A day after changing campaign managers, Jon Huntsman’s team takes a new shot at Mitt Romney’s: A Huntsman spokesman notes that, as a candidate for Massachusetts governor in 2002, Romney disdained Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge as “government by gimmickry,” but has happily signed it this time around. “So, what’s changed?,” asks Huntsman’s campaign. Some people [...]
With three weeks to go until the Ames straw poll in Iowa, the race is on to capture the hearts of social conservatives in the Republican party. A number of candidates are competing for the important voting bloc, but for all practical purposes, the field has already narrowed to Michele Bachmann and a still-undeclared candidate, [...]
Moments after the Senate voted to kill House Republicans’ Cut, Cap & Balance plan by a vote of 51-46, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid took the floor and made a surprise announcement: He will not move to pass legislation to increase the debt ceiling in the Senate. Reid and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had [...]
Let us pause a moment, as the debt ceiling negotiations round the final corner, to note where the various parties find themselves. House Republicans are losing sleep over the prospect of voting for something that raise tax revenue and get them primary opponents next year. House and Senate Democrats fear that President Obama will take [...]
The case of Syed Fai has turned over the rock under which foreign influence peddlers and members of Congress usually shelter together, protected by the darkness of our loophole-riddled lobbying rules. Fai was arrested on Tuesday and charged with acting as a foreign agent for the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, Pakistan’s spy service, without registering under [...]
I’ve repeatedly criticized Republicans for holding the global economy hostage to try to force President Obama to adopt their right-wing fiscal agenda. For consistency’s sake, I suppose I should criticize Republican Congressman John Mica for holding a routine extension of the Federal Aviation Administration’s funding hostage to try to insert some union-bashing language. But I have [...]
In this week’s issue of TIME, Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass takes President Obama’s call for domestic investment from a June speech announcing an accelerated withdrawal from Afghanistan, and expands it into a new way of thinking about U.S. foreign policy. With the threat of a dominance struggle between global powers left in [...]
Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign manager resigned on Thursday, just a month after the former Utah governor kicked off his bid for the White House. The departure of Susie Wiles, a former campaign manager for Florida Governor Rick Scott who helped guide the decision to base the campaign in Orlando, comes as Huntsman has struggled to [...]
You might have caught my dispatches from South Carolina this week, where I saw Michele Bachmann take her act to that important southern primary state. In this week’s print issue of TIME, you can read a longer, richer story on how Bachmann was received there, what comes next for a campaign suddenly under intense scrutiny, [...]
–Republican Senator Tom Coburn wagering that President Obama can be boxed into accepting the GOP’s drastic Cut, Cap and Balance deficit reduction plan.
