A presidential campaign exposes candidates' strengths and weaknesses. The strengths they're eager to tell you about. So let's look at the weaknesses.
Start with Rick Santorum, whose poll numbers in New Hampshire and South Carolina have been surging since (by last count) he lost the Iowa caucuses by the Chinese lucky number of 8 votes.
Read More
Elections are contests held during a moment in time between candidates who have records stretching back, often far back, into the past. So there is always a tension between the man (or woman) who is running and the moment.
That tension is greater than usual when the contest is for the nomination of a political party dominated by a large number of newcomers to politics motivated by strong opposition to current policies.
Read More
Election year has finally arrived, well after the beginning of a turbulent and unpredictable elections season, and voting begins two days from now in the Iowa Republicans caucuses.
The few days of post-Christmas polling have shown the numbers oscillating and opinion changing in ways it hadn't been earlier in the campaign.
Read More
In a blogpost today my Examiner colleague Tim Carney notes the opposition of defense hawks David Frum and Bill Kristol to the budget deal and predicts that “defense cuts could cause serious divisions on the Right.” Which prompts the question, where do the Republican presidential candidates stand?
Read More
In my Sunday Examiner column I noted that the national debt currently amounts to 62 percent of gross domestic product and I cited Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart’s book This Time Is Different for the proposition that economic growth is impaired when debt reaches 90 percent of gross domestic product.
Read More
Immigration from Mexico to the United States has slowed down toward zero: that’s the thrust of an excellent story by Damien Cave in the New York Times (complete with excellent interactive graphics).
Read More
I've got a column in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) on how liberals want to go back to what I call the Midcentury Moment, the more conformist and egalitarian America of the 1940s and 1950s and early 1960s, and why we can't get there. I've touched on these themes in the Examiner, but not in the same way.
Read More
Nate Silver has an excellent post on his New York Times blog, explaining that Barack Obama’s approval rating have been running unusually high as compared to people’s assessments of how things are going in the country. He thinks this effect will be reduced somewhat by November 2012, but that it will still be a factor.
Read More
“Unexpectedly,” as I noted in my Sunday Examiner column, is a word that often appears in mainstream media accounts of negative economic developments. Or “unexpected” or even “a real surprise.” Glenn Reynolds, the eagle-eyed Instapundit, has spotted yet another example.
Read More
Pajamas TV doesn't offer embed codes or let you watch video without registering your email address, but if you are a PJTV member or don't mind taking a second to sign up, click here to watch Michael Barone give a rundown on the 2012 election.
In Barone's view, there isn't a frontrunner in the GOP 2012 presidential primaries and any effort to paint Mitt Romney as a frontrunner is ridiculous.
Read More
URL: http://www.sfexaminer.com/taxonomy/term/3040?quicktabs_6=0
