President Obama's post-Labor Day "jobs" speech will be his last chance to launch an economic policy with any chance of manifesting its effect -- both economic and political -- before the November 2012 elections.
"It's not the consumers' job to know what they want" -- Steve Jobs
Some of society's most intractable problems come not from its failures but from its successes. Often you can't get a good thing without paying a bad price.
When Scott Brown was elected U.S. senator from Massachusetts in a special election last year, Republicans rejoiced. They had wrested the Senate seat held by the late liberal icon Edward Kennedy in a Democratic stronghold.
In the vengeful world of politics, what goes around often comes around.
Not long ago, I wrote about how the private sector outraces and laps government. While governments dither and dispute, the private sector discovers.
Have you noticed that our immigration laws are finally being enforced? That illegal immigration is way down? That employers hiring undocumented workers are finally being punished? And that this is being done in the Democratic administration of President Barack Obama? If not, take note.
One of the few issues on which opinion has moved left over the last few years is same-sex marriage. In 1996, Gallup found that Americans opposed it by a 68 percent to 27 percent margin. Last May, Gallup found Americans in favor by 53 percent to 45 percent. That's a huge change in 15 years.
As the Iowa Straw Poll in Ames was wrapping up Saturday, a reporter rushed onto the floor of Iowa State University's Hilton Coliseum, where the press was filing their stories. She went up to her colleagues with what she said was a new, breaking quote from Michele Bachmann: Bachmann, the reporter said, had just vowed to make Barack Obama a "one-term president."
Several columnists recently referred to the tea party "patriots" as terrorists. The terrorist label set off a stormy protest among the group's legion of message writers.
President Obama has found himself in the cellar for the first time since taking office: He fell to 39% in Gallup Poll tracking over the past weekend. Obama may or may not have a month or months when his average is below 40%. Still, it is a number that has already imprinted itself on the mind of the political community.
Pundits lately have been comparing Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter, suggesting he is a likely loser in 2012. But my American Enterprise Institute colleague Norman Ornstein, writing in The New Republic, compares Obama to Harry S. Truman, suggesting he may outperform the polls and win.
Gov. Rick Perry scorched the political pot on Tuesday with a red-hot rhetorical attack on Fed-head Ben Bernanke. When asked about the Fed reopening the monetary spigots, Perry said, “If this guy prints more money between now and the election, I don’t know what y’all would do to him in Iowa, but we -- we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas.”
In the weeks during and since the debt-ceiling debate, the media, pushed by the Democratic Party, has peddled the propaganda that our government is broken -- because the Republicans in the House of Representatives negotiated a better deal than the liberals wanted.
Watching the riots in Britain's cities, I recalled visiting an English friend who ran a big company and had a country house grand enough to be called a "hall." (I will not disclose his identity.) Though hardly liberal, my friend was politically moderate. He was also a very decent person.
This has been quite a week or 10 days for Republicans. As this is written, down in South Carolina Rick Perry has just announced he's running for president, while here in Ames most of the votes have been cast but none has yet been counted in the Iowa Republican straw poll.
Majorities in liberal states often back policies that most folks in conservative states abhor -- and vice versa. The difficulty of reaching accord among warring but heartfelt views partly explains Washington's paralysis.
With world markets suddenly sagging under the weight of the Standard & Poor's Aug. 5 downgrade of Treasury bonds, Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., is disturbed by the monopolistic power of the ratings agencies -- and still determined to curb their abuses, as he tried to do last year with an amendment to the Dodd-Frank banking reform bill.
Things look different in the Midwest. Back in Washington, people are talking about President Barack Obama's poor showing this past week. (Did you see that Maureen Dowd has turned against him?) In Iowa, they're focused on the state Republicans' presidential straw poll in Ames next Saturday. And in Wisconsin, they just got through counting the votes in a recall election that has great national significance.
Tonight marks the third televised debate of the 2012 campaign for the Republican contenders, and by far the most important one yet. It's not that the audience in Iowa or on TV will be enormous in the midst of August vacations and summer doldrums.
