Free Republic

Fred Barnes: It's like Jimmy Carter never left town By: Fred Barnes OpEd ContributorNovember 9, 2009 Republican conservatives and moderates are at each other's throats. Tea party populists are furious at President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and aren't crazy about Republicans either. Democrats haven't got a clue. There's talk of a third party. The economy is stagnant as unemployment, now 10.2 percent, climbs. It's beginning to look like the late 1970s.This is good news for Republicans -- extremely good news. Today's struggles between conservatives and moderates are mere skirmishes compared with the titanic intraparty battle touched off by...

Creigh Deeds, the Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia, has a Barack Obama problem. Obama won Virginia in last year's presidential race -- the first Democrat to do so in 44 years -- but his popularity in the state has plunged since then. Deeds is conflicted. Asked if he was an "Obama Democrat," Deeds said he was a "Creigh Deeds Democrat," whatever that is. And he's skipped two of three Obama appearances in Virginia during the campaign season. His campaign is sputtering, he trails Republican Bob McDonnell by 7 points or more in every poll, and the Democratic base is...

Give President Obama credit for persistence. And stubbornness. And lack of imagination. He declared again last week that his health care plan "will slow the growth of health care costs for our families and our businesses and our government." And this historic achievement will be accompanied by a dazzling array of new medical benefits that everyone will receive--guaranteed by law. Okay, you've heard this before. But that's the president's story, and he's sticking to it. The question is, why? Does he think we're stupid? His argument has failed to persuade a sizeable majority of the American people precisely because they're...

Virginia has been kind to Democrats as of late. Eight years ago, Democrat Mark Warner captured the governor’s mansion. Four years later, his lieutenant governor, Tim Kaine, succeeded him. In 2006, Jim Webb took one of the state’s U.S. Senate seats away from the GOP. Last year, Mr. Warner took the other as Barack Obama became the first presidential candidate of his party to carry the state in 44 years. But now the Democratic tide is ebbing in Virginia. In January Mr. Obama's approval rating was 62%, according to a Survey USA. By August it had fallen to 42%. This...

Last December, weeks before the president took office, House speaker Nancy Pelosi set sharp limits on the role of Obama and his aides on Capitol Hill. A few days later, Democrats ignored the Obama team's desire for a tax credit for small businesses in the "stimulus" bill. It might have attracted Republican support and fulfilled the president's promise to be bipartisan. Post-inauguration, Senate and House Democrats embarrassed the new president by sending him an omnibus spending bill studded with thousands of earmarks. Though he'd criticized earmarks, Obama knuckled under and signed the measure. On the cap-and-trade environmental legislation, House Democrats...

We've always suspected that fear of angering trial lawyers was the only reason President Obama refused to embrace tort reform as a crucial part of achieving his goal of reduced health care costs. Now we know for sure. A moment of candor by Howard Dean, the former chairman of the DNC and an enthusiastic backer of Obama's health reform initiative, confirmed our suspicions. "The reason that tort reform is not in the bill is because the people who wrote it did not want to take on the trial lawyers in addition to everyone else they were taking on," Dean said...

Teddy Kennedy was known as the liberal lion of the US Senate. But in fact, he hadn't roared in decades. Even though his funeral today marks the end of the Kennedy family's political saga, Kennedy liberalism, the brand of Left-wing politics with which the family was identified, died years ago. Kennedy, who served as a senator from the Left-wing state of Massachusetts for 46 years, supported Barack Obama in last year's Democratic primaries in the hope that an Obama presidency would lift Washington to new heights of liberal progress, as Franklin Roosevelt had during the Depression and John Kennedy and...

Republicans are discovering just how effective an opposition party can be in Washington. Their strategy is simply to aggressively and relentlessly oppose the liberal agenda of the president and the Democratic Congress. As a result, Barack Obama's agenda is in jeopardy, and the president is disconcerted, less popular and on the defensive

Republicans are discovering just how effective an opposition party can be in Washington. Their strategy is simply to aggressively and relentlessly oppose the liberal agenda of the president and the Democratic Congress. As a result, Barack Obama's agenda is in jeopardy, and the president is disconcerted, less popular and on the defensive. Republican opposition isn't the only reason for this. Mr. Obama did himself no favors by pushing policies far more liberal than voters wanted. But the decision by Republicans to be combative rather than accommodating has played an indispensable role.

Between July 20 and July 30, President Obama was a busy man, barely out of the public eye while campaigning furiously for his health care initiative. He did four town hall events, spoke at two hospitals, delivered a radio address, was interviewed on two network TV news shows, and held a prime time press conference--all devoted to promoting his health care plan. On this issue as on no other, Obama personally took his case to the people. Something else occurred during that time frame. The president's job approval rating fell 9 points, from 61 percent to 52 percent in the...

