In the Arena2012 Election
Ron Brownstein may be the best in the business at reading polls, and here he explains a conundrum that has puzzled a fair number of political observers: why the President seems to be doing so much better in swing states than among the general population. The answer is pretty simple:
In the Arena2012 Election
Not much happening on today’s Sunday talk shows. Lots of debate spinning, of course — the first debate is always good for challengers, we’re told. (It wasn’t in 1996, when Bob Dole debated Bill Clinton — but hey, that was Clinton.) And lots of handwringing over the Obama Administration’s reputed obfuscation of the terrorist attack on …
In the ArenaUncategorized
This is outrageous. As I travel around the country, I frequently meet with veterans, or their family members, who have been stiffed, ignored or mistreated by the Veterans Administration. Paperwork is lost. Claims disappear. It takes months, sometimes years, to get a response. The treatment afforded a new generation of wounded warriors, …
In the ArenaIn the Arena
Charles Krauthammer’s precipitous descent into partisan silliness proceeds apace. In this week’s column, he excoriates President Obama’s Arab Spring policy and suggests that Mitt Romney “go large” in opposing it. Ok…but what’s the alternative? In the past, when he was still a rigorous and creative thinker, Krauthammer might have …
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The Middle East scenario no one wants to talk about.
In the ArenaIn the Arena
There have been so many dispiriting days during this campaign, but today was not one of them. In fact, it was a fine day of speech-making–two strong foreign policy speeches by President Obama and one by Mitt Romney. The speech …
In the Arena2012 Election
when his team is losing.
In the ArenaUncategorized
Not just an imaginary Obama, but also an imaginary electorate.
In the ArenaUncategorized
I went back and listened to Barack Obama’s 2008 fundraising gaffe about people in small towns who have grown “bitter” and so they “cling to their guns or religion or antipathy toward people who are not like them …” to compare it with Mitt Romney’s “47%” monstrosity. And it’s interesting: there are similarities, but the differences …
In the Arena2012 Election
As Alex Altman reports, Mitt Romney’s bad week just got worse. And the worst of the worse is Romney’s contention that the 47% of the country who support Obama are just looking for handouts. This from a man who pays 14% in taxes–a multi-million dollar handout that Romney receives because he makes his money via a financial scheme that …
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Maureen Dowd didn’t write a particularly rigorous column about the role of neoconservatives in misleading Republicans over the past decade, but she is no anti-Semite. I don’t think she was at all conscious of the the snake metaphors and other vestiges of Jew hating from the Middle Ages that her critics are now raising. Why should she be? …
In the Arena2012 Election
I was having a drink with a Republican strategist the other day and he said, “Jon Stewart was right. We’re running a Clint Eastwood campaign, running against a version of Barack Obama that doesn’t exist.” Exhibit A is this Fred Barnes piece in the Weekly Standard, which begins with this rather remarkable paragraph:
President Obama is
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In the ArenaUncategorized
A powerful bipartisan group of experts, led by Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, has issued a policy paper that raises grave doubts about the efficacy of a military attack on Iran. The report raises many of the same concerns I did in this space yesterday. It serves to further isolate the neoconservative extremists who, at the …
