How will this election be seen in history? Obviously, it depends on who wins. If Barack Obama is defeated, the irresistible comparison will be with Jimmy Carter. A one-term president was rejected after pursuing big government programs amid high energy prices and attacks on America in the Middle East.
When innocent citizens asked about unemployment last night at the town hall presidential debate on Long Island, would Mitt Romney again tout his plan to create 12 million jobs? Unable to Etch-a-Sketch away that often repeated claim -- one that he has hired several conservative economists to endorse -- the Republican candidate had little choice. It's up on his campaign website, it's there in his own well-advertised words, and it is the central appeal of his candidacy for the non-billionaire voting bloc.
When 2012 began, the presidential race looked too close to call, but most analysts thought the Republicans had a good chance to win control of the Senate. The numbers were just too daunting for the Democrats. They had too many seats to defend and too many vulnerable incumbents.
An interesting story from last winter: An email friend who lives in an affluent suburb far from Washington, a staunch Republican, was watching one of the Republican debates with his wife, a staunch Democrat.
Nine years ago, the Ohio Art Co. closed its Etch A Sketch operation in Bryan, Ohio, and moved the jobs to Shenzhen, China. The 100 laid-off American workers weren't surprised. They'd been training their Chinese replacements.
We take free speech for granted in America, unlike elsewhere. The furor over that anti-Muslim video is the latest reminder of that.
A weird war between the generations is growing, and the Republican candidates are the mongers.
When a politician is in trouble, he usually falls back on what he knows best -- the world he saw around him when he entered into political awareness as a young adult.
Driverless cars are on the horizon, and we can all start feeling ancient now. The youngest among us will remember the days when we had to keep our hands on the steering wheel and foot near the brake. Joining "icebox" and "fire stable" will be such terms as "behind the wheel," "pedal to the metal" and "in the driver's seat."
According to Political Class pundits, the race for the White House was turned upside down by a single debate. The reality, however, is that a very close race shifted ever so slightly from narrowly favoring President Obama to narrowly favoring Mitt Romney. Either way, it remains too close to call.
Unemployment is still too high, income is still too low and the recovery is still much too slow -- but the United States is faring considerably better than other developed nations against the threat of a renewed recession.
"The Illegal-Donor Loophole" is the headline of a Daily Beast story by Peter Schweizer of the conservative Government Accountability Institute and Peter Boyer, former reporter at The New Yorker and The New York Times.
We live in the Divided Era of American politics. Nearly equal numbers of people are now on the side of almost every political issue. This phenomenon of partisanship is neither accidental nor temporary. Throughout all of history, the larger the stakes the more divided a people and the larger the government, the larger the stakes. This year, the presidential election is taking America to new partisan heights.
President Obama tanked in the last debate. Good.
Now maybe people will listen when Mitt Romney says things like, "The genius of America is the free enterprise system, and freedom, and the fact that people can go out there and start a business. ... The private market and individual responsibility always work best."
"It's not easy to debate a liar," complained an email from one observer of the first presidential debate -- and there was no question about which candidate he meant. Prevarication, falsification, fabrication are all familiar tactics that have been employed by Mitt Romney without much consequence to him ever since he entered public life, thanks to the inviolable taboo in the mainstream media against calling out a liar (unless, of course, he lies about sex).
It can't be by accident that Obama campaign adviser Robert Gibbs made the Sunday talk-show rounds using the word "masterful" to describe Mitt Romney's performance at the presidential debate. True, President Obama looked tired, while Romney was brimming with old ideas. But Romney's master-of-the-universe act was not universally admired. It will be turned on him.
Wednesday night's presidential debate in which Mitt Romney shellacked Barack Obama attracted the biggest audience since the debate between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan seven days before the 1980 election.
While other gubernatorial races may get closer as Election Day nears, right now the top gubernatorial tilts in the country are in two small but politically active states: New Hampshire and Montana.
Throughout this year’s presidential campaign, the competitive portion of the electoral map has been limited to about 12 or 13 states. There are the nine that flipped from Republican George W. Bush in 2004 to Democrat Barack Obama in 2008, plus four or so others -- Michigan, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin come quickly to mind -- that voted Democratic the last two presidential elections but narrowly so in 2004.
The first presidential debate of 2012 is now behind us. The reviews suggest that many were surprised at how well Mitt Romney did and how weakly President Obama performed.
