Free Republic

A candidateÂ’s strengths can also be his weaknesses. Take the case of Rick Santorum. One of his strengths is perseverance. For more than a year, he made hundreds of appearances in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, with no visible result in the polls. He persevered and ended up finishing first in the Iowa caucuses on January 3. Then, after poor showings in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, and Nevada, he finished first in Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado on February 7. Now heÂ’s leading Mitt Romney in most polls nationally and in RomneyÂ’s native state of Michigan. SantorumÂ’s other strengths...

That’s what Michael Barone, co-author of “The Almanac of American Politics,” argued at an election forum this morning hosted by the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Voters no longer need to meet candidates at events or see them at rallies to feel as though they know them, he argues. “New media has in different ways displaced some of the old techniques of campaigning that have worked in the past,” he said. “Voters seem to be getting an in-depth look at the candidates through the Internet and cable TV. People can get a sense of them through YouTube clips.”

Herman Cain, beleaguered by charges of sexual harassment, was all over Washington last week -- an odd choice of venue, considering that the Iowa precinct caucuses are now just 58 days away and the New Hampshire primary 65. But as I learned when I sat next to Cain Friday morning during a long-scheduled taping of Richard Carlson's "Danger Zone" radio program, Cain seemed unfazed. In conversation before the taping he dismissed the controversy. "No documentation. No witnesses. And I didn't cancel a single event this week" -- although his wife Gloria, accompanying him for the first time, cancelled an interview...

On Oct. 22, 1844, thousand of Millerites, having sold all their possessions, climbed to the top of hills in Upstate New York to await the return of Jesus and the end of the world. They suffered "the great disappointment" when it didn't happen. In 1212, or so the legends go, thousands of Children's Crusaders set off from France and Germany expecting the sea to part so they could march peaceably and convert Muslims in the Holy Land. It didn't, and many were shipwrecked or sold into slavery. In 1898 the cavalrymen of the Madhi, ruler of Sudan for 13 years,...

Is Herman Cain a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination? It's a question no one in the pundit world was asking until the past week. Cain has never held public office. When he ran for the Senate in Georgia in 2004, he lost the primary by a 52 percent to 26 percent margin. He has zero experience in foreign or defense policy, where presidents have the most leeway to set policy. When questioned about the Middle East earlier this year, he clearly had no idea what the "right of return" is. His solid performance in the Fox News/Google debate...

But on one policy Truman went further than his top advisers or Dewey's. When the Soviets blocked land access to West Berlin in June 1948, Truman's advisers -- men of the caliber of George Marshall and Omar Bradley -- said that it was impossible to supply food and fuel to Berlin and we should just abandon it. At a crucial meeting in July 1948 Truman listened to this advice. After others finished talking, Truman said simply, "We're not leaving Berlin." Gen. Lucius Clay, our proconsul in Germany, set about organizing what became the Berlin airlift. Gen. William Tunner, who had...

Two years ago, in June 2009, the American economy emerged from recession, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. But as this week's Economist noted, with typical British understatement, "The recovery has been a disappointment." And maybe not a recovery for long. Robert Shiller, the economist who first identified the housing bubble, said last week that we may be headed for recession again. "Whether we call it a double dip or not," he told Reuters, "there is a risk." His Case/Shiller housing price index indicated that home prices in March slumped to levels not seen since March 2003, and...

Bottom line. This was a New Hampshire debate, but it has serious ramifications for Iowa as well. I have disparaged the idea that Romney is the frontrunner; I continue to think that given the polls no one is the frontrunner. But Romney behaved like a frontrunner tonight, one with confidence and sense of command and with the adroitness to step aside from two major issue challenges (Romneycare, his various views on abortion) he faces. Romney has wisely eschewed the Iowa caucuses this time, leaving as two major competitors there Pawlenty (from next door Minnesota and a genuine religious conservative) and...

Exit Newt Gingrich. Well, not quite yet, officially. On his Facebook page, Gingrich says he will endure "the rigors of campaigning for public office" and "will carry the message of American renewal to every part of this great land, whatever it takes." Without, however, the assistance of his 16 top campaign aides, some of whom had been with him for years, who resigned en masse last Thursday. They wanted him to spend more time on personal campaigning. He and his wife, Callista, figured they could do a lot of their campaigning and fundraising over the Internet. This is not the...

