Free Republic

Andrew Romano takes apart the supposed “Obamacan” movement of Republicans who support Barack Obama for President. As Romano notes in Newsweek, the appearance of Lincoln Chaffee — who is no longer a Republican anyway — and a couple of previously-committed endorsers yesterday doesn’t exactly make a movement. In checking the polls, the actual motion comes from the other direction: But are there enough rank-and-file Republicans whispering their support at Obama rallies to actually make a difference on Election Day? As I discovered from examination the last 18 months of head-to-head general election polls, the answer is an emphatic “no.” In...

Barack Obama's campaign is rolling out a number of centrist Republicans who are endorsing the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee over Republican rival John McCain - in a show of his ability to win cross-over votes. A conference call Tuesday featured former Iowa Rep. Jim Leach, former White House intelligence adviser Rita Hauser and former Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee, who represented his state as a Republican, but switched to become a Democrat so he could vote for Obama in the primary. Leach predicted that a lot of Republicans and independents are going to be attracted by Obama's campaign. The Obama...

God, Republicans are saps. They think that they’re running against some academic liberal who wouldn’t wear flag pins on his lapel, whose wife isn’t proud of America and who went to some liberationist church where the pastor damned his own country. They think they’re running against some naïve university-town dreamer, the second coming of Adlai Stevenson. But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce...

Senator Obama has announced that he intends to create a Council For Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Having been privileged to give some advance guidance for this worthy idea, it is exciting to watch it become part of the public record. An old idea talked about by George W. Bush and even "his thousand points of light" father? Well, yes, talked about; but by the writing of Bush's own staff, regrettably, not done. Obama says he's different and this will be a "critical part of his administration." The proof will be in the doing, of course, but this much is plain:...

Abortion has been dividing the culture, including political parties for over 30 years now. In its last several iterations with the Clintons, Al Gore, and John Kerry, the Democratic party platform has been rather decidedly one-sided.Roe v. Wade is to be affirmed and defended. End of story. Oh yes, there was the language of "safe, legal and rare," but the emphasis was always on 'safe and legal,' with 'rare' little more than an afterthought. Barack Obama is a different type of candidate. As he sees it, Roe is not an endorsement of abortion, so much as an affirmation that abortion...

I suppose I have to accept the insanity that some glassy-eyed Republicans are considering voting for Barack Obama, but I don't have to like it. Whether or not this is an example of the liberal media trying to create rather than report news, The New York Times is reporting that small enclaves of Republicans are meeting around the country to discuss their support for Obama. Let's call them "support groups." One such support group in Indiana is calling its attendees "whispering Republicans." Fittingly, these renegades, as the Times called them, met over iced tea and brownies, as if to signify...

Chuck Lasker, a political blogger and Internet consultant in Indiana, hosted a gathering last week of 20 people he calls "whispering Republicans" - party members like him who support Senator Barack Obama, a Democrat, for president. Over iced tea and brownies, the renegades took turns explaining why they liked Mr. Obama and recalling the strange stares from other Republicans. In recent weeks, Obama aides have met with Republican leaders in crucial states to strategize about wooing undecided voters. ... Mr. Obama is hardly a perfect candidate for Republicans. ... And the idea of a Barack Obama-Nancy Pelosi-Harry Reid triumvirate, should...

If anyone could lay claim totheir state's Republican Party, it's Deborah Burstion-Donbraye of Cleveland. The 53-year-old international business consultant is the former outreach director for the Ohio Republican Party, for starters. She helped deliver the swing state to President Bush in his 2004 re-election bid in which he garnered 16 percent of the black vote. Among her Republican credentials, Mrs. Burstion-Donbraye worked in several high-level positions during the Reagan and Bush administrations of the late 1980s and was the press secretary for George W. Bush's Texas gubernatorial campaign in 1994. In the 1980s, she was an assistant national desk editor...

Almost anything can happen in an election year, but among conservatives, almost everyone seems to agree that no matter who captures the White House in November, the movement that has ruled the Republican Party since the 1960s and mostly dominated American politics since 1980 has lost its way. Across the spectrum of the right, writers and thinkers have turned their relentless analysis inward, a kind of political EST seminar aimed at self-transformation.

President McCain in 2000 I must be one of the few conservative writers in cyberspace who never feared a McCain presidency. When Senator McCain looked like he might win the Republican nomination in 2000, I asked what, exactly, my friends were so worried about. McCain was honest, like Bush, while Clinton and Gore were steeped in moral slipperiness. McCain was pro-life, like Bush, while Clinton and Gore were pro-abortion. McCain, like Bush, supported a strong military, while Clinton famously “loathed” the military and Gore followed him like a trained poodle. McCain’s ACU (American Conservative Union) voting record is conservative and...

