Free Republic

In another blow to Obama’s reelection bid, consumer confidence, which has been low throughout Obama’s presidency, stumbled badly last month after economists initially predicted confidence would go up. The number indicates that the onslaught of people and politicians abandoning the S.S. Obama continues unabated. In recent weeks, allies of Obama have defected from his campaign message if not from his person. Forget about polls numbers for a moment. Consumer confidence is the number that tells you what is really behind the defections.     "Consumer Confidence fell in May,” said Lynn Franco, Director of Economic Indicators at The Conference Board, “following a...

Attorney General Eric Holder told a council of African American church leaders Wednesday that the "sacred" right to vote is under assault nationwide, with federal lawsuits and at least a dozen state laws that could weaken — or block — minority access to the ballot box this fall.

Most political predictions are made by biased pollsters, pundits, or prognosticators who are either rooting for Republicans or Democrats. I am neither. I am a former Libertarian Vice Presidential nominee, and a well-known Vegas oddsmaker with one of the most accurate records of predicting political races. Neither Obama nor Romney are my horses in the race. I believe both Republicans and Democrats have destroyed the U.S. economy and brought us to the edge of economic disaster. My vote will go to Libertarian Presidential candidate Gary Johnson in November, whom I believe has the most fiscally conservative track record of any...

Every time a Bilderberg Meeting takes place, important things happen. The last time they met in the US was an election year, 2008 – and the world got Obama. This year they’re back in the US: will they decide who the next president will be? ­When in 2008 they gathered from June 5 to 8 in Chantilly, Virginia – just a stone’s throw from the Washington DC – Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were neck-in-neck in the battle for the Democratic Party’s presidential candidacy. On June 5 of that year, Barack and Hillary mysteriously “disappeared” for some hours “somewhere in...

From my email today: Dear MoveOn member, With November fast approaching, we need to make some hard decisions about which campaigns we can afford to take on, and which ones we'll have to sit out. There are so many important races this year. Of course there's the presidential election. But the U.S. Senate is up for grabs, too. There's the Scott Walker recall in Wisconsin. If we can elect Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts, that will be huge. It's like picking which of your kids you love the most. I just can't do it. But I'll be honest—if we can't increase...

Attorney General Eric Holder, the IRS, and the liberal lawyers at the ACLU will brief several hundred pastors in the African American community on how to participate in the presidential election -- which the Congressional Black Caucus chair expects will help President Obama's campaign. "We will have representatives from nine denominations who actually pastor somewhere in the neighborhood of about 10 million people, and we're going to first of all equip them with the information they need to know about what they can say and what they cannot say in the church that would violate their 501c3 status with the...

PRINCETON, NJ -- U.S. veterans, about 13% of the adult population and consisting mostly of older men, support Mitt Romney over Barack Obama for president by 58% to 34%, while nonveterans give Obama a four-percentage-point edge. These data, from an analysis of Gallup Daily tracking interviews conducted April 11-May 24, show that 24% of all adult men are veterans, compared with 2% of adult women. Obama and Romney are tied overall at 46% apiece among all registered voters in this sample. Men give Romney an eight-point edge, while women opt for Obama over Romney by seven points. It turns out...

In the last few weeks, President Barack Obama has reached out to military voters with the aim of slicing away pieces of what has been a reliable part of the Republican base. The most recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll shows that presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney leads Obama among military voters, but by eight percent. That single-digit difference is significant and it follows on the heels of other polls showing Obama performing well among veterans, particularly veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Love is always being able to tell liberals I told you so. Ok, I don’t know if it’s love exactly, but man it sure does feel good.A few weeks ago, after West Virginia’s Democrat governor and US Senator both refused to endorse Obama for reelection in 2012, I wrote:Scores of Democrats running for reelection will defect from Obama before the campaign is done. And scores of Democrat voters will reject him too. Why? The same reason voters will likely vote to kick Obama out of the White House: self-interest, if not outright self-defense.      Democrat Governor Earl Ray Tomblin of West...

E. J. Dionne, a liberal columnist for The Washington Post, suggested in a Monday blog post that Catholic leaders who are opposing the Obama administration's birth control mandate could be doing so to help Republicans in the November elections. Dionne was responding to the Monday lawsuits from 43 Catholic agencies. They sued the Obama administration over the requirement to provide coverage for contraception, sterilization and some abortifacient drugs in their health plans. These agencies did not qualify for the religious exemption because the exemption defines religious groups as only those that primarily hire and serve coreligionists, and for which religious...

