, suggesting he may outperform the polls and win.
This has been quite a week or 10 days for Republicans. As this is written, down in South Carolina Rick Perry has just announced he's running for president, while here in Ames most of the votes have been cast but none has yet been counted in the Iowa Republican straw poll.
Things look different in the Midwest. Back in Washington, people are talking about President Barack Obama's poor showing this past week. (Did you see that Maureen Dowd has turned against him?) In Iowa, they're focused on the state Republicans' presidential straw poll in Ames next Saturday. And in Wisconsin, they just got through counting the votes in a recall election that has great national significance.
Why aren't voters moving to the left, toward parties favoring bigger government, during what increasingly looks like an economic depression? That's a question I've asked, and one that was addressed with characteristic thoughtfulness by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg in The New York Times last week.
"Leading from behind." That's what an unnamed White House aide told the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza that Barack Obama was doing on Libya.
Everyone seems pretty cross at this juncture in the fight over raising the debt limit. As this is written, the House has just passed the bill that Speaker John Boehner yanked from the floor Thursday night and then revised with a balanced-budget amendment on Friday. The Senate has yet to pass Majority Leader Harry Reid's measure that in many but not all respects is not that much different.
Most presidents affect the standing of their political parties. Ronald Reagan advanced his party's standing among young voters. So did Bill Clinton.
Those who consider themselves constitutional conservatives should take care to consider not only the powers that the Constitution confers on the different branches of government and reserves to the states and the people, but also the schedule that the Constitution sets up for sharp changes and reversals of public policy.
When governments want to encourage what they believe is beneficial behavior, they subsidize it. Sounds like good public policy.
It's hard to keep up with all the arguments and proposals in the debt limit struggle. But what's at stake is fundamental.