The Democrats and the GOP have not given voters a substantive choice for president in November. Barack Obama trumpets “change.” John McCain trumpets “maverick.” Yet they both stand for the Beltway establishment, the status quo and the further centralization of power in the presidency.

The judiciary is becoming an important election issue. John McCain is warning conservatives that control of today's finely balanced Supreme Court depends on his election. Unfortunately, his jurisprudence is likely to be anything but conservative. The idea of a "living Constitution" long has been popular on the political left. Conservatives routinely dismiss such result-oriented justice, denouncing "judicial activism" and proclaiming their fidelity to "original intent." However, many Republicans, like Mr. McCain, are just as result-oriented as their Democratic opponents. They only disagree over the result desired. Judge-made rights are wrong because there is no constitutional warrant behind them. The Constitution...

Despite worsening economic conditions and a news backdrop that supposedly favors Democrats, presumed Republican standard-bearer John McCain remains only 3 points behind rival Barack Obama in the latest IBD/TIPP Poll. But the poll also shows McCain isn't pulling as well as expected from the independents and moderates to whom his "maverick" reputation was thought to appeal. He also has yet to close the sale with his party's conservative base. Compared with the 78% support that McCain has with Republicans in general, conservatives back him by 67%, with 17% still undecided. Obama polls 13% among conservatives. In sharp contrast, liberals favor...

A number of friends of mine have commented on an odd phenomenon that they have observed-- conservative Republicans they know who are saying that they are going to vote for Barack Obama. It seemed at first to be an isolated fluke, perhaps signifying only that my friends know some strange conservatives. But apparently columnist Robert Novak has encountered the same phenomenon and has coined the term "Obamacons" to describe the conservatives for Senator Obama. Now the San Francisco Chronicle has run a feature article, titled "Some Influential Conservatives Spurn GOP and Endorse Obama." In it they quote various conservatives on...

A number of friends of mine have commented on an odd phenomenon that they have observed — conservative Republicans they know who are saying that they are going to vote for Barack Obama. It seemed at first to be an isolated fluke, perhaps signifying only that my friends know some strange conservatives. But apparently columnist Robert Novak has encountered the same phenomenon and has coined the term "Obamacons" to describe the conservatives for Senator Obama. Now the San Francisco Chronicle has run a feature article, titled "Some Influential Conservatives Spurn GOP and Endorse Obama." In it they quote various conservatives...

Recent comments by well-known black Republicans J.C. Watts and Armstrong Williams that they're conflicted about the upcoming presidential elections and are contemplating voting for Barack Obama have sent shock waves through the Republican Party. I'm hearing many black Republicans echoing similar sentiments. They say that because of the historical significance of casting a vote for the first legitimate black presidential candidate, they may cross party lines. These statements don't surprise me.

By Nina May (AXcess News) - In the mid 1980's I debated Gloria Steinhem on the Phil Donahue show, during the presidential campaign where Geraldine Ferraro was the first woman Vice Presidential candidate. The assumption by feminists, like Gloria, was that all women should vote for Geraldine because she was a woman. I asked her if she would be supporting Phyllis Schlafly if she were the candidate instead of Geraldine, and if she would be offended if I made that same assumption. When Allen Keyes was running for president, as probably one of the most brilliant candidates we have ever...

The "Obamacans" that Sen. Barack Obama used to joke about - Republican apostates who whispered their support for his candidacy - have morphed into a new phenomenon, or syndrome, as detractors like to call it: the Obamacons. These are conservatives who have publicly endorsed the presumptive Democratic nominee, dissidents from the brain trust of think tanks, ex-officials and policy magazines that have fueled the Republican Party since the 1960s. Scratch the surface of this elite, and one finds a profound dismay that is far more damaging to the GOP than the usual 10 percent of registered Republicans expected to switch...

Peggy sent me this. Emily Nordling has never met a Muslim, at least not to her knowledge. But this spring, Ms. Nordling, a 19-year-old student from Fort Thomas, Ky., gave herself a new middle name on Facebook.com, mimicking her boyfriend and shocking her father. “Emily Hussein Nordling,” her entry now reads. "I mean, like, isn't that, you know, like, just you know like the coolest thing like in the world?" Or sumpin' like that. With her decision, she joined a growing band of supporters of Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who are expressing solidarity with him by...

What is an "Obamacon?" The phrase surfaced in January to describe British conservatives entranced by Barack Obama. On March 13 the American Spectator broadened the term to cover all "conservative supporters" of the Democratic presidential candidate. Their ranks, though growing, feature few famous people. But looming on the horizon are two big potential Obamacons: Colin Powell and Chuck Hagel.