Mitt Romney is a clever and talented man. But, as was evident in the most recent Republican debate, he should not become our next president. Eight of 10 Americans say the country is on the wrong track. We must consider clearly what kind of individual we need as president to take on the prodigious challenges facing us to get back on track. We need a leader prepared to tell the American people what they don’t want to hear. We need a leader obsessed with truth, not focus groups. We need a leader whose passion is not becoming president but saving America. Read More

Welfare reform — the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act — was the most sweeping reform signed into law during Newt Gingrich’s time as House Speaker. The landmark bill transformed welfare from entitlement to temporary safety net. Instead of welfare being available forever to any individual who met qualifying criteria, it was transformed to a time-limited assistance program in which individuals had to also demonstrate their efforts to get to work. Read More

It might help getting our minds around what is so wrong in America today by thinking about the local police force. It’s not hard to understand that the job of the police is to protect lives and property. Suppose we decided to broaden their mandate. Suppose each municipality decided that the job of the police was not just protection but to make every community more fair and just and to improve the quality of life. To do this, we’d have to let them decide what is fair and just and give them authority to implement their sense of these things. Read More

What’s the Republican takeaway from President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address? That they should be unwavering opposition to an unconditional increase in the U.S. debt limit. The statutory debt ceiling of $14.3 trillion will soon be reached. Republicans should oppose increasing it to permit more borrowing without meaningful spending cuts as part of the deal. Read More

When Barack Obama was sworn in as president, he chose the Bible that Abraham Lincoln used to take the oath of office. A little more than a year later, as Obama strong-arms House and Senate Democrats to pass a health care bill that will nationalize 17 percent of our economic lives, we ought to recall Lincoln’s famous words at Gettysburg. Dedicating the final resting place for those who fought there, Lincoln appealed that we not let up in the struggle for “government of the people, by the people and for the people.” Read More

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said recently, “Our K-12 agenda can be summed up in one word: reform.” Would that it were true. But what Duncan calls reform is indeed putting lipstick on a pig. In this case, the pig is Washington, D.C.’s never-changing formula for solving everything: spending ever-increasing sums of taxpayer money. “Reform” means generating new ideas about how to spend and coming up with clever new titles for programs. Read More