Bill Clinton just sent Obama supporters and email saying that he has joined President Obama as first prize in the latest campaign fundraising raffle.

In 1968, the political world was shocked when President Lyndon Johnson, running for reelection just four years after a landslide victory, was held beneath 50% of the vote in the Democrat primary in New Hampshire. Sen. Eugene McCarthy scored a shocking 41.5% of the vote against the incumbent President. The result confirmed Johnson's weakness going into the November general election. Within weeks, Sen. Robert Kennedy announced he would seek the Democrat nomination for President and Johnson announced that he would not. LBJ was bowing out of his reelection bid. Today, the Obama reelection campaign is reeling from his disastrous performance...

That President Obama lost roughly 40 percent of the vote in Democratic primaries in Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia over the last two weeks has drawn massive national headlines. Those headlines have drawn a collective eyeroll from Democrats — and many others who closely follow national politics — who ascribe the underperformance by the incumbent to a very simple thing: racism. No, none of these Democrats are willing to put their name to that allegation — either generally or for this story. But, it is, without question the prevalent viewpoint they hold privately.

President Obama is lucky he was able to intimidate any significant Democrat from challenging him in this year’s primaries. As Katrina noted, a collection of nobodies — including the non-person “Uncommitted� — have been giving him a run for his money in several primaries.In this month’s West Virginia primary a convicted felon serving time in a Texas prison won over 40 percent of the vote. Last night, in Kentucky’s primary “Uncommitted� won 42 percent of the vote and actually carried a majority of the state’s 120 counties over the incumbent president. Dozens of traditionally Democratic counties — including the...

Dr. Jerome Corsi was the first guest on tonight's Bill Cunningham Radio Program on the Premier Radio Network and he spent about 20 minutes talking about the Obama literary agency biography and other eligibility-related issues. The presence of this topic was a bit surprising, as Cunningham has previously been dismissive and condescending of these questions, instead towing the line that Obama was politically misguided but nonetheless a nice guy and good family man who was clearly eligible to be president [Article II Section 1 be damned!]. Much of his appearance covered the basics of these questions, but Dr. Corsi did...

So it’s unanimous, then– Thomas Edsall was right: In the aftermath of Obama’s gay marriage flip, pundits seem to have concluded that Obama’s Democratic party has indeed given up on white working class voters. They’ve been dropped from the winning coalition, which is now composed of three main groups: “young people, college-educated whites (especially women), and minorities,” according to Ron Brownstein. Bill Galston agrees. Ruy Teixeira–who once wrote a book called America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters–agrees. Here’s Teixeira on how Obama can win Arizona: First, the share of Hispanic voters must grow and their support...

Show of hands: Who here still thinks Vice President Joseph R. Biden will be on the 2012 ticket? Really? All of you? So wrong. The Great One, Sir Barack Hussein Obama, will replace the bumbling, buffoonish Mr. Biden with Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, maybe at the Democratic convention, maybe just before, in a last-ditch effort to win re-election. The wild and crazy move is all the talk outside the Beltway. One state Democratic leader even tells me the bumper stickers are already printed, sitting in a warehouse in (where else?) Little Rock, Ark. Another party bigwig says she is “99.9...

Romney’s up three points in a Mason-Dixon poll, 47%-44%. Obama has a six-point lead with women and a seven-point lead with those younger than 50.

It may be early in the campaign season, but the Communist Party USA already has seen fit to endorse Barack Obama for the 2012 election. While noting he is disappointed with "some aspects" of the Obama administration's domestic and foreign policy, Sam Webb, chairman of the Communist Party USA, threw his support behind Obama's re-election bid. Read more: http://nation.foxnews.com/president-obama/2011/08/04/communist-party-endorses-obama-2012#ixzz1vB13LTqI

While not exactly something to hold the presses over, NARAL Tuesday endorsed pro-abortion President Barack Obama for a second term.“The difference between President Obama and Mitt Romney on choice is clear and stark,” said NARAL President Nancy Keenan. “We will make sure that voters understand the importance of re-electing President Obama. We are ready to go to battle and work every day to keep a pro-choice leader in the White House.”Keenan went on to emphasize that NARAL “will focus on a key bloc of women voters in battleground states. Choice is the issue that compels this segment to support President...

bored at work, I decided to wander over to the New York Times website to see how they're viewing the world today, insofar as one can see that from looking at things on their website accessible for free, as I (obviously) refuse to give them any of my money. I happened across this ridiculosity, which I post here for the amusement of my fellow freepers. It's one of a series of essays about what Obama can do to improve his vote-getting ability. My favorite paragraph: Older, rural, white men, especially in the South, are probably out of reach for the...