Watch out for Plan B. It's President Obama's fallback position on health care reform. It's Obamacare without the most controversial part, the creation of a government-run, "public" health insurance plan open to all comers at cut rate. And Plan B is something that Obama and the health insurance lobby both agree on. Plan B is no day at the beach for health insurers. By imposing an exhaustive array of regulations and installing a powerful national health commissioner, it would turn health insurers into public utilities. They'd be assured a small profit, but competition among insurers would be gone and bureaucrats...

Is President Obama an economic illiterate? Harsh as that sounds, there's growing evidence he understands little about economics and even less about economic growth or job creation. Yet, as we saw at last week's presidential press conference, he's undeterred from holding forth, with seeming confidence, on economic issues.

Is President Obama an economic illiterate? Harsh as that sounds, there's growing evidence he understands little about economics and even less about economic growth or job creation. Yet, as we saw at last week's presidential press conference, he's undeterred from holding forth, with seeming confidence, on economic issues. Obama professes to believe in free market economics. But no one expects his policies to reflect the unfettered capitalism of a Milton Friedman. That's too much to ask. Demonstrating a passing acquaintance with free market ideas and how they might be used to fight the recession--that's not too much to ask. But...

First President Bush, then President Obama poured billions into General Motors and Chrysler to keep the companies alive but barely breathing. That was just for starters. Next came Obama's creation of an Auto Task Force to oversee the auto companies. To head the task force, the president picked Steve Rattner, a Wall Street investor with no experience in automaking but lots in raising campaign money for Obama and Democrats. GM and Chrysler were quickly restructured, mostly to the benefit of the United Auto Workers, the union which spent millions in 2008 to elect Obama and Democrats. The UAW now owns...

Forget about Sarah Palin as the Republican presidential candidate in 2012 and probably ever. She may have no interest in seeking the GOP nomination. But if she does, her chances of winning the nomination have been minimized by her decision to resign as governor of Alaska. She's knocked out one of three legs of the presidential stool and a second one is wobbly. I say this reluctantly because Palin, in my view, is the most exciting Republican figure to emerge in decades. She mesmerizes crowds in a way that no other Republican leader can come close to matching. She has...

Rejecting "false choices" is a favorite rhetorical device of President Obama. His speeches are littered with examples. A half-dozen times, he's repudiated "the false choice between our security and our ideals." He's dismissed "the false choice between sound science and moral values." He's not only disposed of "the false choice between securing this nation and wasting billions of taxpayer dollars," he's laid to rest the clash between those who'd "conserve our resources" and those who'd "profit from these natural resources." But confronted by a popular revolt in Iran, Obama has succumbed to a false choice. Either support the democratic forces...

Is President Obama anti-business? The obvious answer is yes. Yet he insists he's a free-market guy who hates "meddling in the private sector" but has been forced to. So in deciding whether he's anti-business, let's be fair and judge Obama by nonideological and nonpartisan standards. I have four criteria: his appointments, his policies, his decisions, and his own words. Democratic presidents are not famous for appointing businessmen, merchants, or entrepreneurs to their cabinet or senior White House staff. These are people who have started or run private businesses, created jobs, met payrolls, and made profits. Thus they might be sensitive...

"As I've often said, in the short term, as we transition to renewable energy," President Obama stated in April, "we can and should increase our domestic production of oil and natural gas... . We still need more oil, we still need more gas. If we've got some here in the United States that we can use, we should find it and do so in an environmentally sustainable way." Does anyone believe Obama was serious about this? Given his practice of misdirection--saying one thing, doing another--no one should have. Now, nearly five months into the Obama presidency, it's clear he didn't...

Let's stipulate that President Obama is a wonderful speaker, vigorous in promoting his policies and even eloquent at times. But there's a problem: He's not persuasive. Obama is effective at marketing himself. His 64 percent job approval (Gallup poll) is a reflection of this. But in building public support for his policies, Obama has been largely unsuccessful. You'd never guess this from the laudatory press coverage of Obama. With every major speech or press conference, the media and a sizable chunk of the political community--including many Republicans--assume Obama has carried the day. Actually, he rarely has. The most striking example...

Like a troubled bank, President Obama is overleveraged. When a bank makes risky loans and many of them default, the bank goes bankrupt (or gets bailed out). When a first-term president adopts risky policies and many of them fail, his prospects for sustained public approval and reelection diminish. ... Most presidents propose two or three risky policies in their first year--risky because there's a significant chance of failure to deliver what's promised. In 1981, President Reagan's policies of deep cuts in taxes and spending and aggressively confronting the Soviet Union were dicey. But the economy rebounded 18 months later and...

Meg Whitman is the most interesting person in American politics and, potentially, a formidable Republican leader at the national level. At age 52 and a year after stepping down as CEO of eBay, she's running for governor of California. Like Ronald Reagan, she's a well-known star from another field--the corporate world in Whitman's case--who has entered California politics at the top and now intends to leapfrog an entire generation of ambitious political strivers. Similarity to Reagan isn't what makes Whitman exceptional. Nor does the possibility she might copy a fellow billionaire, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, and dip into her...

Republican leaders in Congress have created something called the National Council for a New America (NCNA). It describes itself as "not a Republican-only forum" but one that seeks to "engage people in a discussion to meet common challenges and build a stronger country through common-sense ideas." The expectation--mine, anyway--is those ideas will differ from President Obama's in a way that makes Republicans look fairminded and reasonable. The council's first event at a pizza parlor in Arlington, Virginia, did just that. Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush showed up, media coverage was heavy, and the session was deemed a success. Improving the...

It's the end of the road for The Beltway Boys, Fox News Channel's Saturday evening political chat with newsmen Fred Barnes and Mort Kondracke. Whispers hears that the show has run its course. A Fox spokesman confirmed this when contacted for comment. No replacement has been named. Theirs was a fun mix of the week's politics, a peppy version of some of the other Saturday media political reviews. They talked about "hot stories," the week's big events, and sized up personalities in the "Ups and Downs" segment. While it's now off the air, those in the know say that Barnes...

My one rule of politics is that the future is never a straight line projection of the present. Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter's unexpected decision to switch parties and run for re-election in 2010 as a Democrat proves the rule. Mr. Specter often votes for liberal Democratic initiatives and infuriates conservative Republicans. Still, his surprise defection was a crushing setback for the GOP, instantly reducing what limited power Republicans have in the Senate. The GOP's ability to stop liberal legislation is now weakened if not eliminated in some instances. CorbisMr. Specter's jump across the aisle significantly adds to the heavy Republican...

... President Obama is the master of misdirection. His skill in using this tactic is a key to his success as a candidate and to his popularity as president. He is a great salesman, marketing his product--the liberal agenda, plus a few add-ons--in a manner that disguises what he's really up to. ... Misdirection is different. It is meant to deceive. When Obama intervened last week to prop up General Motors, he said he was merely helping the company get through a rough patch. "Let me be clear," he said. "The United States government has no interest or intention of...

You don't have to be an old Washington hand to spot the telltale signs of a presidency and an administration in serious trouble. There's nothing new about these clues. The inability to get their stories straight--that's a hardy perennial of high-level officials caught in the vise of political embarrassment. A president who skips town to avoid the White House press corps and speak directly to the American people--we've sure seen that before. So in a sense the AIG mess has touched off nothing more than business as usual. What goes on in Washington usually comes across as background noise to...

When Barack Obama met with TV anchors at a White House lunch last week, he assured them he likes being president. "And it turns out I'm very good at it," he added. Well, not exactly. What Obama is actually very good at is campaigning. He did it for two years as a presidential candidate, and it's pretty much what he's been doing in the six weeks since he was sworn in. It's working. Despite the bad economy he inherited, the political circumstances, for Obama at least, are favorable. He's popular, as new presidents usually are. He talks about "hard choices"...

Unions spur unemployment, and "there is no question" about it. "High union wages that exceed the competitive market rate are likely to cause job losses in the unionized sector of the economy." That is the unvarnished conclusion of one of the country's most admired economists. From 1970 to 1985, a state with average unionization had a rate of unemployment 1.2 percentage points higher than a state with no unions. This represented "about 60 percent of the increase in normal unemployment" in that period. Okay, a finding from several decades ago may be a bit dated. But the phenomenon of how...

Is the day of the strong, self-reliant American over? Have we turned into a bunch of Euro-weenies looking to government for our every need? A recent Fox News poll makes one wonder. [snip] Along the way, the guys displayed a recent Fox News poll. There was some good news and some very bad news. On the one hand, 76% think Americans are starting to rely too much on government. But when it got down to specifics, way too many Americans think it’s government’s job to do way too many things. The most depressing/disturbing poll result: a majority think it’s the...

What did we learn from the last week's unanimous rejection of the Democratic stimulus package by House Republicans? We learned President Obama, who ardently wooed Republicans, is more charming than he is persuasive. We learned Republicans, though they can't win a vote, can win an argument. We learned the stimulus bill is too big, too porky, and hardly stimulative at all. And we learned Nancy Pelosi, the aggressively partisan House speaker, is by her own admission really and truly "non-partisan." That's a lot of learning from one event at the outset of a new administration. But the stimulus--or "stimulus"--is one...

The Only Thing We Have to Fear . . . is Obama. by Fred Barnes 01/26/2009, Volume 014, Issue 18 Barack Obama is the apostle of hope. But he also arouses the flipside of hope--fear. And while the fear he stirs may turn out to be unfounded, it's not irrational. People don't know who Obama really is or where his ideological center of gravity rests, to the extent it rests anywhere. He was a liberal in the Senate and the campaign, a centrist in the transition, and who knows what he'll be as president. He's elusive. I count four separate...

Barack Obama is the apostle of hope. But he also arouses the flipside of hope--fear. And while the fear he stirs may turn out to be unfounded, it's not irrational. People don't know who Obama really is or where his ideological center of gravity rests, to the extent it rests anywhere. He was a liberal in the Senate and the campaign, a centrist in the transition, and who knows what he'll be as president. He's elusive. I count four separate fears. Whether he's a crypto-Marxist is not one of them. Neither is the absurd fear that he's secretly a Muslim,...

The postmortems on the presidency of George W. Bush are all wrong. The liberal line is that Bush dangerously weakened America's position in the world and rushed to the aid of the rich and powerful as income inequality worsened. That is twaddle. Conservatives--okay, not all of them--have only been a little bit kinder. They give Bush credit for the surge that saved Iraq, but not for much else. He deserves better. His presidency was far more successful than not. And there's an aspect of his decision-making that merits special recognition: his courage. Time and time again, Bush did what other...

Uncorrected transcript provided by Morningside Partners. C-SPAN uses its best efforts to provide accurate transcripts of its programs, but it can not be held liable for mistakes such as omitted words, punctuation, spelling, mistakes that change meaning, etc. ### C-SPAN/Q&A Host: Brian Lamb Guest: Brit Hume July 9, 2008 . . BRIAN LAMB, HOST: Brit Hume, if you had to go in front of a journalism class and define the term ”journalism” today, what would you say? BRIT HUME, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: That’s a big subject today. But I think journalism is in new forms, pretty much what it’s always...

Barack Obama is an awfully good politician but not much of an economist. His model for lifting America out of its economic slump is President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. The trouble with FDR's policy, however, is that it didn't come close to reviving the economy and restoring it to pre-Depression vigor. But FDR did use the New Deal quite successfully in another regard: to build a coalition that kept Democrats in the majority for a half century. The difference between Reagan's and Obama's policies is striking. Reagan stressed private investment. With Obama, as with FDR, it's public investment. Reagan cut...

The Other American Auto Industry Plenty of car makers make a go of it in this country--they're just non-union and not headquartered in Detroit. West Point, Georgia Drew Ferguson IV is a 42-year-old dentist whose family has lived in this town, population 3,300, "since God put us here." To be precise, the family arrived eight generations ago. Ferguson went off to the University of Georgia, then on to dental school, after which he came back to West Point. He and his wife, whom he met in college, have four kids. A year ago, Ferguson was elected mayor. "There's a reason...

I'm so sick of this guy. He needs to get out of Washington and see what ILLLEGAL, not legal, immigrations is doing to our country. I wish Fox would get rid of this jerk who's spent all most his whole life in DC. Every week he's complaining about the "anti-immigrant" faction of the Republican party. Hey Fred, live in CA for a while, visit the schools, visit the emergency rooms, and don't go to a posh rich area, go to a middle class area, and you'll see why we're all so mad.

Barack Obama wants to give the economy a jolt. So far, though, the biggest jolt we've seen is the one the economy has given to Obama. That jolt, in the form of a plummeting stock market, upset Obama's desire for a leisurely transition. It made him virtually America's acting president. Obama is fond of saying-he said it again last week-that the country has only one president at a time, and until January 20 it's George W. Bush. True enough, but financial markets don't look at Washington that way. They focus on the future, and that means Obama. Financial markets demanded...

Fred prediction is McCain.

They just said it is a foregone conclusion that Obama's win ( my paraphrase). Good lord. Thanks guys. They say it would take a 3000 point rise in the stock market to save McCain now. The dems special interest agenda caused this debacle and the GOP takes the fall. Is there no justice? But WHY never any mention of the stinkin' muck and company Obama keeps?

