My sense is that Palin has not made a decision about running for president, but as she told Chris Wallace on Fox she has not foreclosed that option. In the meantime, she is raising funds for GOP candidates (many of them in primaries), giving speeches, maintaining ongoing exposure as a Fox News contributor, and making contributions through her political action committee. All these activities will redound to the benefit of conservatives in the short term, regardless of her long-term plans.
President Obama attended the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington yesterday. His own denomination—the United Church of Christ—has been teasingly described as “Unitarians considering Christ.” I don’t know how much he is considering Jesus, but he sure is quiet about it if he is. Even among Christians, the president seems to believe in a Christless Christianity.
He quoted President Kennedy’s inaugural—always a good idea. “Civility is not a sign of weakness,” he said. But as with omitting Jesus, the president skipped the rest of the JFK quote: “. . . but sincerity is always subject to proof.”
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by Ken Blackwell
The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the rest of all the right-thinking (which is to say left-doing) world, is in high dudgeon. They are inflamed over the U.S. Supreme Court’s striking down major portions of the McCain-Feingold Act in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case.
President Obama took the unprecedented step of confronting the Supreme Court about this ruling during his State of the Union address last week. The president’s characterization of the court’s ruling was way off base.
Justice Alito famously mouthed the words: “Simply not true.” Justice Alito was right. He was right on two grounds: First, Mr. Obama had wrongly stated that the court would now allow corporations to contribute to federal campaigns. They can’t. Second, Mr. Obama was wrong to tongue-lash the members of the Supreme Court while they sat before him, robed and silent.
The Post’s columnist E.J. Dionne thinks conservatives who criticize Mr. Obama’s incivility are being hypocrites. Mr. Dionne points to Ronald Reagan’s criticism of Roe v. Wade in a 1983 article in the Human Life Review. “I know of no one on the right who protested when President Ronald Reagan … took on the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision of ten years earlier.”
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Obama said 90 percent of the bills passed by the House and the Senate are fine, with just 10 percent presenting problems that need to be fixed. “We were just about to clean those up,” Obama said, “and then the Massachusetts election happened and everybody said, ‘Oh, oh, oh, it’s over. Well no, it’s not over.”
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Her GOP rivals, including Congressman John Boozman who is expected to enter the race on Saturday, all earn roughly 50% of the vote against the two-term Democrat.
But worse for Lincoln in the latest survey is that her numbers continue to fall. In September and December, her support was between 39% and 41% in these match-ups. Last month, it slipped to 38% or 39% support against any of four Republicans. Now, her support ranges from 33% to 36%.
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By Glen Bolger
For the first time since June 2003, the Republican candidate has a five point lead on the generic ballot in a new survey conducted for NPR by Public Opinion Strategies and Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner and Associates. The Republican candidate has a 44%-39% advantage.
(The analysis of the data in this article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of NPR or GQR.)
In 2008, the Dems won the generic ballot by eight points. To have a thirteen point shift in just over one year is a remarkable shift in the political environment. The GOP lead is bolstered by a twelve point advantage among Independents. The caveat for Republicans, however, is that 40% of Independents are undecided. Thus, they are still up for grabs.
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By Ramesh Ponnuru
Fox News is Americans’ most trusted source of news: That’s what Public Policy Polling reported earlier this week. ABC’s director of polling disputed the poll’s findings largely because of its use of “robopolling.” But now a second poll using a different methodology—and human callers—has reached a similar conclusion.
In a poll commissioned by National Review Institute, McLaughlin & Associates found that Fox News was the top response from likely voters who were asked what source of news about politics and government they most trusted. Thirty-six percent of respondents picked Fox News, compared to 20 percent who picked CNN and 6 percent who picked MSNBC. NBC and ABC each got 6 percent, too, and CBS 5.
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PENNSYLVANIA: Former GOP Rep. Pat Toomey holds powerful leads over both Sen. Arlen Specter and Specter’s Democratic primary opponent, Rep. Joe Sestak, in a new poll by Franklin and Marshall College. Toomey would defeat Specter by 14 points, 45 percent to 31 percent, among likely voters, according to the poll, and he’d outpace the less-known Sestak by an even wider margin. Caveats: both Democrats poll better among registered voters and in every matchup the number of undecideds is high.
