Juice?

After the first 100 days of his second term, President Obama just can’t stop talking about the limits of his own power. At a press conference Tuesday morning, he said he wanted a smooth roll out for ObamaCare, but then added, “even if we do everything perfectly, there’ll still be, you know, glitches and bumps.” [...]

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New stand-up material?

What might be the topic that actually prompted Barack Obama to make a rare appearance at an open presser?  Perhaps he wants to try his stand-up routine from the White House Correspondents Dinner on the daytime TV crowd.  More likely, Obama wants to push his budget priorities and push back against the sequester — the [...]

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And doomed, says Politico.

Actually, this could be the consensus.  David Corn wrote Tuesday night that Barack Obama’s speech “present[ed] a powerful progressive agenda.”  It’s been a long time since Ronald Reagan made the idea of big government solutions toxic and Bill Clinton delivered its eulogy, but Obama managed to exhume it for an evening.  But does that mean [...]

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Jobs Council being laid off?

The Hill has bad news for businessmen as the second term of Barack Obama begins, and … more bad news.  First, businesses foresee a flood of regulations as Obama uses the executive branch to push an agenda that has no chance of getting through Congress: President Obama has begun to wield the power of the [...]

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Mandates.

At first blush, the reaction to this Gallup poll is … so what?  Barack Obama managed to get himself elected to a second term anyway, even with historically anemic approval numbers.  But there’s more to this than just last November: President Barack Obama averaged 49.1% job approval during his first term in office, among the [...]

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Sandbagging?

Today will likely be a slow news day, except for the one big event taking place in Washington DC today — the ceremonial inauguration of Barack Obama for his second term as President.  Four years ago, nearly two million people crowded into the Mall for President Obama’s first inaugural address.  Today, organizers are trying to [...]

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Transformational?

Last year, when the blogger and amateur gynecologist Andrew Sullivan published a Newsweek cover story proclaiming Barack Obama the liberal Ronald Reagan, conservatives mocked him. No one deserves mockery more than Sullivan—well, maybe Paul Krugman—but in this case the criticism was misplaced. On the eve of his second inauguration, we ought to face the unpleasant [...]

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Pick him out of the lineup.

Barack Obama will announce Denis McDonough for his choice of chief of staff, CNN reports, with an announcement expected soon.  McDonough replaces Jack Lew, who went to Treasury in the second-term shake-up.  That may produce another uncomfortable round of diversity scolding for the President: President Barack Obama is expected to name Deputy National Security Adviser [...]

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Aggressive.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus wasted no time in attacking President Obama’s new gun control proposals. “President Obama’s series of gun control measures amount to an executive power grab that may please his political base but will not solve the problems at hand. He paid lip service to our fundamental constitutional rights, but took [...]

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Totally.

Over the course of Obama’s first four years as president, we watched him ‘evolve’ from a zealous, I-will-slow-the-rise-of-the-oceans climate change champion to a remarkably quiet almost-bystander on the whole debate. Now that his second term is secure, I’m sure we can expect that at least his rhetoric on the subject will once again reach much [...]

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The shrinking of the pie.

I’m still collecting my thoughts on what we saw happen last night, and probably will be for awhile yet — in the coming days, there will be tons of analysis and data-crunching and commentary that we’ll all be trying to decipher. But, in the meantime, there’s at least some small sense I can make of [...]

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They just keep sellin' like hotcakes.

I always find it amusing that, despite President Obama’s copious command-and-control efforts to stimulate both the economy at large and his politically-preferred pet industries (“green energy” springs to mind), all of which have all meandered along miserably, he hasn’t managed to even remotely stymie the one industry that so many liberals would like to see [...]

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Charts of the day.

We’ve really come down to closing arguments now in the presidential election, where candidates usually lay out the best positive case for voter support.  As I’ve noted since the debates, Democrats seem to be going in the opposite direction, stepping up personal attacks against Mitt Romney rather than argue for another four years of Barack [...]

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...Just keep swimming?

If you have any lingering romantical notions about the big nothingburger of old n’ busted recyclables that is President Obama’s last-ditch effort at a “second-term agenda,” here’s another exercise in futility we can glean from its glossy depths — or, rather, its glossy shallows. If you flip through it, you’ll notice some lovely-looking assurances of [...]

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Fantastical!

While most of you were still sleeping, I was getting up early (even for us Midwestern types) to make my first appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.  Some of you were awake and tweeting me about going into the lion’s den, but I like Morning Joe because it has at least some diversity of opinion and [...]

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"His bold vision for the future, is little more than silly, stale platitudes."

Maybe this is the best recap ever of Barack Obama’s campaign, taken from Obama’s own speech this morning in Tampa Bay.  Obama starts off by attacking Mitt Romney’s economic agenda, and then momentarily can’t find his own: Obama’s booklet slipped off his lectern in Tampa. “Where’s my plan? Oh, it dropped. I couldn’t find my [...]

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Contempt.

If you suffered whiplash after Team Obama’s sudden change in strategy after the last debate, you weren’t alone.  After waiting until almost literally the last moment to release Barack Obama’s second-term agenda, suddenly the campaign rushed out an ad and a 20-page booklet that consists of mostly full-color pictures out to the press — not [...]

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Desperate.

This would be hilarious if it weren’t so … well, hilarious, really, but in a very sad way.  The Barack Obama campaign officially launched in April 2011.  They have raised something close to a billion dollars, and they’ve certainly spent almost as much on field offices, GOTV efforts, and tons of campaign advertising.  They even [...]

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Still not talking about his second-term agenda.

President Obama’s apologists have found lots of reasons why Obama lost the debate on Wednesday, some of them pretty creative.  They range from Mitt Romney lied so much that it stunned Obama into ennui to Obama meant to do that to lull Romney into a false sense of security! Al Gore thinks it’s altitude sickness, and I [...]

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"The reality of Social Security is this is a much less imminent problem than Medicare."

David Axelrod ran into a buzz saw this morning, and on MSNBC, of all places.  Time’s Mark Halperin asks a rather predictable question of Axelrod, noting that Barack Obama never mentioned Social Security reform in his 60 Minutes interview last night (and Steve Kroft apparently never asked about it, either).  Where’s the plan, Halperin asks [...]

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Deja blew it.

As it turns out, Bill Clinton ended up overshadowing Barack Obama — and it wasn’t even close.  The President had an opportunity to craft a new message outlining his specific agenda for a second term at a moment when Obama had the attention of the entire nation.  Failing that, he could have offered a ringing [...]

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Second term?

President Barack Obama says his Republican challenger has the “wrong vision” for the country. So what’s his? Some of his agenda for a second term is a continuation of the first. He’d raise taxes on annual family incomes above $250,000. He’d continue to spend on education and green energy. He’d implement the health care law [...]

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"Unexpectedly."

While Democrats continue to fumble the “better off” question,  new economic indicators provided even more of a challenge to Barack Obama and his surrogates as the Democratic National Convention opens today.  Manufacturing dropped in August more sharply than any time in the last three years of recovery, and construction contracted at the fastest rate in [...]

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