Free Republic

MANCHESTER, N.H. - As it played out on TV this week, Sarah Palin’s “One Nation” road trip of U.S. historical sites was a masterpiece of political mischief-making – a wild dash up the East Coast that delighted her fans and cornered the market on 2012 coverage for days on end. That’s not how the bus tour looked to Republicans on the ground, many of whom are more convinced than ever that the former Alaska governor is simply not serious about running for president. While Palin has reveled in giving an extended one-fingered salute to the national press, refusing to give...

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...

One prominent Republican calls on his party to drum Palin out of the 2012 race. Here's why he'll be disappointed. "Morning Joe" Scarborough earned a splash of attention within the politerati this week with a Politico column calling on the Republican Party to "man up" and denounce Sarah Palin. His main point is that Palin is poison for the Grand Old Party: The most-talked-about figure in the GOP is a reality show star who cannot be elected. And yet the same leaders who fret that Sarah Palin could devastate their party in 2012 are too scared to say in public...

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...

REHOBOTH BEACH, Del.— Soon after Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski lost her August primary and became the latest casualty of the tea party’s assault on the GOP establishment, she placed a call to Rep. Mike Castle, another Republican Party favorite facing an insurgent challenger. Her message? “They'll come at you hard, so just be prepared," Castle told POLITICO. Murkowski’s warning proved prescient and her experience instructive. While her defeat at the hands of tea party-backed challenger Joe Miller reverberated across the country, nowhere did it have more impact than in tiny Delaware, where Castle once looked to be a runaway winner...

Sarah Palin is often cast as a reincarnation of Pat Buchanan, who tapped into the nationalist, even nativist, sentiment that's always been a strand of American political life. But in one important respect, as Josh Rogin points out today, Palin is the anti-Buchanan: She's emerged as the spokeswoman for a hawkish, confrontational, Cheneyite foreign policy that would make Buchanan shudder. She just posted a rather long foreign policy speech to Facebook, and it's worth a read. And she's fighting an important battle inside the loosely organized conservative grass roots to head off calls from some tea party types and fiscal...

The tea party movement exploded onto the political scene in 2009 as a backlash to the agenda pushed by President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats, but a little more than a year later, a POLITICO survey found tea party activists unhappy with many of the biggest names in the Republican Party. And that could complicate GOP plans to harness the energy of the tea parties as they head into the November midterm elections with hopes of rearranging the balance of power in Washington. In a survey of more than three dozen grass-roots tea party leaders from 29 states, the party’s...

After months of struggling to harness the energy of newly engaged tea party activists, the conservative establishment — with critical midterm congressional elections on the horizon — is taking aim for the first time at the movement’s extremist elements. The move has been cast by some conservatives as a modern version of the marginalization of the far-right, anti-communist John Birch Society during the reorganization of the conservative movement spearheaded by William F. Buckley Jr. in the 1960s and 1970s. “A similar effort will be required today of conservative political and intellectual leaders,” former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson wrote in his column in...

Why Cheney attacks By: Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei February 13, 2010 03:09 PM EST Former Vice President Cheney will appear on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday, and it’s a safe bet what he will say: President Barack Obama projects weakness to terrorists and puts American lives at risk. It’s the kind of brutal charge — nuance-free and politically explosive — that has become a Cheney specialty since he left office 13 months ago. Cheney’s broadsides on Afghanistan policy, detention and surveillance policies, and Obama’s general philosophy about the U.S. role in a dangerous world inevitably dominate the news. No...