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The Trouble With Romney I read the New York Post this morning and, reluctantly, the weekly Peggy Noonan column. Noonan is a centrist RINO who thinks she represents mainstream American conservative thinking because she wrote speeches for Ronald Reagan over thirty years ago. You can read her article titled “Obama Can Lose” here: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/obama_can_lose_XyLH4VsgHAHvWQlmzrdGRJ?CMP=OTC-rss&FEEDNAME The traitorous Noonan—who supported, shrilled and voted for Obama in 2008—writes that even if the economy turns around, inflation calms and mid east unrest subsides, Obama will lose in 2012. According this shrill, the only way Obama will win is if the GOP fails to “nominate,...

The State of the Union Address is usually among the most important and least memorable of presidential speeches. The speech itself, in an august setting, is an opportunity for a president to break through in a new way. TV and radio carry it live, and it's hard for the average citizen to avoid seeing at least a piece of it. It's a real chance for a White House to tell the American people "This is where we stand, this is why we are here, this is what we believe in." But most State of the Unions don't measure up. They...

Whenever Sarah Palin's name is mentioned in the same sentence as Ronald Reagan's, there is a screech of indignation, which generally comes from people who only glommed themselves onto Reagan AFTER he became President. These people used Reagan to advance their own careers, but now set themselves up as experts on all things Reagan and arbiters of who can, and who cannot, be fairly compared to the Gipper. [For example, you never hear such criticisms voiced by those who actually campaigned for Reagan in 1976 like Mark Levin or the "St. Paul of the Conservative Movement", Rush Limbaugh who came...

Peggy Noonan's weekend column, Americans Vote for Maturity, is generally supportive of the Tea Parties, but she can't resist joining the chorus of ruling class Republicans grousing about "unqualified" candidates. She concludes: Americans don't want, as their representatives, people who seem empty or crazy. They'll vote no on that. It's not just the message, it's the messenger. Without specifics, this is a fair enough point.  But who decides that a candidate is "empty or crazy"?  Do we take the word of the mainstream media and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee that Rand Paul, Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell are...

Peggy Noonan has never much cared for Sarah Palin. In 2008, she deemed Palin's presence on the Republican ticket "political bullsh*t," and later noted the former Alaska governor seemed "out of her depth in a shallow pool" during the campaign. Now Palin has riled her again, with her observation on Fox News that Ronald Reagan was "an actor" before becoming president. Needless to say, this isn't sitting well with Noonan, who so eloquently praised Reagan's feet in What I Saw At The Revolution ("It was a beautiful foot, sleek. Such casual elegance and clean lines. But not a big foot,...

'The people have spoken, the bastards." That would be how Democrats in the White House and on Capitol Hill are feeling. The last two years of their leadership have been rebuffed. The question for the Democratic Party: Was it worth it? Was it worth following the president and the speaker in their mad pursuit of liberal legislation the country would not, could not, like? And what will you do now? Which path will you take? The Republicans saw their own establishment firmly, sharply put down. The question for them: What will you do to show yourselves worthy of the bounty?...

All presidents take vacations, and all are criticized for it. It's never the right place, the right time. Ronald Reagan went to the ranch, George W. Bush to Crawford, both got knocked. Bill Clinton even poll-tested a vacation site and still was criticized. But Martha's Vineyard—elite, upscale—can't have done President Obama any good, especially following the first lady's foray in Spain. The general feeling this week was summed up by David Letterman: "He'll have plenty of time for vacations when his one term is up. Plenty of time."

And out-of-touch leaders don't see the need to cool things off. It is, obviously, self-referential to quote yourself, but I do it to make a point. I wrote the following on New Year's day, 1994. America 16 years ago was a relatively content nation, though full of political sparks: 10 months later the Republicans would take the House for the first time in 40 years. But beneath all the action was, I thought, a coming unease. Something inside was telling us we were living through "not the placid dawn of a peaceful age but the illusory calm before stern storms."

In our earlier thread on Chris Matthews, one commenter asked why we consider the MS-NBC host a barometer of conservative opinion, considering Matthews’ deeply liberal worldview. It matters because the disillusion of people like Matthews, who sold their audiences on the near-perfection of Barack Obama, are instructive moments to see just how far Obama has fallen in public reputation. After all, conservatives didn’t fawn over a man who had no executive experience and spent most of his legislative career voting “present” rather than showing any leadership.Well, most conservatives didn’t, anyway. At least one who succumbed to Obama’s glamour wonders what...

From Obama lover to this?The New York Times today adds yet another installment in my series "what went wrong" with the Obama presidency by focusing the blame on chief strategist David Axelrod. Good old David, who just loves Obama a little too much is under fire for not doing a better job directing the President. Axelrod's response was combative and so typical of the denial of reality which grips the Obama White House: In an interview in his office, Mr. Axelrod was often defiant, saying he did not give a “flying” expletive “about what the peanut gallery thinks” and did...

This week, two points in an emerging pointillist picture of a White House leaking support—not the support of voters, though polls there show steady decline, but in two core constituencies, Washington's Democratic-journalistic establishment, and what might still be called the foreign-policy establishment. From journalist Elizabeth Drew, a veteran and often sympathetic chronicler of Democratic figures, a fiery denunciation of—and warning for—the White House. In a piece in Politico on the firing of White House counsel Greg Craig, Ms. Drew reports that while the president was in Asia last week, "a critical mass of influential people who once held big hopes...