Just about every objective indicator foreshadows a huge re-election defeat for President Obama. With every day that passes, Mr. Obama looks more like a loser. That’s because there is doom and gloom everywhere you look. When government mathematical fudging is stripped away, unemployment is stuck over 10 percent. Economic growth is practically nonexistent and promises to slide downhill even more in the coming months with Europe and its banks rapidly collapsing. Due to Mr. Obama’s out-of-control deficit spending, the national debt is at a heart-stopping $15.7 trillion, which erases a whole year of economic output by our entire country. With...

US election: 'When Your Name Is Barack Hussein Obama, Getting Elected Is Difficult' Prejudice among some American voters will make it difficult for President Barack Obama to win re-election, he has suggested. The remarks were made on ABC's The View By Jon Swaine 15 May 2012 Asked during a television interview how close he expected the result of November's presidential election to be, Mr Obama said: "When your name is Barack Obama, it's always tight". After a host noted that his full name was "Barack Hussein Obama," he repeated this twice, stressing the middle name that has led conspiracy theorists...

Fifty-six percent of of Americans say President Barack Obama will win re-election, the Gallup polling organization said Tuesday, drily calling that prediction "perhaps a slightly more optimistic assessment than is currently warranted." Thirty-six percent say presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney will be the one taking the oath of office in January. Party affiliation shapes whether Americans are bullish or bearish on the odds of another term for Obama: 81 percent of Democrats but just 24 percent of Republicans predict he'll pull it off. But 58 percent of Independents agreed, compared to just 31 percent who said Romney would get the...

Just a week ago the establishment media was aflutter with news that a CIA double-agent had thwarted a new type of underwear bomb attack targeting U.S. flights in a plot devised by al-Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula. But as the week progressed, a developing bombshell story got buried under President Obama’s gay marriage announcement. Not only is the supposed CIA asset not a CIA asset at all, but the entire operation was exposed prematurely and the double-agent’s life was immediately threatened by an intelligence leak that very well may have come out of the White House for political gain. As...

“You can be stylish and powerful, too. That's Michelle’s advice.” -- President Obama telling graduates to temper but preserve their interest in clothing during his commencement address at Barnard College, a women-only college of New York’s Columbia University. It has taken months of bad news, but Democrats increasingly believe that President Obama might just lose his re-election bid. The latest wake-up call comes in the form of a New York Times/CBS poll showing Republican Mitt Romney in the lead not just among registered voters overall, but with women and independents.

President Obama referred to the Constitution's ability to help those who had originally been left out to fight their way in, especially when it came to unresolved race and gender rights. Obama likened the Constitutional to a "constant forward movement" in his commencement address to the women-only Barnard College. "What made this document special was that it made it possible for those who were left out to fight their way back in a constant forward movement," Obama said. "We look forward, not back." Obama's campaign slogan, FORWARD, was introduced last month.

The new CBS/New York Times poll out last evening is, on the surface, the biggest disaster for the Barack Obama campaign at this point in the 2012 election. Down overall? Check. Voters frustrated with the economy and how things are going? Check. Gay marriage endorsement backfire? Check. But this might be the worst underlier of all: Obama is even losing among women. Now, before we delve deeper, we should point out the funky methodology that has some — ranging on the spectrum from the Obama campaign to the National Journal — questioning how the results hold up. This is a...

(CNN) - Mitt Romney's support among registered voters who are women has grown and is slightly above President Barack Obama's, according to a poll released Monday. The CBS News/New York Times poll shows Obama's support among female voters dropping five points over the last two months, from 49% to 44%. Romney is up 3 from 43% to 46% within that coveted demographic, according to the survey. The margin is still within the survey's sampling error, however. Prior polling, including a mid-April CNN/ORC International poll, showed Obama ahead among women, with the CNN survey giving the president a 16-point advantage. That...

