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On the fundraising circuit these days, President Obama tells two stories. The first is his public story, the one about Republican obstruction of his proposal to inject more tax cuts and spending into the economy. It is a timeless political tale, a good-guy, bad-guy drama that argues Democrats are fighting for the country while Republicans [...]
We’re off, with a montage of the mountain west, courtesy of CNN. Soft focus shots of a cactus, water in a river, a desert. It’s like a karaoke video, except instead of a Whitesnake song, the voice over is going on about “mountain majesty” backed by swelling bassoons, or some instruments that sound like bassoons. The idea, it seems, is to set the stage. But the experience is like riding down Willy Wonka’s chocolate river tunnel.
My TIME colleague Ishaan Tharoor has done the interwebbing proud by writing a blog post that tries to counterspin the growing political spin–most recently from President Obama–describing the liberal Occupy Wall Street movement as similar in kind to the conservative Tea Party movement. Provocative, no doubt, and just what the moment ordered. But since I [...]
In South Carolina today, Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s wife, Anita, committed a cardinal campaign sin: Candor. In an address that was sometimes teary, she offered a window into how the family has been dealing with this first two months of the campaign, and admitted to drawing a surprising conclusion: Rick Perry is being attacked by [...]
When Richard Trumka, the head of the nation’s largest labor union coalition, the AFL-CIO, visited the Occupy Wall Street protesters last week, he offered a simple message. “We are going to support them in any way we can,” he said. “We’re not going to try to usurp them in any way.” Those marching orders have [...]
The Obama Campaign’s senior strategist, David Axelrod, held a midday conference call with reporters on Wednesday that was mostly focused on coming up with new ways of calling Mitt Romney a rudderless panderer without any fixed principles. He even went so far as to quote George Burns: “All you need to succeed in show business [...]
It’s debate night in America, again. This is not exciting. What is exciting is that Charlie Rose is standing on a stage and the background is not black. It’s a trick that no one ever thought was possible before, like when Jim Henson put Kermit the Frog on a bicycle in Central Park and made his mouth move. It makes you feel like anything is possible. But let’s not get carried away. This is America in 2011. Next to nothing is possible.
A top Obama fundraiser who went to work at the Department of Energy pushed for the quick processing of a loan guarantee for the defunct energy firm Solyndra after agreeing to avoid any “active participation” in the company’s application because his wife was working for a law firm that represented the company, e-mails obtained by [...]
The running critique of the Occupy Wall Street protests is that they have too many bongo drums and not enough message coherence. But that hasn’t stopped Washington’s elite–Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and President Barack Obama–from all hearing the same, singular message loud and clear.
“Why?” Barack Obama asked Republicans about their opposition to his job creation bill. Then he asked it again. And again. By the time he was done, the President had repeated the question, in different ways, some 15 times.
This was Obama on offense. It was Professor Obama to be more exact, attacking with the Socratic method.
