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So here’s what we know for certain today that we could only bet on last Monday morning: Mike Huckabee is out. Newt Gingrich is officially in. Jon Huntsman finally broke cover. And Ron Paul is back. And just like that, the Republican primary is underway.
A couple of weeks ago, I spent a day following Newt Gingrich around New Hampshire. After a radio interview in Concord, Gingrich had a lunchtime Guinness at the Barley House in Concord with Thomas Wilhelmsen, the CEO of a local hospital who first met Gingrich in the mid-1990s. They lapsed into wonky talk about ObamaCare [...]
Mike Huckabee announced Saturday night he would not take another shot at the White House, telling viewers tuned into his Fox News talk show that he had made a “spiritual” decision not to run. The former Republican governor of Arkansas dedicated much of his announcement to detailing why he would have been a strong candidate and [...]
Hispanics are not a typical target demographic for Republicans seeking a presidential nomination. Rather, since at least 2007, GOP candidates tend to jump all over each other to prove that they will take a tougher, no-amnesty line on immigration. But Newt Gingrich is breaking from the pack.
When George W. Bush declared in a 1999 GOP debate that his favorite political philosopher was Jesus, pundits snickered and wondered whether he actually knew any political philosophers. But the answer was politically canny, establishing Bush’s evangelical bona fides with social conservatives. In contrast, the philosopher GOP leaders quote most reverently these days was vehemently [...]
President Obama’s Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, is stepping down. His departure comes at an awkward moment. The peace process in free fall.
The Senate Ethics Committee’s report accusing John Ensign of violating federal and campaign-finance laws doesn’t just reflect poorly on the former Nevada senator. It also highlights lingering questions about the Federal Election Commission’s ability to do its job. Among the investigation’s findings was the revelation that Ensign, who resigned last month, lied to the FEC [...]
The White House and Pentagon won’t admit it, but everybody else knows the size and scope of the continuing U.S. presence in Afghanistan is now subject to debate. That’s the result of a perfect storm of factors — the killing of Osama bin Laden, the weariness of the American public, and the continuing zaniness of [...]
Newt Gingrich has made the simple slogan “2+2=4” a central part of his presidential campaign message. That’s a reference to the totalitarian state of George Orwell’s 1984, and the way it warps reality to keep its subjects mentally enslaved. It’s a bit ironic, then, that Newt should be so vulnerable to the Washington Post‘s fact-checker, [...]
As Washington debates Medicare, taxes, deficits and the future of the budget, it’s become a cliché to say that Americans like big government but don’t like to pay for it. Most clichés are true. And as the swollen Mississippi River barrels south toward New Orleans, you can see a stark example of that in the [...]