Despite the fact Barack Obama is married with two children, Newsweek magazine is dubbing him “The First Gay President” on its latest cover, crowning him with a rainbow-colored halo. The cover comes in the wake of Obama’s newly declared support for homosexual marriage in America. The edition, which hits newsstands Monday, features a column by Andrew Sullivan, an openly homosexual self-titled conservative political pundit. “When you step back a little and assess the record of Obama on gay rights, you see, in fact, that this was not an aberration. It was an inevitable culmination of three years of work,” Sullivan...

Mitt Romney made a hastily arranged trip to Charlotte, N.C., on Friday, and not just because that city is the site of the Democratic National Convention. It's because North Carolina looks to be leaning red. President Obama won the state four years ago but his decision to publicly endorse same-sex marriage this week could cost him the Tar Heel state, especially as his announcement came the day after the state rejected an amendment legalizing gay marriage. The Republican National Committee circulated a memo on the state, arguing that the retirement of high-profile Democratic lawmakers in the North Carolina, a sexual...

On NBC's Meet The Press,' just now (May 13, 2012: Jamie Dimon said it's not fair to blame 'all banks,' you know of a particular bank that does something wrong go after that specifically. I accept all criticism. I am now "barely a democrat." Asked: 'What do you mean "barely a Democrat," Are you not a Democrat anymore? I mean I am still a Democrat... but BARELY... The current admin. - (environment) very 'anti-Business.' I don't blame the president but the Democrats were much more destructive than the Republicans.

Among all voters surveyed, Obama led Romney 45 percent to 39.5 percent in Michigan. Michigan was central to Romney’s success in the GOP primary. He grew up there, and his father was governor. Romney campaigned aggressively against the government's auto industry bailout, but has lately said that he deserves credit for the industry's recovery. Saul Anuzis, a former chairman of the state Republican Party, told the Detroit News that the poll is “great news” because it shows that Obama will have to work hard to defend a state he won in 2008.

Just as the political air is filled with talk of the inevitability of Barack Obama’s reelection — we are told that the kids at his Chicago headquarters are brimming with confidence — in come some poll numbers showing him behind.Not by anything statistically significant, mind you. But when you get the Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls and the Politico/George Washington University Battleground poll all showing Mitt Romney leading Obama by one point, an Obama victory seems far from inevitable.These results came in at a time when the Real Clear Politics average of recent polls shows 50 percent expressing favorable...

President Obama's historic move Wednesday to support same-sex marriage could ripple all the way to the November election, helping unite his liberal base while threatening to ignite evangelical voters who have yet to commit to presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, political experts said. But while the public debate over same-sex marriage has sparked explosive political clashes in the past, observers on both sides said it is unlikely to be a game-changer this year, when the economy is the top issue for most voters. Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to support same-sex marriage Wednesday during an interview with ABC...

President Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage is an election-year boost to his liberal base that comes with some risks. The move is likely to hurt him in the South. One in three Southern swing voters are strongly opposed to gay marriage, a recent Pew Research Center poll found. Just this week, North Carolina, which Obama carried narrowly in 2008, approved one of the toughest bans on same-sex unions in the country. If the switch on same-sex marriage ends up costing him states in the fall, North Carolina will be the first place to look. More central to his reelection will...

President Obama today announced that he now supports same-sex marriage, reversing his longstanding opposition amid growing pressure from the Democratic base and even his own vice president. In an interview with ABC News’ Robin Roberts, the president described his thought process as an “evolution” that led him to this place, based on conversations with his own staff members, openly gay and lesbian service members, and conversations with his wife and own daughters. "I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of...

Ryan Lizza, a Washington correspondent for 'The New Yorker,' tweeted out a statement from a SENIOR Obama advisor today: Sr. BO adviser to me re: BO endorsing gay marriage: BO "may get around to it before this election but he certainly will after the election." If true, I guess we're once again learning what Obama has in mind after the election when he has more "flexibility." There's also news on the Twitter-nets that Obama's going to or already has done an interview in order to clarify his position on same-sex marriage, you know, because the words "for" or "against" require...

Comments and questions have poured forth after a woman was removed, said to be in a burqa, from President Obama campaign rally on Saturday. Isti Arief , a PhD student at Virginia Commonwealth University, told CBS 6 she was elated to see another Muslim woman sitting a few rows in front of her at President Obama’s re-election rally on Saturday. However, Arief says when she looked much closer , she knew something was wrong, starting with the woman’s burqa. “It looked like more of a makeshift one. It wasn’t even an official one” said Arief. Arief goes on to say...

