President Obama wraps up his three-day bus tour of North Carolina and Virginia on Wednesday, a jaunt designed to sell his $447 billion jobs bill to voters in two swing states he wrested from the GOP in 2008. The trip’s route has been telling. Repeating his victories in these pivotal Southern battlegrounds will be a challenge for Obama. …
Barack Obama
TIME Poll: Obama Leads Head-to-Head Matchups with Republican Rivals
Despite sweeping pessimism about the nation’s fortunes and his own sliding approval ratings, President Obama leads potential Republican rivals Mitt Romney and Rick Perry in hypothetical general-election matchups, according to a …
The Next Twist in the Solyndra Scandal
More Solyndra emails from the White House are coming. Just how many is unclear, as is whether or not they will contain any news. The last batch–hundreds of pages of correspondence between low-level Solyndra executives and President Obama’s advance team–revealed little, beyond one aide’s view that the manufacturing robots at Solyndra’s …
Why Obama Wants a Supreme Court Fight on Health Reform in 2012
The Obama administration’s decision late Monday not to ask for a full court review of the August decision by two appeals court judges to strike down ObamaCare is a risky but potentially high-value play by the White House in the …
Breaking: Rick Perry Is “An American”
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Lucas Baiano, the guy who made Rick Perry’s new web video, was born and raised on the far side of the Canadian border. This doesn’t matter of course. Baiano is legal to work in the United States, and his dedication to the American political system is unquestioned. After volunteering for both …
Obama’s Tax on the Big Bad Banks
Way back in January of 2010, during his short-lived “fat cat” bashing phase, Obama proposed a tax on the nation’s largest financial institutions with the stated intent of recouping taxpayer losses from the 2008 bank bailouts. Even by that point, the Troubled Asset Relief Program’s price tag was shaping up to be much lower than the …
What Suskind’s Book Really Says About Obama’s Presidency — and America
Readers often find in texts the meaning they bring to them. That dynamic is well under way in early reviews of veteran journalist Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men, which goes on sale Tuesday.
Rick Perry and the GOP’s Afghanistan Bind
Rick Perry is still laboring to articulate a clear position on Afghanistan.
New York’s Special Election: Looming Upset Would Be a Rebuke to Obama
Back in May, Democrats pulled off an upset in a special election in Western New York, snatching a House seat in a Republican stronghold. On Tuesday the GOP appears ready to exact its revenge.
Republican Bob Turner, a retired television executive, holds an edge over Democratic Assemblyman David Weprin in the special election to replace …
The Sisyphean Stimulus Sell: Why Obama’s Big Job Speech Will Likely Prove Unpersuasive
Governor Rick “Galileo” Perry declared at the Reagan Library last night that President Obama and his 2009 stimulus have “proven once and for all that government spending will not create one job.” Actually, in the last …
Barack Obama’s Polling Keeps Getting Worse
Things keep getting worse. Not just for the country, which has endured unrelenting cycles of bad news for a decade now, but for President Obama, whose entire presidency has been defined by negative forces, most of which are beyond his control. A look at the new polls that greet Obama Tuesday morning, and this is the only conclusion to …
Team Obama Finds Hope for 2012 in a History Lesson
Weeks before the debt-limit showdown came to a head, White House chief of staff Bill Daley held an unannounced retreat for his senior staff at Fort McNair, an Army base near the southern tip of the District of Columbia. The …
Hurricane Politics
Hurricane Irene wreaked billions of dollars in damage, inundated cities and towns and killed at least 35. For hundreds of thousands more, it was either a life-changing calamity or a close call. But for politicians, it was also a chance to showcase leadership and promote their vision of government in a moment of peril. President Obama …