Free Republic

Last Spring in New Orleans, Jonathan Martin and I picked up a very clear sentiment from Republican activists about Sarah Palin, reporting from the Southern Republican Leadership conference that "the wide admiration for Palin among the rock-ribbed Dixie Republicans gathered in the room wasn't matched by a confidence that she was ready to run." Jeff Zeleny picks up something very similar at the Reagan Library this weekend: Roy Billings, a Reagan admirer and a longtime contributor to the [Young America's Foundation], said he liked Ms. Palin a great deal, but he hoped that she would not run for president in...

Newt Gingrich’s political groups raised more than $4.2 million in the last three months of 2010, bringing the former House speaker’s total to $14.5 million for the year – a sum that far eclipses his potential rivals for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. Gingrich, who has increasingly signaled his desire to enter the race to take on President Barack Obama, raised more last year than the three next most prolific fundraisers eying Republican presidential bids combined – former Govs. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts (whose political committees brought in $6.3 million in 2010), Sarah Palin of Alaska ($3.5 million) and Tim...

Even in Republican Arizona, Barack Obama has a healthy lead over Sarah Palin. With the state swinging away from Democrats, having Palin on the ballot come general election time next year is Obama's best hope of winning the Grand Canyon State, according to a new poll. Democrats have taken Arizona in only one presidential race since 1952. Continue Reading The survey by Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling found Obama topping Palin 49 percent to 41 percent in the state. That's significantly better than he fares against other candidates — Obama trails Mitt Romney by 6 points, Mike Huckabee by 4 points,...

Palin’s putting the safety catch on her references to weapons in the wake of Rep. Giffords's shooting. Continue Reading Her speech last night to the Safari Club in Reno was closed press, but thanks to the Reno Gazette-Journal's David Jacobs putting his ear to a closed door, we’re hearing the former Alaska governor’s new line. Palin dropped the "reload" phrase from her routine, telling the audience of hunters "don't retreat, stand tall" — a shift from her now infamous and well-known "don't retreat, reload" line that played on a loop on cable in the after the Tucson shooting.

Americans responded with overwhelming positivity to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech, two polls conducted after the Tuesday night speech found...

And Politico effectively joins Barack Obama's re-election campaign. Politico's increasingly leftward lean has finally caused it to fall over entirely. The sheer volume of anti-Palin stories over the last week was breathtaking. It's clear that they have targeted Palin. To wit: First they were critical of Palin for not saying anything: Tucson shooting presents 2012 test Their widely divergent reactions — from Tim Pawlenty’s subtle distancing from his beleaguered rival, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin; to her virtual disappearance; to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s feeding of the right-wing base — are telling for what they show about the...

In the span of a single news cycle, Republicans got a jarring reminder of two forces that could prevent them from retaking the presidency in next year. At sunrise in the East on Wednesday, Sarah Palin demonstrated that she has little interest — or capacity — in moving beyond her brand of grievance-based politics. And at sundown in the West, Barack Obama reminded even his critics of his ability to rally disparate Americans around a message of reconciliation. Palin was defiant, making the case in a taped speech she posted online why the nation’s heated political debate should continue unabated...

On a day that political leaders in Washington and Arizona devoted to honoring Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and other victims of Saturday’s mass shooting in Tucson, Sarah Palin proved once again that her bully pulpit is second to none in commanding the attention and passions of the political world. As Democratic and Republican lawmakers filed into the well of the House to offer prayers for the severely wounded Giffords and the six people who were killed, Palin’s eight-minute Facebook video — in which she accuses her opponents of “blood libel” — dominated the national political conversation. The video, released shortly after...

(snip) Dig long enough and just about every Republican has a green skeleton in their closet. Many of them have their last presidential nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, a longtime cap-and-trade enthusiast, to thank for it. (snip) "I support a reasonable cap-and-trade system," [Pawlenty] said. "I think it'd be good for the federal government to take that up rather than have states take it up as clusters of regions." Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, appealed to a New Hampshire audience in October 2007 on moral grounds by saying he backed a cap-and-trade system to reduce greenhouse gases and faulted the...

After making attacks on what she memorably labeled “the lamestream media” one of her signature issues, Sarah Palin has begun to experiment with a new strategy toward the press – engaging it. The former Alaska governor has started cautiously cooperating with some of the same media outlets she and her supporters have accused of unfair and inaccurate coverage they feel has caricatured her as a flaky lightweight – a narrative her team seems determined to rewrite as Palin openly weighs a bid for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. “This is just about getting the press to characterize the governor accurately,”...

