Free Republic

President Obama hopes there will be no change in the White House on Nov. 6. His campaign offers platitudes such as "investments" in education and green energy. But there has been very little attention on what Obama would actually do with four more years. Second terms tend to be lackluster. The intellectual and political energy wanes, and scandals are common. But Obama's re-election would mean sweeping policy changes, simply by his being in the Oval Office through 2016.

The economy expanded at a revised 3% annual rate in the fourth quarter. That’s the fastest growth since Q2 2010 and not a bad number by itself. But it’s a measure of how low expectations have fallen. U.S. GDP hasn’t risen 4% or more in any quarter since the first quarter of 2006. That’s by far the longest such stretch on record going back to 1950. The only other sizable sub-par stretch was a three-year span from late 2000 to mid 2003 during the prior recession and sluggish recovery.

The conventional wisdom of the 2012 election was that it would be a race over economics: how to revive the economy, how to reduce unemployment and how to get the deficit under control. The last week has undermined that assumption. The election may be about the culture war instead. Consider the events of the last week or so.

Yesterday in the Huffington Post, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., taught us an important lesson: Health care can be free! For example, she wrote, “When President Obama announced that because of health care reform, birth control would soon be available for free in new insurance plans, you would have expected universal approval.” She also wrote, “Finally, (Obama’s) decision will help working families by giving them access to free birth control.”

Should Mitt Romney win the Florida primary, it will be with minimal Tea Party support. Many in the movement view the former Massachusetts governor warily. But his campaign also has made little effort to reach out to activists, say many Tea Party leaders in the Sunshine State.

If private equity and hedge fund managers were optimistic that the election of one of their own would preserve their prized carried-interest tax break, Monday’s debate must have given them pause. Given the chance to defend his low tax rate by talking up the importance of low taxes on investment for job creation and competitiveness, Mitt Romney balked. Instead, he made an implicit case for why investment taxes shouldn’t be any lower than they are — as Newt Gingrich wants — and defended his own conduct rather than seeking to justify the tax policy.

Despite endless talk of spending cuts and fiscal restraint in Washington over the past year, lawmakers continued to act as though the government doesn't spend nearly enough. They introduced 874 bills in the House and Senate that would have boosted annual federal spending by more than $1 trillion if they'd all been signed into law, according to an analysis done for IBD by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. In contrast, lawmakers offered up just 215 bills to cut spending last year that would have reduced federal outlays by about half a trillion had they all been signed into law.

Since emerging as the Republican front-runner, Mitt Romney has been pilloried as a corporate raider and greedy destroyer of working-class jobs because he once headed private equity firm Bain Capital. A new video by a political action committee with ties to rival presidential candidate Newt Gingrich portrays Romney as someone who plundered companies for their assets, left them in debt and ruined countless lives of ordinary Americans. That's not the view at Fort Wayne, Ind.-based Steel Dynamics (STLD), where Bain invested just as the company was getting off the ground in 1994.

With Wall Street out of fashion this election season, can Mitt Romney fend off the attacks on his tenure at Bain Capital? Some GOP presidential rivals, especially Newt Gingrich, have laid into his private equity past, accusing him of "looting companies" and laying off workers. While those attacks may backfire now — conservatives have rallied to Romney's defense — they might work in the general election.

As tensions with Iran escalate on several fronts, most Americans favor military force to stop Tehran from building nuclear weapons if diplomacy fails, a new IBD/TIPP poll shows. That comes as the Obama ad ministration claims that Iran isn't yet building a bomb and urged the continuation of a "responsible" policy of economic pressure.

Mitt Romney has apparently decided that his lead in New Hampshire is large enough that he can afford to sit on it and campaign in South Carolina instead. The former Massachusetts governor has held relatively few events in the state since his narrow Iowa win. That neglect is beginning to cost him. The latest Suffolk University tracking poll, has him falling to 35% support, the fourth straight day he has slipped. Romney was 43% as recently as Tuesday.

New Hampshire has long had a reputation as the most conservative state in the Northeast. Its license plates even say, "Live Free or Die." The Tea Party ought to be a force here. Just days before the state's primary, New Hampshirites may help Mitt Romney consolidate his position as the Republican front-runner. Not because they support him, but because they cannot unite behind another candidate.

Which Newt Gingrich would show up? That was the question on most people’s minds — OK, mine — as we waited for him to appear at a town hall event at St. Anselm College’s New Hampshire Institute of Politics Wednesday evening. Would it be the calm, above-the-fray political sage that Gingrich has lately tried to will himself into being? Or the partisan bomb-thrower of yore that we all know from the 1990s? After his fourth-place finish in Iowa the night before and his subsequent concession speech/declaration of war on Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, my own expectation was on the...

Rick Santorum had the good fortune to surge right into Tuesday’s Iowa caucuses, where he virtually tied Mitt Romney. Several other GOP candidates, including Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich, have risen to the top of the polls only to fall quickly to earth. Even if the ex-Pennsylvania senator can avoid implosion, he still faces a daunting road to the nomination. Romney has a nationwide campaign with lots of cash. Many early contests appear to favor him.

Washington is engaging in a game of chicken over the payroll tax holiday, but this likely won't be the last time Congress and the White House try to extend it. Some say it will become a "permanently temporary" feature of American politics. And the consequences could be dramatic. "We could be having this conversation 15 years from now and talking about how President Obama, as a Democrat, was the president that started the path to killing Social Security," said Jason Fichtner, a senior fellow at the libertarian Mercatus Center.

Over the past several months, President Obama has spent much time pleading for patience on the sluggish economy and ongoing high unemployment, arguing that the economic hole was so deep and the crisis so monumental that a slow recovery — now in its 30th month — was inevitable. But in making his case, Obama appears to be perpetuating several myths about the recession he inherited and the slow recovery over which he's presided.

That’s what Michael Barone, co-author of “The Almanac of American Politics,” argued at an election forum this morning hosted by the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Voters no longer need to meet candidates at events or see them at rallies to feel as though they know them, he argues. “New media has in different ways displaced some of the old techniques of campaigning that have worked in the past,” he said. “Voters seem to be getting an in-depth look at the candidates through the Internet and cable TV. People can get a sense of them through YouTube clips.”

Ron Paul is surging in Iowa according to the latest polls, but if the libertarian Texas Republican does become the flavor of the week, his foreign policy views will likely leave Republican voters with a sour taste. The latest IBD/TIPP survey asked respondents which GOP presidential candidate they preferred on four issues: the economy, budget/taxes, health care and foreign policy. Paul is third behind Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, being the preferred choice by Republicans on the first three issues by margins of 9%, 10%, and 6%, respectively. As today’s IBD story touched on, Paul is weakest on foreign policy,...

Each year, the federal government hands approximately $10 billion over to the richest 1% of Americans — mainly to rich retirees — according to an IBD analysis of data on various federal transfer programs. And these payments are growing, adding to the income inequality that politicians like President Obama frequently complain about.

The government has pulled roughly even with the private sector as a source of home mortgages and consumer credit, with both financing $6.4 trillion in outstanding loans last quarter, Federal Reserve data show. This represents a dramatic reversal from 2006, when private-sector financing supplied nearly $2 in outstanding home mortgages and consumer credit for every $1 of government-financed loans.