Free Republic

With its nomination settled, the GOP has been healing its wounds, but Democratic feelings are still raw because of the ongoing fight between Clinton and Sanders. The latest round of polls re­leased pri­or to Me­mori­al Day week­end, which showed Hil­lary Clin­ton and Don­ald Trump in a vir­tu­al tie, set off in­tense hand-wringing among Demo­crats, Clin­ton back­ers, and Trump de­tract­ors alike. They much pre­ferred the polls from a month earli­er giv­ing the former sec­ret­ary of State a double-di­git lead over the real-es­tate mogul. What’s lost on many people is that any tri­al heat between Trump and Clin­ton today is like com­par­ing...

There were several more polls which came out this week in the wake of Donald Trump’s latest gaffe which was sure to finally doom him. Most of them were covered here, but they all delivered essentially the same news: nothing had changed, except possibly for The Donald expanding his plurality in the GOP primary. (Iowa is still the possible exception.) The lack of changes, however, was only in the poll numbers. By the time the weekend had arrived I was seeing a shift in the coverage and analysis of the race. One of the telling editorials I found was from...

As the sprawl­ing, brawl­ing Re­pub­lic­an pres­id­en­tial field gath­ers for its second de­bate here to­night, the new ABC/Wash­ing­ton Post na­tion­al poll may point to a crack in the ar­mor of con­front­a­tion­al front-run­ner Don­ald Trump. While the poll found that Trump con­tin­ues to hold a com­fort­able lead among Re­pub­lic­ans na­tion­wide, de­tailed res­ults provided to Next Amer­ica show that large num­bers of white-col­lar GOP voters doubt that he has the qual­i­fic­a­tions, per­son­al­ity, or tem­pera­ment to suc­ceed as pres­id­ent.

Only the most vicious partisans on either side of the aisle care a whit for the party platform. The outdated practice of defining a political party’s ideals in writing so that they can be ignored by the institution’s elected officials serves only the opposition’s purposes. For Republicans, the platform’s codification of the GOP’s support for banning of all legal abortion practices and legally defining marriage as an institution that exists only between a man and a woman have provided their Democratic opponents ample opportunity to frame the party as “extreme.” The Democrats, too, stumbled into a public relations nightmare...

Late last summer, with midterms consuming the attention of the political class, a group of GOP activists spent two days in Des Moines trying to convince their fellow Republicans that change was coming to their party. With eyes on 2016, they attended the Iowa State Fair, talked with newspaper editorial boards, and even ventured onto conservative talk radio. To cap it off, on the last evening, supporters gathered at 801 Chophouse, the upscale watering hole of the city's political elite, as if to announce their movement had gone mainstream. That it couldn't be dismissed as fringe any longer. Their issue,...

When Sen. Rand Paul makes his first visit to Iowa as an official presidential candidate next month, he will head to the campus of the University of Iowa. The location—one of the state's biggest liberal strongholds—seems unusual for a Republican, but Paul is headed there in the hopes of appealing to a different constituency. As Paul prepares to formally enter the 2016 arena, younger conservatives are emerging as a backbone of his campaign strategy: a source not only of volunteers and energy but votes. A youth-fueled campaign, his team hopes, will also help brand him as a fresh face for...

National Journal Senior Political Columnist and Editorial Director Ron Fournier said that Democrats are “scared to death” over the scandals regarding donations to the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton’s emails on Monday’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel. “Don’t buy the spin, they [Democrats] are scared to death. And there’s a lot of them who are already starting to think ‘is she really the best candidate for us?’…Their bench, compared to the Republican bench is awfully, awfully thin. And there’s a lot of Democrats, by the way, who are saying ‘follow the money.’ A lot of Democrats are really worried...

Shedding a new skin is Bush's euphemism for national transformation: purge public institutions of what doesn't work and ingest the fruits of radical connectivity to inspire and support innovators.

From the first day of 2011, Mitt Romney was the favorite to win the 2012 Republican presidential primary campaign. No one else was even close. The 2016 outlook could not be more different. Offered the choice to bet on one single candidate to win the nomination versus the rest of the field, the choice would have to be "the field." For the first time in years, there is no one next in line. And without a former vice president or powerhouse former candidate looking likely to run, Republicans are shaping up to spend the next year and a half fighting...

Donors are overrating brand-name contenders and missing the vulnerability their insider credentials will carry. Far too often, political coverage is based on the thinking of consultants and donors, and doesn't pay enough attention to what the voters are actually thinking. It's why we focus on presidential horse-race numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire, which couldn't be less predictive, and are often slow to pick up on the issues driving grassroots anger, like Common Core. It's why immigration reform rates as a top legislative priority in the minds of strategists over proposing an economic agenda to assuage voter anxieties. And it's...

