Free Republic

You better at least get ready. There’s a buzz being fed. Warren gave a speech to the AFL-CIO today, and the “draft Warren” talk is starting. Elizabeth Warren is totally wowing @AFLCIO convention, Wonder if she'll enter the race if Hillary, for some reason, doesn't run. #AFLCIO13— Steven Greenhouse (@greenhousenyt) September 8, 2013 @greenhousenyt Outstanding speech. I would not be surprised at all if Draft Warren groups sprung up in Iowa, New Hampshire. — Mike Conrad (@mikeconrad1) September 8, 2013 @greenhousenyt @AFLCIO DEAR GOD YES, PLEASE, YES, OMG, THAT'S WHAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN #DRAFTSENWARREN (sorry for the caps!) — Organize...

Will Sarah Palin run for Senate in 2014 or for President in 2016? Reading the Mark Leibovich book "This Town" reminds me why I don't want Palin in that town as a one of a hundred senators. I want her running that town. Contrary to what the well fed right and Bill Kristol say, Sarah Palin doesn't need to rehabilitate her image. Yes, the GOP does need rehab, but has it hit rock bottom? I don't think it has. When it does, I don't want Sarah Palin running the intervention from the Senate. Dealing with overly confident and cocky Ted...

Confident Biden Team Sows Seeds For 2016 Backers Consider Steps for White House—Even If Hillary Clinton Enters Race By PETER NICHOLAS, CAROL E. LEE and COLLEEN MCCAIN NELSON CONNECT Political allies of Vice President Joe Biden have concluded that he can win the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination—even if Hillary Clinton enters the contest—and are considering steps he could take to prepare for a potential candidacy. While Mr. Biden has made no decision about his future, people familiar with his thinking say, he hasn't ruled out a bid for the White House. If he runs, that could set up a titanic...

There are no polls showing Ted Cruz leading the 2016 Republican presidential field in the Iowa. A PPP survey last month found Cruz in sixth place in the state, behind Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio. But after a particularly well-received appearance at a conservative event in Ames, Iowa over the weekend, there seems little doubt that Cruz, who has been in the U.S. Senate all of eight months, is zooming toward the front of the GOP pack in the nation’s first-voting state. The gathering, sponsored by the social conservative organization Family Leader, featured appearances...

In his latest book, Collision 2012, Dan Balz, a Washington Post writer, expresses his incredulity over “the inability” of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign to “humanize” its candidate. This is one reason why, in Balz’s estimation, Romney lost the 2012 election to Barack Obama. Yet there are two other reasons that he supplies to account for Romney’s defeat. The one pertains to the “technically superior” character of his rival’s campaign. The other is in regard to Romney’s “ambivalence” concerning his bid for the presidency. The first thing that should be noted is that if Romney’s consultants had difficulty in “humanizing” their...

one hour and thirty minutes of pain...

"It is of great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible; and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him." --Thomas Jefferson (1785) Barack Hussein Obama walked into a White House press briefing Friday afternoon, unannounced. He used the briefing to deliver his political assessment of the Zimmerman/Martin case....

You can get agreement from almost all points on the political spectrum that the worst aspect of our political system is the presidential nomination process. It is perhaps no coincidence that it is the one part of the system not treated in the Constitution. That’s because the Founding Fathers abhorred political parties and hoped that presidents would be selected by something like an elite consensus. But we have political parties, the oldest and third-oldest in the world, and they are not going away. Surely a better system is possible. The current system of primaries, caucuses, and national conventions is the...

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...

Almost everybody has written off Rick Santorum as a 2016 contender — everybody, that is, except Rick Santorum. Behind the scenes, the former Pennsylvania senator is quietly preparing for another presidential run. Trips to Iowa are in the works, he’s meeting daily with his advisers, and he’s already fine-tuning his message for the early primaries. Hints of that pitch came last Thursday during a fiery speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s summer conference. Santorum cast himself as a populist conservative. “When all you do is talk to people who are owners,” he warned, the GOP becomes nothing more than...

We might expect Keith Alexander to advocate on behalf of the two programs at the center of our national debate about terrorism and surveillance. He is, after all, the head of the National Security Agency, which runs them. “It’s dozens of terrorist events that these have helped prevent—both here and abroad—in disrupting or contributing to the disruption of terrorist attacks,” Alexander testified last week. And it’s not entirely surprising that the four leading members of Congress on intelligence matters would argue on behalf of these programs, known as “215” and “702,” for the sections of the laws that authorize them....

