Most political analysts in Washington believe that war with Iran is unlikely, especially before the November U.S. elections. Politically it would be hard for President Obama to engage in another Middle Eastern war given the war weariness of the U.S. electorate, let alone the question of being able to afford it at a time when Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from the Pentagon budget.
Most Americans won’t have the power to choose the next President because they live in states so tilted towards one end of the political spectrum that the election outcome, barring calamity, is not in doubt. Mitt Romney doesn’t really have a chance in California. Barack Obama is not going to win Texas. What matters instead [...]
For the better part of two years, Mitt Romney has been relentless. “Four years ago, candidate Obama came to Nevada, promising to help,” he said in his victory speech after the Nevada caucuses on Saturday night. “Today, Nevada unemployment is over 12%, home values have plummeted, and Nevada’s foreclosure rate is the highest in the [...]
The best attacks are cast with humor. That’s why it worked when John McCain’s 2008 campaign used Paris Hilton against Barack Obama, and why the windsurfing spot that George W. Bush used against John Kerry in 2004 got so much traction. The humor takes the edge off and builds a bond between the viewer and [...]
A couple of weeks back, I explained the historic importance of economic growth, and more particularly disposable income growth, in predicting presidential election results. When incomes are rising, incumbent parties tend to get reelected. When they are static or falling, incumbent parties tend to lose. On Monday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released December’s income [...]
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, President Obama “put colleges and universities on notice.” Find a way to stop tuition from going up, he told them, or risk losing federal aid money. Following up on that charge, Obama put forward a proposal on Friday at the University of Michigan that, if [...]
It’s no secret that passing health care reform was a balancing act from beginning to end. For President Obama, keeping the legislation alive meant making sure congressional Democrats stayed happy, along with for-profit industries like insurers and Big Pharma and powerful non-profit interest groups like the AARP and the American Medical Association. Through health reform’s [...]
I have a new print column, which TIME subscribers can find here, about Barack Obama’s rousing and very effective State of the Union message. It was effective in three ways–as a policy response to the Republicans running for President, as a spiritual response to the Republican insinuations that he was not quite American and as [...]
The moral case President Obama has made to explain his “Buffet Rule” proposal is pretty simple. “Let me tell you something,” Obama told a crowd in Iowa on Wednesday, “asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary, that’s just common sense.” But the policy rationale behind that statement is far less [...]
Bristling with optimism and a can-do pep, President Obama asked for his pessimistic nation’s attention on Tuesday night to announce he would not stand the naysayers any longer. “Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about,” he said from the biggest lectern [...]