New rankings of lawmakers’ votes show that that Sen. John Cornyn ranks as more conservative among senators than Rep. Steve Stockman ranks in the House, despite the latter’s contention that Cornyn is too liberal: How they rank: National Journal, a public-policy magazine, ranked all members of Congress on a conservative/liberal scale based on votes on key legislation in 2013. Cornyn ranked the 14th-most conservative of the 100 senators. Stockman ranked 138th among the 435 House members. He was behind all but two of the 24 Texas Republicans and in the middle of all House Republicans. How it works: The particular...

We’re still three years away from the 2016 general election and two and a half years from the Iowa caucus, but Hillary Clinton has already managed to grab top-rank political talent on the Left. Does she risk getting too far ahead of the pack and making herself into a punching bag for up-and-comers over the long haul? National Journal’s Jill Lawrence wonders if Hillary is peaking too soon for her own good: Crack organizers from President Obama’s campaigns are the latest political honchos to join the Clinton-for-President movement and, like others involved, they say they are just trying to make...

The CBS News/National Journal debate Saturday night was the first to focus on foreign policy, and it generated fewer fireworks - but more substance - than many of its predecessors. For that reason we aren't going to simply list winners and losers this time around and instead discuss the candidates' performances - though we're still putting those we thought did best at the top.

No wonder he left Fox News . . . On Morning Joe, Major Garrett, formerly of Fox News, now with the National Journal, claimed to be "militantly non-partisan" . . . then proceeded to offer a passionate defense of Pres. Obama's Libya policy. As an hors d'oeuvre during the discussion of the need for the media to acknowledge their leanings, Katrina vanden Heuvel risibly refused to admit that her Nation magazine is left-wing. View video here.

So much for all of the White House’s efforts to keep the details of President Barack Obama’s second State of the Union address under wraps until delivery. At 7:14 p.m. – almost two hours before Obama was scheduled to speak in the House chamber – The National Journal posted a draft of the speech, making the secrecy, calculated leaks and embargoed background briefings seem quaint. The White House, furious over the leak, responded by releasing an un-embargoed copy of Obama’s speech. It landed in reporters’ in-boxes shortly before 8 p.m. National Journal editor in chief Ron Fournier told POLITICO he...

Major Garrett, the Fox News White House correspondent whose recently acquired front-row seat has been the source of so much controversy, is leaving the network for print, Mediaite reports. White House correspondents Wendell Goler and Mike Emanuel will take over the beat for Fox News. From the release:MAJOR GARRETT RETURNS TO PRINT JOURNALISMLeaves FOX News Sept. 3 FOX News’ Chief White House correspondent Major Garrett announced today that he will leave the network effective Sept. 3 to return to his roots in print journalism. White House correspondents Wendell Goler and Mike Emanuel will assume joint coverage of the beat....

A year into his tenure, a majority of Americans would already vote against Pres. Obama if the '12 elections were held today, according to a new survey. The Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll shows 50% say they would probably or definitely vote for someone else. Fully 37% say they would definitely cast a ballot against Obama. Meanwhile, just 39% would vote to re-elect the pres. to a 2nd term, and only 23% say they definitely would do so. Obama's first year in office has been marked by an unemployment rate that surged to 10%, an increased commitment of troops to...

Following The Washington Post’s public shaming for selling lobbyists access to administration officials, newspaper editors, and reporters for $25,000 and up, National Journal has created a private ‘pay-to-play’ web site for members of Congress. The whole amazing story is documented by The Washington Examiner and should be read in its entirety here. The website known as 3121 is described as “a new feature on NationalJournal.com that will become available exclusively to Capitol Hill staffers in September.” Only individuals possessing an email address that ends with Senate.gov or House.gov can gain access to 3121. For the modest one-time contribution of $295,000,...

National Journal annually ranks Senators and Representatives for their liberal and conservative track records for the previous year. The non-partisan publication's credibility allows these rankings to carry considerable weight. This year, their choice may land them in the middle of a presidential election: Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was the most liberal senator in 2007, according to National Journal's 27th annual vote ratings. The insurgent presidential candidate shifted further to the left last year in the run-up to the primaries, after ranking as the 16th- and 10th-most-liberal during his first two years in the Senate. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., the...

In other words, we don't have their excuse. Our war has one of the lowest fatality rates of any war ever, and, when they get so low that even Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid temporarily give up the quagmire bleating, the Times invents bogus stories to suggest that the few veterans lucky enough to make it out of Iraq alive are ticking time-bombs ready to explode across every Main Street in the land. A few days before the Times series began, The National Journal published the latest debunking of a notorious survey: In 2006, the medical journal The Lancet reported...