Exit Newt Gingrich. Well, not quite yet, officially: On his Facebook page, Gingrich says he will endure "the rigors of campaigning for public office" and "will carry the message of American renewal to every part of this great land, whatever it takes."

There's an awful lot that's stale in the debate on government energy policy. Some stale arguments are nevertheless valid: It's dangerous to depend heavily on Middle Eastern oil. Others have increasingly been seen as dubious: that global warming caused by human activity will result in catastrophe. There's stale talk about federal and state laws that promised great change but have produced very little. Electric cars, even with subsidies, are no larger a part of the auto fleet than they were 100 years ago.

Unexpectedly! As megablogger Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, has noted with amusement, the word "unexpectedly" or variants thereon keep cropping up in mainstream media stories about the economy. "New U.S. claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly climbed," reported CNBC.com May 25.

The weakest part of our political system is the presidential nomination process. And it's not coincidental that it's the part of the federal system that finds least guidance in the Constitution. There is no provision in the Constitution that says that Iowa and New Hampshire vote first. The idea of giving any two states a preferred position in the process of choosing a president would surely have struck the Framers as unfair. But we are stuck with Iowa and New Hampshire voting first because no politician who contemplates ever running for president -- i.e., most politicians -- wants to arouse...

Obama's Antique Vision of Technological ProgressHis vision is of a dynamic economy. His result will be a static one. Barack Obama, like all American politicians, likes to portray himself as future-oriented and open to technological progress. Yet the vision he set out in his State of the Union address is oddly antique and disturbingly static. “This is our generation’s Sputnik moment,” he said. But Sputnik and America’s supposedly less advanced rocket programs of 1957 were government projects, at a time when government defense spending, like the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb, drove technology. But today, as Obama noted...

On the day after Boxing Day, it's worth noting that Barack Obama is down but not out. You could tell as much from the contrast between his petulant post-election press conference and his peppy pre-Christmas press conference. In the former, he was crabby about accepting Republicans' demands that income tax rates on all taxpayers not be raised. In the latter, he was celebrating the lame-duck Congress's acceptance of his stands on the New START treaty, repeal of don't ask, don't tell, and even the previously reviled tax deal. Obama has obviously figured out that Americans prefer to see their president...

On the day after Boxing Day, it’s worth noting that Barack Obama is down but not out. You could tell as much from the contrast between his petulant post-election press conference and his peppy pre-Christmas press conference. In the former, he was crabby about accepting Republicans’ demands that income-tax rates on all taxpayers not be raised. In the latter, he was celebrating the lame-duck Congress’s acceptance of his stands on the New START treaty, repeal of don’t ask, don’t tell, and even the previously reviled tax deal. Obama has obviously figured out that Americans prefer to see their president describe...

It's hard to disagree. Robust economic growth solves a lot of fiscal and other problems. But Obama's fellow Democrats, to whom he explicitly directed these comments, can be forgiven for being puzzled. The whole thrust of his first two years -- the stimulus package, the health care legislation, the vast increases in government spending -- has been to put programs in place that have done little or nothing to stimulate economic growth. That's not accidental. The template for the Obama Democrats' policies, the New Deal of the 1930s, was not designed to stimulate economic growth, but to freeze in place...

This hour on the Michael Medved radio show, Michael Barone predicted that the Republicans will gain between 38 and 90 seats. (The midpoint is 64.)

After the 2008 elections, Democratic strategist James Carville predicted that Democrats would dominate US elections for 40 years; Republican strategist Karl Rove had predicted something similar for his party after George W Bush's narrower win in 2004. And Tony Blair's New Labour dominated British politics for nine or 10 years after its first landslide victory in 1997. But the Obama Democrats' dominance turned out to last not 40 years but 40 weeks – until Republicans overtook Democrats in the polls in August 2009. What gives? In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes famously said that practical men of business, who acknowledged...

Why have American voters gone so sour on Barack Obama's Democratic party? It's a question that must puzzle many in Britain who – Conservative as well as Labour and Lib Dem – welcomed Obama's election two years ago and saw him leading America and the world into broad, sunlit uplands. But now it appears that Obama's party is about to take what George W Bush called a "thumping" in the mid-term elections on November 2. It looks to be quite a fall. Obama won the popular vote in 2008 by a 53 to 46 per cent margin. That's not quite...