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Haven't We Heard This Before? Obama's Shopworn State of the Union Speech. BY FRED BARNES January 28 Haven’t we heard that speech before, practically every word of it? Maybe it was a year ago when President Obama first addressed Congress. Maybe it was during the campaign. Maybe it was at one of those town halls? Maybe Obama can’t help himself. His speeches just insist on sounding the same. In any case, Obama delivered the least fresh State of the Union address I’ve ever heard, and I’ve more than 30 of them. It was filled with old ideas, campaign cliches, and...

In the new movie The Young Victoria, the mother of Victoria and her chief overseer meet with the prime minister, Lord Melbourne, to discuss what role they’ll play now that Victoria has become queen of England. They’ve waged a fierce struggle to retain control over Victoria. Suddenly Melbourne cuts off the chatter and bluntly explains the situation. “You lost,” he says. That’s the situation that faces President Obama and his White House advisers. Months of polls on the president and his policies, the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s elections, then last week’s momentous Massachusetts Senate race – all have sent...

Pants on the ground.

Republican takeover of the Senate is no longer impossible in 2010. If Scott Brown wins in the special election Tuesday for the Senate in Massachusetts, it would mean Republicans would have to net 10 seats to take control. If he loses, 11 would be needed. Either way, polls in state after state show Republicans have a shot of either capturing the Senate outright or gaining enough seats to be able to block liberal initiatives by denying Democrats the votes to halt filibusters.

President Obama is a slow learner. For all his brainpower, he’s saddled himself with three ideas about the economy and job creation that aren’t working, either substantively or politically. And he appears to be too ideologically rigid or stubborn to consider the evidence and jettison the failed ideas. Instead, he puts himself in embarrassing situations. On the day the Labor Department announced the unemployment rate was stuck at 10 percent and 85,000 jobs had been lost in December, Obama insisted he continues “to explore every avenue to accelerate the return to hiring.” So what did he propose? Tax credits totaling...

The good news for Republicans in 2010 is they’re ahead in 6 races for Senate seats now held by Democrats and lead or are tied in 6 open seats where Republicans are retiring. In the House, Republicans figure to win a minimum of 20 seats, as things now stand. They’re a good bet to have a majority of the nation’s governors after the midterm elections in November. The bad news? There is no bad news. Okay, the stream of good news is occasionally interrupted. In Connecticut, Democratic senator Chris Dodd, of Countrywide sweetheart mortgage fame, is retiring rather than face...

The title of the legislation is innocent enough: the Free Flow of Information Act. The motivation behind it is a seemingly worthy one. It would give anyone in the media a shield--special protection--against being forced to reveal the names of confidential sources of information. And the result would be more and more information flowing freely to the American people, satisfying their right to know. ... You may wonder why Congress is bothering to create a media privilege in federal cases at this time. It's not as if critical, top secret information isn't flowing to the media at a record pace....

... Washington is more partisan than ever, and more polarized. Even on a purely procedural vote to begin Senate debate on health-care reform this past Saturday, every Democrat voted one way (yes), every Republican the other (no). With rare exception and with no objection from the president, Democrats draft bills with no input from Republicans. In return, Republicans vote in lockstep against Democratic legislation. Every House Republican voted against the stimulus, all but one against liberal health-care reform, and all but eight against cap-and-trade legislation that passed the House earlier this year. Why has the president's publicly expressed vision of...

... Obama has his own theory of our current economic situation. His "first job," he told Chuck Todd of NBC News, was to stave off another "Great Depression," save government jobs (police, firefighters, teachers), and "make sure certain sectors of the economy were supported," such as "construction and infrastructure." "We've gotten that job done," he said. "Our next job is to make sure we can accelerate the job growth," he said. "So what we're seeing now is businesses are starting to invest again, they are starting to be profitable again, but they haven't started hiring again." What's the matter with...

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...