Sarah Palin is the un-Obama. That’s why she’s a political force, though she’s way beyond her 15 minutes of fame. That’s also why she’s a contender in 2012. Barack Obama is a prince of the meritocracy. Palin is queen of the north woods. Why does this matter? Because in presidential politics, opposites rule. If voters are unhappy with Obama, Republicans have to offer them the un-Obama. That’s a role Palin fits perfectly. Obama has degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law School. Palin attended four colleges in six years before earning her bachelor’s degree from the University of Idaho. Obama...

Long-simmering tensions within the Republican Party spilled into public view Wednesday as the pragmatic and conservative wings of the GOP blamed each other in blunt terms for the party’s failure to capture the Senate. With tea party-backed candidates going down in Delaware, Colorado and Nevada, depriving Republicans of what would have been a 50-50 Senate, a bloc of prominent senators and operatives said party purists like Sarah Palin and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) had foolishly pushed nominees too conservative to win in politically competitive states. (snip) Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott put it plainly: “We did not nominate our...

Long-simmering tensions within the Republican Party spilled into public view Wednesday as the pragmatic and conservative wings of the GOP blamed each other in blunt terms for the party’s failure to capture the Senate. With tea party-backed candidates going down in Delaware, Colorado and Nevada, depriving Republicans of what would have been a 50-50 Senate, a bloc of prominent senators and operatives said party purists like Sarah Palin and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) had foolishly pushed nominees too conservative to win in politically competitive states. Movement conservatives pointed the finger right back at the establishment, accusing the National Republican Senatorial...

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who will have far-ranging subpoena power in the new Congress as a result of Tuesday’s election, is going out of his way to dispel perceptions that he’s a partisan bombthrower who plans to use his newfound authority to paralyze President Barack Obama’s administration.“I want to prove the pundits wrong. My job is not to bring down the president. My job is to make the president a success,” Issa said on a midnight conference call with reporters, just after House Minority Leader John Boehner’s victory speech. Issa took a restrained view of his likely new post as...

With Sarah Palin denouncing my colleagues for veiling the Republicans who want to stop her in anonymity, POLITICO executive editor Jim VandeHei responds: We have promised since the earliest days of POLITICO to pull back the curtain on how Washington really works and to let readers inside the conversations taking place among the people in power. Sometimes that requires extensive use of anonymous sources. This is what GOP insiders in this city are talking about and their concerns are widely known, if not publicly discussed. None of these Republicans would speak on the record for obvious reasons: they fear the...

Top Republicans in Washington and in the national GOP establishment say the 2010 campaign highlighted an urgent task that they will begin in earnest as soon as the elections are over: Stop Sarah Palin. Interviews with advisers to the main 2012 presidential contenders and with other veteran Republican operatives make clear they see themselves on a common, if uncoordinated, mission of halting the momentum and credibility Palin gained with conservative activists by plunging so aggressively into this year’s midterm campaigns. There is rising expectation among GOP elites that Palin will probably run for president in 2012 and could win the...

Voters will do much more than decide control of Congress next week: They will determine whether the most powerful political figures in Washington are up, out or ousted from their leadership jobs. Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful House speaker in decades, is in serious danger of losing her job, either by Democrats' surrendering the majority or by emerging with a margin too thin to protect her. John Boehner is a cinch to replace her if Republicans win back power — but expectations are running so high, his job could be on the line if they fall short. Harry Reid, a...

I've been assuming for a while that Sarah Palin is fairly likely to run for president, and reasonably likely to get the nomination if she does, and then if the economy is still bad she could win and then the country will crumble and suffer some apocalyptic disaster and the survivors will envy the dead. Anyway, Jonathan Martin has a terrific piece collecting some reporting about the flakiness, bordering on total dysfunctionality, of Palin's political operation. This is a huge relief: Take, for example, the case of Palin’s interaction with the campaign of Sen. Chuck Grassley, an iconic figure in...

The election is two weeks away, but the campaign trail reviews of Sarah Palin already are in, and they aren’t pretty. According to multiple Republican campaign sources, the former Alaska governor wreaks havoc on campaign logistics and planning. She offers little notice about her availability, refuses to do certain events, is obsessive about press coverage and sometimes backs out with as little lead time as she gave in the first place. In short, her seat-of-the-pants operation can be a nightmare to deal with, which, in part, explains why Palin doesn’t often do individual events for GOP hopefuls.

The election is two weeks away, but the campaign trail reviews of Sarah Palin already are in, and they aren’t pretty. According to multiple Republican campaign sources, the former Alaska governor wreaks havoc on campaign logistics and planning. She offers little notice about her availability, refuses to do certain events, is obsessive about press coverage and sometimes backs out with as little lead time as she gave in the first place. In short, her seat-of-the-pants operation can be a nightmare to deal with, which, in part, explains why Palin doesn’t often do individual events for GOP hopefuls. It’s not that...