The punditocracy has achieved consensus: given the latest crop of national horse-race polls, Mitt Romney can no longer hope to claim the Republican presidential nomination by default; he has no choice but to knock off Rick Perry. There’s just no real consensus on how exactly he should do it.
A few of the current ideas and their …
Back in May and before Rick Perry was considering a presidential run, a group of social conservative leaders approached the Lone Star governor. “One of our people wanted to take a look at him,” says Rapid City, S.D., furniture-store owner and conservative organizer Bob Fischer. “Perry became anxious to meet with us, the conservatives …
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 …
Since his entry into the GOP presidential race earlier this month, Rick Perry has rocketed to the top of national polls and attained frontrunner status. The position of the Anybody But Mitt candidate, briefly occupied by Michele
…
Mitt Romney was slow to dive into close-contact retail campaigning–for months Romney snuck along with a frontrunner campaign, popping up occasionally to bash the President’s “failure” on the economy– and we’re starting to see why. The political media seemed to lose interest in RomneyCare ever since since the former Massachusetts …
Education Secretary Arne Duncan came out swinging this week, when he attacked Rick Perry’s education record in Texas, saying that he feels “very, very badly for the children there.” But a few hours later, Duncan had moderated his attack line, in an interview with TIME’s Andrew Rotherham.
When I asked Duncan about this dire assessment in
…
Presidential campaigns are all about the future, yet they take place in the present and rest upon the past. A candidate’s record, and performance in debates and on the trail, are what a voter has to go on. So the records of the Republican candidates when it comes to fiscal responsibility matter, especially in a nomination campaign that …
In the latest issue of TIME, now available to subscribers on tablets and the web, Republican John E. Sununu argues the debt debate and subsequent S&P downgrade have critically damaged President Obama’s re-election effort, while Mark Halperin makes the case that Rick Perry’s entrance into the presidential race has things looking up for …
As the resident Fed bore, what interested me about Rick Perry’s attack on Ben Bernanke, aside from the additional evidence that the guy seems a few books short of a library, was his implicit acknowledgment that printing more money could help juice the economy. Presumably that’s why it would be so treasonous to do it before the …
Say what you will about the Iowa straw poll. (“Good-natured fraud,” says Walter Shapiro. “Not very predictive,” says Jon Stewart. “Overhyped, underwhelming,” says Michael Crowley.) But no one can deny that the event …
Rick Perry is primed to announce his bid for the Republican presidential nomination on Saturday in South Carolina. TIME’s Mark Halperin caught up with the Texas governor in Austin and asked him about his feelings on a White House run, his conservative credentials and his rumored rocky relationship with the Bushes. Lightly edited …
I always get a kick out of watching someone ignore or subvert ridiculous political traditions. So I chuckled yesterday envisioning the panic of my colleagues in the press corps desperately trying to figure out whether to cancel …
The political news hole situated between Washington’s debt deal and the run-up to Iowa’s straw poll is being filled up by stories on the Texas governor in part because things are slow, no one else is running around renting out stadiums or getting experimental stem cell treatments, but mostly because of the orbit-altering effect his …