A Texas felon gave President Obama a run for his money in the West Virginia Democratic primary, beating Obama in several counties and winning enough of the vote to be eligible for at least one delegate at the convention, according to the Associated Press. Perennial candidate Keith Russell Judd, currently serving 210 months in a federal prison, is currently pulling down roughly 40 percent of the vote to Obama's 60 percent. Judd has caused problems in other elections as well. In 2008, Idaho Democrats were peeved Judd qualified for the ballot, with one Democratic official calling him a "yahoo prisoner...

United States President Barack Obama leads Republican challenger Mitt Romney by seven percentage points, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found Tuesday. Obama has widened his lead since April, when he was leading by four percentage points. .....

In 2008, Barack Obama won the Catholic vote by nine points, 54/45, over John McCain on his way to a seven-point victory in the national popular vote. Three months after announcing the HHS mandate that would force religious hospitals, schools, and charities to fund contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients, Obama has lost that edge among the tens of millions of Catholic voters. A new Gallup poll shows Obama in a dead heat with Mitt Romney, at just about the same level as McCain got in 2008: Catholic voters in the United States are evenly split in their support for Barack Obama...

Someone in the Obama campaign should find a new line of work. They've adopted as a slogan the single word: Forward! You've heard those complaints from conservatives that Obama is a socialist? Well, Forward! is one sure way to validate those concerns. Forward! has been the slogan of Marxists for more than a century. Vorwärts is not a soccer rival to Harry Potter's Hogwarts school, that home of witchcraft and wizardry. Vorwärts was the German language name of the Socialist newspaper for generations of European leftists. In Russia, Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks used the word Vperyod! Now, if you had been...

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who endorsed Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, told The Daily Caller that he will be “listening” to both GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney and President Obama before making any “judgments” on their foreign policies. “I’m not going to do politics tonight, and I will be watching both Mr. Romney and President Obama and see what judgments I come to as a result of listening to them, but that’s not tonight,” he told TheDC at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. “Tonight is entertainment and fun.” In September 2010 Powell said he thought...

(CNN) – Former President Bill Clinton will appear Sunday alongside President Barack Obama at a fund-raiser for Obama's re-election effort, a campaign official told CNN. The fund-raiser will take place in Virginia at the home of former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe. More than 500 supporters will attend a reception with the two presidents, and 80 will attend a dinner at the house, the campaign official said. Tickets for the reception started at $1,000 a person and tickets for the dinner were $20,000 a person.

Check out the video...

... the Obama campaign in North Carolina – a major battleground in the 2012 election – faces a tough task as it seeks to capture the fickle youth vote that flocked to the polls in record numbers four years ago. A Harvard Institute of Politics national poll released Tuesday shows Obama with a 43 percent to 26 percent advantage against presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney among 18- to 29-year-old likely voters.

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Jessica Yellin of CNN is following Obama. Obama's in North Carolina. By the way, there's a sex scandal in North Carolina. It started out to be some very small, inconsequential thing. It's ballooning now. Details are coming up. Jessica Yellin is tweeting that Obama's crowd today is 50% the size it was when he went to the same place in 2008. Where is he? Chapel Hill. Yeah, he's at the Dean Smith Center with 9,000 people. BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Jessica Yellin of CNN is traveling with Obama. He's in North Carolina. That's a big problem state for...

The odds of defeating an incumbent president should be slim but they are in fact at least 50/50. Here are some reasons that this is true. 1) Romney is a more experienced and better candidate than he was in 2008. That often happens after a run or two. Nixon was tougher in 1968 than in 1960 in the way that Reagan was wiser in 1980 than in 1968 and 1976, and George H. W. Bush was better in 1988 than in 1980. McCain ran more effectively in the primaries in 2008 than he did in 2000. The Republican primary rough-housing...

Hillary Rodham Clinton has been on a bit of a roll lately. First, the secretary of state was the focus of a weeklong Internet rage, “Texts with Hillary,” that showed a stock photo of her exchanging spoof text messages with various people. Then, on Saturday night, she was seen dancing and drinking a beer with a group of bodyguards and aides at the Cafe Havana to toast the impending end of the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia. Today, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer interviewed her for his program, “The Situation Room,” after he accompanied her and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta...