Free Republic

Has Obama Lost the Catholic Left? Lyndon B. Johnson, after watching Walter Cronkite conclude a special broadcast which was heavily critical of the Tet offensive, said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”Well, this story isn’t exactly on the same level as that, but President Barack Obama may be losing the Catholic Left, with obvious implications for entrenched faculty on many Catholic college campuses. Michael Sean Winters, a lead writer for the National Catholic Reporter and vocal defender of the University of Notre Dame’s 2009 commencement honors for President Obama, wrote yesterday that he can’t see how he could...

The sobering reality: just 55.3 percent of Americans between 16 and 29 have jobs. And earlier this year, Americans’ student loan debt surpassed credit card debt for the first time ever. In 2008, the youth vote helped sweep Barack Obama into office. Americans 18-29 spread the word on social media, energized fundraising and went to the polls. In 2012, the youth vote is moving on and throwing those omnipresent “Hope” bumper stickers and t-shirts in garbage bins. Not because of apathy. Not because another candidate generates more enthusiasm. Not because of his character. Not because they think voting is pointless....

Electoral racism in its most egregious form is the unwillingness of whites to vote for blacks regardless of qualifications or ideology. So far, Barack Obama has been involved in two elections that suggest such racism is no longer operative. His reelection bid, however, may indicate that a more insidious form of racism has replaced it. The 2004 Illinois Senate race between Obama and Alan Keyes, two African Americans, was a unique test of old-fashioned electoral racism. For a truly committed racist, neither would have been acceptable. In 2008, the long primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Obama added hundreds of...

President Obama coasted into the White House thanks in part to the youth vote, individuals aged 18-29 who bought into his vague promise to bring change. During Mr. Obama’s term in office, however, many of this group - known as Millennials - have been forced to learn how to subsist on pocket change. This isn’t quite what they were expecting when they turned out in historic droves in 2008. According to a recent poll commissioned by Generation Opportunity, 57 percent of Millennials participating said they will learn more about the policy positions of presidential candidates in the 2012 election than...

STAUNTON, Va. – Whether it is called General Lee Highway, as in Virginia, or Molly Pitcher Highway, as in Pennsylvania, the lives and economic strain along U.S. Route 11 tell of a country’s disappointment with Washington – specifically, with President Obama. The north–south highway, created in 1926, extends more than 1,600 miles from New York to Louisiana. It is one of those blue lines you find on a gas-station road atlas, obscured by the bold red lines of the dominant interstates. Woodrow Wilson’s home is along this road in Virginia, James Buchanan’s in Pennsylvania. In between those presidential homes is...

dpaAs America's first black president, Barack Obama electrified an entire nation. But now that the nation is in crisis, he seems unable to connect with the people. He wanted to change America and restore its reputation in the world. But now his opponents are dictating the country's political course.

I confess that I'm having great fun watching the liberals waking up to the fact that the image of President Obama they bought into was a fantasy, and underneath is an arrogant, cold, and incompetent executive, with no experience at all in running anything. This morning brings Colbert King, the liberal Washington Post columnist, who take his first step down the path to a reality-based perception of The One. King displays a certain annoyance with Barack Obama, explaining to the president why it is so stupid for him to be going on vacation: King goes on to list many other...

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said in a radio interview that he's thinking about trying to encourage somebody to run against President Obama in a primary election, claiming the president has drifted toward Republican positions because "no one will stand up to him." Republicans hardly feel that Obama is on their side. House Speaker John Boehner, after splitting off from White House-led debt talks, said Sunday that they are almost "from two different planets." But Sanders, an Independent, said Friday that the president is not living up to his campaign commitments on issues like Social Security -- reflecting a concern among...

July 24, 2011, 10:11 AM President Pushover Updated: Drew article now available. The redoubtable Elizabeth Drew has a forthcoming article in the New York Review of Books — not yet online — that confirms all our worst fears. She tells us that past concessions have established in both Democrats’ and Republicans’ minds the thought that Obama was a weak negotiator—a “pushover.” He was more widely seen among Democrats and other close observers as having a strategy of starting near where he thinks the Republicans are—at the fifty-yard line—and then moving closer to their position. Even more alarming, however, is her...

If the election were held today, President Obama would get only 56 percent of the Jewish vote against a generic Republican candidate, down from the 78 percent he won in 2008 and less than the 74 percent John Kerry received in 2004. This is the key finding of a survey of 1,000 Jewish voters I conducted from June 20-27 using telephone and Internet interviews. After asking basic questions of the entire sample, I proceeded to drill down with more detailed questions for the Jews in the sample who identified themselves as Democrats. The overall survey has a 95 percent confidence...

David Ainsman really began to get worried about President Barack Obama’s standing with his fellow Jewish Democrats when a recent dinner with his wife and two other couples — all Obama voters in 2008 — nearly turned into a screaming match. Ainsman, a prominent Democratic lawyer and Pittsburgh Jewish community leader, was trying to explain that Obama had just been offering Israel a bit of “tough love” in his May 19 speech on the Arab Spring. His friends disagreed — to say the least. One said he had the sense that Obama “took the opportunity to throw Israel under the...

Obama Losing The Youth Vote 'Because White Students Don't Think He's Cool Anymore' By PAUL BENTLEY 7th June 2011 President Barack Obama famously won the 2008 election on a wave of support from America's youth. But any hopes the 49-year-old had of keeping down with the kids appear to have faded - his support from young people is rapidly waning, a poll has found. And for a man known for his 'jacket off' casual style the reason for this slump may be particularly hurtful - students are abandoning the President because they do not think he is cool anymore, it...

What have they done with President Obama? What happened to the inspirational figure his supporters thought they elected? Who is this bland, timid guy who doesn’t seem to stand for anything in particular?

Let's give Kathleen Parker credit for not badgering rock star Gene Simmons with, "Yeah, but aren't I as awesome and chic and cute as Sarah Palin is stupid?" Such restraint on the part of someone so "unqualified" to co-host a television show next to a guy smarter than she is, who runs circles around her, is admirable. Parker's sucking up to the left under the mistaken belief they wouldn't smell weakness and abuse it for every partisan advantage is a "naive" mistake Sarah Palin never made - you know, the Sarah Palin with the successful TV show and bright future

Dear MoveOn member [cough, cough], Remember Barack Obama in 2008? The guy who refused to go along with a "dumb war" and said, "In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope." I miss that guy. Imagine if someone told you in 2008 that Barack Obama was actually thinking about signing legislation to extend the Bush tax giveaways for the rich.1 I wouldn't have believed it. Now more than ever, we need the Barack Obama we elected in 2008—the smart, tough, hopeful progressive champion who inspired millions of us—to stand up and say "no"...

~snip~ Honestly, though, I'm surprised that so many people have turned against the president. Obviously, if you've lost your job, life is tough, but did voters really believe the country was going to quickly and dramatically reverse course once he was elected? So he hasn't yet made good on every campaign promise—isn't this like being shocked that you didn't lose as much weight doing Jenny Craig as Valerie Bertinelli did, or that your new memory-foam mattress didn't magically cure your insomnia? ~snip~ But when I see Obama on television, I'm unfailingly struck by his intelligence and charisma, by his easygoing...

Whoa boy, the Democrats are in major spin mode now that the election is so near. On Saturday the ill-conceived "foreign money" talking point reared its head again from the queen bee of stupid, Nancy Pelosi: Before introducing President Barack Obama at a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fundraiser in Minneapolis on Saturday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi bemoaned the massive amount of money that shadowy conservative third-party groups have poured into this year’s election. “Everything was going great and all of a sudden secret money from God knows where — because they won’t disclose it — is pouring in,” the California...

Op-ed: As elections loom, US president losing support of once - sympathetic voters In the last elections campaigns, it was possible to point to a political gender-based gap. While men tended to vote Republican, women tended to vote Democrat. Yet the recent polls show that the female vote is also shifting to the Right. Some 52% of women still support the Democrats, yet this marks a sharp drop in the face of the masculine zeal to topple the Left, and Obama knows it. Hence, his West Coast trip is dedicated to meetings with women and efforts to boost two female...

President Obama's closing argument: Don't go GOP By: Carol E. Lee October 23, 2010 05:49 PM EDT MINNEAPOLIS — President Barack Obama finished the longest campaign trip of his presidency Saturday much in the way he started: criticizing Republicans for wanting to take the country backward and trying to rally disheartened Democrats to the polls. For Democratic supporters from 2008 who are thinking about switching sides this election, Obama paraphrased Albert Einstein. “The true sign of madness is if you do the same thing over and over again and expect the same result,” he said during a rally at the...

Verily I say unto thee, Barack Obama was a spuriously manufactured, promoted, and peddled messiah, hustled from the back of the mountebank’s wagon of the Left. Obama’s political hari kari, other than being copiously unqualified, was buying into his own hype. Before taking the oath of office, he had already caused his standard to be set somewhere within the Trinity. He did, in fact, run as a Messiah, the Emmanuel of the proletariat. He was to distribute salvation upon the Left, liberal elites, middle-class working Americans, the welfare dependent, and the overwhelming majority of black America. The mainstream media packaged...

President Barack Obama is taking his popular wife with him to three campaign stops in the pivotal swing state of Ohio Sunday, but a new Associated Press Poll shows that may be too little, too late with just over two weeks remaining before critical congressional elections. The survey found that the coalition of voters that swept Obama into the White House just two years ago — aching for change after the eight-year presidency of Republican George W. Bush — has crumbled. SNIP The Associated Press-Knowledge Networks survey found that one-fourth of those who voted for Obama two years ago are...

This president gives rousing speeches. He did it again yesterday. He bounded out onto the Hynes Convention Center stage, all youth and vigor, open-necked white shirt, navy blazer. But he didn't sell me, or reassure me. I don't think the president meant to undermine anybody's confidence with his wrong-way-out-of-the-ditch story yesterday. But that's the nagging question - isn't it? Even among the once-Obamified, like me? We're afraid he's not really getting us out of our ditch. And the ditch is getting deeper. And it's very scary stuff.

Question from Adam Hunter: "When you were first elected, it seemed as though the sky was falling in terms of the economy. There was a bailout that you supported, there was stimulus that added to our deficit, but yet it seems as though our unemployment rate still rises. You said it won't go past 8% and now it's at 9.5% … So, my question to you is: Why should we still support you going forward with your economic policies and if the economic does not improve over the next years, why should we vote you back in?"

The monolithic pro-Democratic black vote is a clear and present danger to America. As recently as 1956, the GOP captured 39 percent of the black vote. If Republicans can seize just 20 or 30 percent of the black vote, the Democratic Party -- and its ability to pull the country to the left -- could be stopped, if not reversed. "The 'black vote'?" I said to a white Republican politician who asked my advice. "I'll tell you how to go after it, but you won't do it." "Try me," he said. Politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, treat blacks like children....

CHICAGO -- Even in President Barack Obama's hometown, they had hoped for more. Obama will be stumping for Senate candidate and basketball buddy Alexi Giannoulias on Thursday in Chicago, a city where every other person crossing the street seems to have a story about descending on Grant Park that historic night of the 2008 election or proudly watching the president take the oath on television. But nearly two years after Obama took office, while the president remains widely popular in the city, his image has slipped a bit as many people wonder where the promised change and jobs are, even...

Three years ago, Bryant Park Hotel doorman Greg Smith, 46, once a diehard supporter of the Clintons, put his life on hold to cam paign for Barack Obama. Shortly after The Post fea tured Smith's conversion on the front page in April 2007, Obama called the doorman and asked him to introduce him on the cam paign trail. Now, 18 months after Obama's inaugura tion, Smith says he's losing hope for the change he once believed in. He tells ANNIE KARNI his story.

"I'm one of your middle class Americans. And quite frankly, I'm exhausted. Exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for," a woman told President Obama at a town hall.

Nearly two years ago, the political world could only marvel at the breadth of voter support for Barack Obama. The new president had won over voters once thought to have abandoned his party for good. He'd found new reservoirs of support among groups many thought were tapped out. He energized a coalition — made up of blacks, women, Latinos, young voters and large numbers of suburbanites — that some believed would keep Democrats in power for years to come. A scant 20 months later, the Obama coalition is frayed and frazzled. A majority of those who voted for Obama still...

CAROLINE KENNEDY is so ticked off at the OBAMAs she coldly snubbed them during the family's recent vacation to Martha's Vineyard, sources tell The ENQUIRER. After working hard to elect President Obama, Caroline was widely expected to host the first family at her sprawling Red Gate Farm on the island, as the Kennedys did the Clintons when they were in the White House. Instead, when the Obamas recently relaxed on Martha's Vineyard, they ended up renting the same place as last year, Blue Heron Farm in the town of Chilmark. Caroline's blatant cold-shoulder treatment is evidence of the bad blood...

As college students prepare to enter a threadbare workforce, some are learning what outsiders have long suspected: Their professors were wrong. “The college vote is up for grabs this year — to an extent that would have seemed unlikely two years ago, when a generation of young people seemed to swoon over Barack Obama,” Kirk Johnson reports in The New York Times. “Though many students are liberals on social issues, the economic reality of a weak job market has taken a toll on their loyalties: far fewer 18- to 29-year-olds now identify themselves as Democrats compared with 2008.” “Is the...

Charlotte, N.C. A few months ago, I sat with some friends in a pizza place in Chapel Hill, N.C., engaged in my own version of a “beer summit.” A successful Connecticut entrepreneur, a Wall Street executive, and a retired senior bank officer pummeled me with questions about my support of President Obama. Politically outnumbered, I ended up playing defense most of the night. I get myself into these situations because my conversion from moderate, middle-aged, Southern conservative to Obama campaign foot soldier got splashed all over the Web after an opinion piece I wrote for the Monitor went viral and...

Notice the picture the NY Times is painting of this week’s primary results? Republican insurgents from the far right did well in Tuesday’s primaries. What their campaigns lack in logic, compassion and sensible policy seems to be counterbalanced by a fiercely committed voter base… This is an attack on voters thinly disguised as a critique of candidates: Much of the G.O.P’s fervid populist energy has been churned up by playing on some people’s fears of Hispanics and Muslims, by painting the president as a dangerous radical, by distorting the truth about the causes of the recession. Far too many Republican...

“We are still fighting two increasingly trying wars overseas, witnessing terrifying new levels of creativity from would-be terrorists (underwear bombs, etc.), mopping up a greasy mess in the Gulf of Mexico and trying to right an economy that seems insistent on remaining off the rails. And the so-called leader of the free world thinks the best use of his time is to yuk it up with Whoopi Goldberg." — S.E. Cupp, New York Daily News, July 28 America is in dire straits. Unemployment stands at 9.5 percent (and a staggering 34.5 percent for young black men), with more than 15...

Honest to goodness, the man just does not get it. He might be forced to pull a Palin and resign before his first term is over. He could go off and write his memoirs and build his presidential library. (Both would be half-size, of course.) I am not saying Obama is not smart; he is as smart as a whip. I am just saying he does not understand what savvy first-term presidents need to understand: You have to stay on message, follow the polls, listen to your advisers (who are writing the message and taking the polls) and realize that...

All signs point to major losses for the Democratic party in the US midterm elections this November. The recovery is slowing, while recent job figures have all but ended hopes that unemployment will fall fast enough to change voter’s minds. But for President Barack Obama it really does not matter whether his party loses its congressional majority, or merely a large number of seat sitters. In either case, the days of single-party government in Washington will be over. To see why a reverse looms, look at the trends that worry Democrats. Their edge in party identification has narrowed sharply. To...

WASHINGTON – Independents who embraced President Barack Obama's call for change in 2008 are ready for a shift again, and that's worrisome news for Democrats. Only 32 percent of those citing no allegiance to either major party say they want Democrats to keep control of Congress in this November's elections, according to combined results of recent Associated Press-GfK polls. That's way down from the 52 percent of independents who backed Obama over Republican Sen. John McCain two years ago, and the 49 percent to 41 percent edge by which they preferred Democratic candidates for the House in that election, according...

It’s been one year since the United States government threw some jumper cables onto slumping auto sales with the trade-in program known as Cash for Clunkers. However, as time passed, some car agreements made by consumers under the government incentive program has bred some buyers remorse of late. According to LeaseTrader.com, droves of Cash for Clunkers-inspired vehicle lessees (who is said to account for 1 in 5 total vehicle sales during the incentive’s period) are actively seeking rescue from their contracts. In lease agreements required to be a minimum of five years, a degree of these commitments have fallen under...

Thousands of people who leased cars last year as part of the Cash for Clunkers program are having second thoughts and are trying to get out of their leases, reports LeaseTrader.com. The program provided up to a $4,500 rebate if a person signed at least a five-year lease for their car. A year later, that money has long been spent and people realize they are stuck with the car for four more years, says John Sternal, LeaseTrader.com spokesman. "I think it's Cash for Clunkers remorse," Sternal says, whose company helps hook up people who want to trade out of their...

It was a year ago this month that President Barack Obama began losing voters. In the 12 months since, he has had legislative victories that appear – especially in the case of health care – to have cost him large amounts of both political capital and political support. A comparison of the public’s views of him then and now tells us a great deal about the shape of American politics and how difficult it is for any president, even one as politically gifted as Barack Obama, to surmount the nation’s deep political and ideological divisions. [Snip] On Election Day 2008,...

This guy is probably making a fortune off all the Obama suckers from the last election. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=201pgTaEseQ&feature=popular

Nearly 60 percent of American voters say they lack faith in President Barack Obama, according to a public opinion poll published on Tuesday. Asked how much confidence they have in Obama to make the right decisions for the country's future, 58 percent of respondents said "just some" or "none." The poll of 1,288 people was conducted July 7-11

For two years as a presidential candidate, Barack Obama addressed educators gathered for the summer conventions of the two national teachers’ unions, and last year both groups rolled out the welcome mat for Education Secretary Arne Duncan. But in a sign of the Obama administration’s strained relations with two of its most powerful political allies, no federal official was scheduled to speak at either convention this month, partly because union officials feared that administration speakers would face heckling. The largest union’s meeting opened here on Saturday to a drumbeat of heated rhetoric, with several speakers calling for Mr. Duncan’s resignation,...

It’s more than two years ahead of the 2012 presidential vote, but a new Zogby International survey conducted for The O’Leary Report has found a clear majority of independents think it’s time for somebody new in the Oval office. The Zogby survey was conducted June 25-28 with interviews of 2,061 registered voters. The survey has a 2.2 percent margin of error. When asked if they think President Obama should be re-elected or is it time for somebody new in the White House, 50 percent of the respondents overall said they want somebody else as chief executive. Obama should get a...

I believe it was Jean Giraudoux who first said, "Only the mediocre are always at their best." Barack Obama was supposed to be the best, the very best, and yet he is always, reliably, consistently mediocre. His speech on oil was no better or worse than his speech on race. Yet the Obammyboppers who once squealed with delight are weary of last year's boy band. At the end of the big Oval Office address, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews and the rest of the MSNBC gang jeered the president. For a bewildered Obama, it must have felt like his Ceausescu balcony...

President Obama’s relationship with America, like many a young marriage, is growing sour. That’s my surmise after reviewing recent polling and watching the carping that followed his Oval Office speech (which I thought was just fine, by the way). It is becoming increasingly apparent that the magic has drained away. Even among his most ardent supporters, there now exists a certain frustration and disillusionment — not necessarily in the execution of his duties, but in his inability to seize moments, chart a course and navigate the choppy waters of public opinion. What’s left for many is a big plume of...

The purpose of this website is to tell America that former Obama supporters are no longer proud of their decision. We want everyone to contribute a story of themselves or about someone they know that tells America that they are sorry they voted for Obama.

I wanted to see what the DU folks had to say about Obama's speech tonight. Apparently, threads are being locked and pulled. I did find one interesting thread that shows that even the DU members' confidence in Obama is wavering. I tried to edit for language somewhat. Here are some exerpts: "When it comes to Obama speeches anymore, I'm like Gary Larson's dog...Blah, blah, blah Ginger blah, blah, blah Ginger blah, blah, blah..." "I was underwhelmed watching it on Olberman just now and agree with most of what Olberman and the commentators are saying, unfortunately." "Un f...ing believable! I am...

I Admit It: I Was Wrong To Have Supported Barack Obama Daniel Hannan June 14th, 2010 There’s little point, I know, in reminding readers that my support for Barack Obama was qualified; that I simultaneously endorsed GOP Congressional candidates; that I never saw Obama as a messiah and, indeed, was repelled by the millenarian fervour of his supporters. Nor is there much purpose in rehearsing John McCain’s shortcomings. The fact remains that I backed the Democrat. I was wrong. Not that Obama is without his good points, obviously. His commitment to school choice is unfeigned. His foreign policy has been...

In three and a half years of blogging, this has been my single most unpopular post. There’s little point, I know, in reminding readers that my support for Barack Obama was qualified; that I simultaneously endorsed GOP Congressional candidates; that I never saw Obama as a messiah and, indeed, was repelled by the millenarian fervour of his supporters. Nor is there much purpose in rehearsing John McCain’s shortcomings. The fact remains that I backed the Democrat. I was wrong... All these things are minor irritants compared to the way the Obama administration is backing Peronist Argentina’s claim to the Falkland...

Fairey, , "Some of the works are about gridlock in Washington. Washington is too intertwined with corporate America . . . I had a lot of hope for Obama, but it's not panning out. He's not pushing hard enough."