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Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia delivered the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union address this week. McDonnell spoke from the Virginia House of Delegates chamber for ten minutes, calling for less spending, fiscal responsibility, and a strategy of victory in the war on terror. “Governor McDonnell is a outstanding spokesman for our shared conservative values and his speech made not just Virginians, but conservatives all over America, proud,” said state Senator Steve Martin, chairman of the Virginia Faith and Freedom Coalition.
My sense is that Palin has not made a decision about running for president, but as she told Chris Wallace on Fox she has not foreclosed that option. In the meantime, she is raising funds for GOP candidates (many of them in primaries), giving speeches, maintaining ongoing exposure as a Fox News contributor, and making contributions through her political action committee. All these activities will redound to the benefit of conservatives in the short term, regardless of her long-term plans.
Barack Obama was inaugurated as president one year ago today to the hosannas of the mainstream media. He strolled down Pennsylvania Avenue hand-in-hand with his wife Michelle, exuding the confidence of a man basking in sky-high poll numbers that approached 70 percent. What a difference a year makes.
Massachusetts—in a huge turnout of over 2 million voters in a special election—has sent a clear and undeniable message to Washington: defeat the Obama-backed health care reform bill, stop the spending spree, and put the brakes on the Obama agenda, from terrorism to spending to taxes. The defeat of Martha Coakley and the election of Republican Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate is the canary in the coal mine for Democrats. This is a state that, while it has elected Republicans as governor in recent years (William Weld, Mitt Romney), had not elected a Republican to the U.S. Senate in 37 years. The seat won by Brown had been held by Edward M. Kennedy for 47 years, and is currently occupied by Paul Kirk, a placeholder and longtime Kennedy family retainer. Brown will be the only Republican in the state’s congressional delegation, representing a state with only 13 percent of the voters registered Republicans. Read More…
In 2008, after splitting the Super Tuesday primaries with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton revived her flagging presidential campaign with a hard-hitting television ad in which she questioned whether Barack Obama was ready to be president. The ad’s dramatic hook was a hypothetical 3 a.m. phone call to the White House during a national security emergency. The ad dramatized existing doubts about Obama’s preparedness. At the time Obama was only four years removed from the Illinois State Senate seat representing the south side of Chicago and had been in the U.S. Senate for a little over three years. The “3 a.m. phone call ad” helped Clinton win the Texas and Ohio primaries, but it was too little, too late.
Now Obama’s real-life 3 a.m. phone call has come, and he has flunked the test. When a Nigerian national trained by al-Qaeda in Yemen boarded a flight to Detroit on Christmas Day and tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines aircraft carrying 278 passengers and 11 crew members, it was one of the most significant attempted terrorist attacks against the homeland since the war on terror began. After first claiming the foiled terrorist plot was the work of an “isolated extremist,” falsely implying that he was not part of al-Qaeda or another terrorist network, it took Obama days (while he played golf in Hawaii) to step before the cameras and acknowledge the obvious: a massive, systemic, and nearly disastrous failure of intelligence.
Senate Democrats were caught flat-footed by Lieberman’s statement. They had assumed that they could count on his support for the latest “compromise” version of the public option: an expanded version of the Federal Employee Health Care Plan that would be open to consumers and subsidized by the government, combined with a “buy in” to Medicare by those aged 55-64. That “compromise,” which in many ways was worse than the original public option because it hastened Medicare’s massive and looming unfunded liabilities and deficit, was rumored to be getting what one Hill source told me was a “very bad number” from the Congressional Budget Office. Now it appears to be dead even before the CBO gives it a number. Which means Reid is back to the drawing board.
This uncontrollability—her rogue qualities—-are what explains the Palin phenomenon. Too many national politicians in both parties are automatons, over-coached, scripted by high-priced handlers, (in Obama’s case, tethered to the teleprompter), their language shaped by focus groups, their posture suggesting they are fearful of their own shadow. In a sea of programmed mannequins, Palin’s candor is refreshing, even disarmingly so. Little wonder that even as they lambaste her, the pundits and talking heads cannot resist talking about her—and they pine for the ratings and book sales she delivers.