Palin Comes Out Swinging And keeps hope alive for McCain. by Fred Barnes 10/13/2008, Volume 014, Issue 05 Sarah Palin's scintillating success in last week's vice presidential debate with Joe Biden has made her an enormous asset (again) to John McCain's bid for the presidency. Now McCain must decide how to maximize her role in the campaign. Anything short of bringing her front and center makes no sense. McCain was thrilled by her debate performance. "The kind of excitement that she ignites, frankly, I have not seen before in American politics," he told talk radio host Mike Gallagher. Having gambled...

The Thursday, October 2, 2008 "Special Report With Brit Hume" on Fox News discussed the ramifications of not passing the Rescue Bill. Fred Barnes, Executive Editor, the Weekly Standard gave the following stupid response to a question on the House Republican’s resistance to this bailout/pork bill from Host Brit Hume; Brit Hume: “Let me ask you this question, Fred (Barnes). You're none unsympathetic to the conservatives in the House of Representatives, and the noisiest opposition to this measure has come from conservatives in the House. Give me your thoughts on the quality of their arguments.” Fred Barnes: “I think their...

Comeback Sarah Palin changed her image overnight. by Fred Barnes The moment when Sarah Palin knew she was winning last night's debate with her vice presidential opponent Joe Biden came after the subject had turned to nuclear weapons. Palin had talked about nukes as a deterrent and said it was important to keep them out of the hands of dictators who are enemies of America. Then she turned to moderator Gwen Ifill and asked, "Can we talk about Afghanistan real quick?" Afghanistan? The impression Palin had left in television interviews with ABC's Charles Gibson and CBS's Katie Couric was that...

St. Paul - That was easy. Sarah Palin delivered what may have been the most important speech ever by a vice presidential candidate and made it look like she'd been performing on the national political stage for years. And she made John McCain look good for having picked her as his running mate. Yet, as governor of Alaska, Palin had never addressed as large a crowd as she did last night at the Republican convention. She'd never before given a nationally televised speech in prime time. And she'd never had to deal with a situation filled with such political peril...

It seems Barack Obama had a "senior moment" on Wednesday during his trip to Israel regarding which Senate committees he is a member of. On the same day's Special Report with Brit Hume, during the "Fox All Stars" segment, the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes called out Obama for his claim, which the Illinois Senator made while trying to impress Israeli reporters, that he is a member of the Senate Banking Committee, and he took credit for the passage of legislation regarding Iran. Barnes: "[Obama] was trying to brag about how tough he was on the Iranians, and he said his...

Denver Last January, a "confidential" memo from a Democratic political consultant outlined an ambitious scheme for spending $11.7 million in Colorado this year to crush Republicans. The money would come from rich liberal donors in the state and would be spent primarily on defeating Senate candidate Bob Schaffer ($5.1 million) and Representative Marilyn Musgrave ($2.6 million), who are loathed by liberals for sponsoring a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. The overarching aim: Lock in Democratic control of Colorado for years to come. Leaked memos have a way of revealing who's on top and who's not in politics and...

For years now, John McCain has warned of the peril to America in sending $400 billion a year to foreign countries in return for oil. He's been loud and relentless on the subject--and wise. "It's a national security issue," he declared last week at a town hall meeting in New York City. Much of the money goes to countries that "do not like us very much," he noted. That was McCain's understated way of saying the beneficiaries include Iran, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia, countries in which anti-American forces find aid and comfort. So you'd think McCain would favor an unbridled...

Republicans finally have a winning argument on a big issue, and they'd better make the most of it. It starts with high gasoline prices--the single most infuriating issue to voters these days--but doesn't end there. Democrats are not being blamed for causing the price of gasoline to reach $4 a gallon, at least by the public and at least for now. Where Democrats have stumbled embarrassingly is in their campaign to persuade the public that the American oil industry is the chief culprit. A Gallup national poll in May found only 20 percent blame the oil companies for gouging, down...

Out of over 20 debates that Barack Obama has heretofore participated in, he has yet to come away with a decisive victory. John McCain, aiming to capitalize on his political foes weakness, recently challenged Obama to participate in 10 town halls this summer. Fred Barnes argues on The Weekly Standard’s The Blog that Obama’s political cowardice prevents him from accepting McCain’s proposal town hall proposal. Barnes has a point: McCain’s best when he’s spontaneous, while Obama has struggled in such situations...

The story of the Democratic Congress is this: So much to do, so little done. Issues of importance are crying out for attention. The alarms are largely ignored. The list of big issues is long and includes immigration, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, health care and health insurance in general, and energy. It might make sense for Republicans to demand these issues be brought up this year, as President Truman did in 1948 to embarrass the "do nothing 80th Congress." But political stunts seldom work the second time. Besides, these are especially complex issues. There's an alternative, however, that might galvanize...