He doesn't need a campaign platform for the primaries in 2016. All he needs, really, is this with a single word in 120-point font underneath: “ELECTABILITY.”NBC/WSJ took his temperature in their new poll too and found similar parity across segments, although the numbers weren’t as robust: He’s also energized certain segments of the Republican Party with his tough fiscal approach to governing New Jersey, and has proven popular among Garden State residents for his style of crisis management.It’s a combination that’s led to 40 percent of Republicans, 41 percent of independents and 43 percent of Democrats seeing him in a...

There were two big shocks for me on election night 2012: 1) Obama beat Romney. I had concluded that 2012 would look a lot like 2004, i.e. a 50-49 victory with about 290 Electoral votes. I did not subscribe to the landslide (i.e. Dick Morris) but did see a narrow Romney victory! 2) All of the talk about the "hispano" vote. I had looked at anecdotal evidence and did not see a "hispano" wave on election day. So I was surprised with all of the conventional wisdom that "hispanos" had reelected Obama. It turns out that "hispanos" did not really...

White and Hispanic turnout fell from 2004 to 2012, according to a new study by the Center for Immigration Studies based on newly-released U.S. Census data. Had turnout equaled what it was in 2004, 4.7 million more whites would have voted in 2012, of which 4.2 million were not college graduates, according to the study. Obama received five million more votes than Romney. “As Republicans think about how they can expand their voter base, the new data suggest that one of their biggest problems in the last presidential election was that so many less-educated whites sat home,” said Steven Camarota,...

Hillary Clinton’s favorability rating dropped significantly in a Quinnipiac University poll released Friday, as the months-long investigation into the terrorist attacks in Benghazi have begun to drag on the former secretary of State. According to the survey, 52 percent said they have a favorable view of Clinton, against 40 unfavorable. That’s down from her all-time high of 61 percent favorable and 34 unfavorable in February of this year. “Her score is down substantially from her all-time high score in February,” said Quinnipiac director of polling Peter A. Brown in a statement. “The drop in favorability is substantial among men, Republicans...

Kurt Schlichter notes that conservatives have been vindicated quite often in the past several weeks: Kurt Schlichter @KurtSchlichter Things Conservatives Have Been Proven Right About Lately: ☑ Benghazi; ☑ Pigford;☑ Obamacare; ☑ IRS. Next up: The immigration reform scam. 6:43 PM - 10 May 2013 357 Retweets 90 favorites I suspect that list will grow longer. The common thread in each of these scandals is corruption and a willingness to abuse the expanded powers of big government--while failing to carry out the most basic responsibilities of any government. In Benghazi, Obama a) failed to take action to save American diplomats...

White House West Wing evacuated briefly because of smoke Reporters and photographers were evacuated early Saturday after smoke was seen coming from Smoke coming from an overheated transformer in a mechanical room closet, officials said. No one was injured, and people were allowed back into the building after an hour. WASHINGTON — Reporters and photographers were evacuated briefly from the West Wing of the White House early Saturday because of smoke from an overheated transformer in a mechanical room. President Barack Obama and his family were not affected by the incident, according to the White House. U.S. Secret Service spokesman...

More serious than Watergate 'because 4 Americans did in fact die' To this day, it is not known what role President Richard Nixon played in the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, but the tape recordings from the White House confirm he and Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman discussed using the CIA to slow down the FBI investigation. It was the cover-up, as history records, that eventually brought about Nixon’s resignation in disgrace. Now, Congress is investigating an alleged cover-up of the terrorist attack Sept. 11, 2012, on the U.S. foreign service facility in Benghazi, Libya, amid predictions from prominent voices...

President Barack Obama has to be the most partisan and most ideological president we've seen in a long, long time. He cannot or will not refrain from injecting his partisan politics into almost every occasion. Did he go to Mexico last week to improve our relationship with our southern neighbor or to use Mexico, as he does anything else he can find, as a political prop to bash Republicans and as a platform to criticize the United States? What other American president has so often sidled up to foreign countries on the backs of his own countrymen? Obama's defenders deny,...

Gov. Cuomo has quietly told associates that he is resigned to the fact that he can’t run for president in 2016 if Hillary Rodham Clinton enters the race, as is widely expected, sources told The Post. “The governor has told people in recent weeks that there’s not a chance for him to run if Hillary gets in the race because she’ll easily wrap up the Democratic nomination,’’ said a Cuomo administration insider with direct knowledge of the situation. “He knows that and he accepts that, and so he won’t even be thinking at all in those terms — unless Hillary...