Free Republic

"Where is she heading? She is going to get her own reality show, not the White House," said John Feehery, a Republican consultant. "There a lot of big challenges in this country and how can she handle them if she can barely handle her own family?" And there we have it – those powerful Republican circles, none more influential than John Feehery. Mr Feehery was, of course, a staffer for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who endorsed Mitt Romney last year. Though retired from politics he is still the Don Corleone of the GOP, a man who can make or...

Feehery: How Trump wins Most political analysts believe that Joe Biden will beat Donald Trump in the coming election. They are wrong. Here are five reasons why Trump wins reelection: 1) Beating an incumbent is hard: Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama won their reelections not because they were great presidents but because they were incumbents. Reagan lost the Senate in 1982 and endured a crippling recession but still was able to bounce back to win a landslide in 1984. Clinton’s first two years were so bad that Democrats lost the House for the first time...

What's the opposite of a "political earthquake"? If the primary defeat of Rep. Eric Cantor drained D.C.'s supply of dramatic analogies, the snap leadership election surprised almost no one. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the party's occasionally competent whip, easily took Cantor's old job after a furtive conservative challenge from Rep. Raul Labrador. And Rep. Steve Scalise, a Louisiana conservative who had been leading the Republican Study Committee, nabbed McCarthy's job in one ballot. (SNIP) Why? Simple: There are three states where party primaries have been replaced by jungle primaries, followed by runoffs between the top two finishers. After John Boehner, the...

"Angry Newt" took the night off. In a striking role reversal, Newt Gingrich looked more like a firefly than a firebrand in a high-stakes debate Monday night, while rival Mitt Romney called the surging former House Speaker a disgraced, influence-peddling, Washington insider. Somebody must have awakened the cool-and-nonchalant Romney out of his debate slumber and told him the GOP nomination was slipping away. Gingrich stunned the political world -- and frightened much of the GOP establishment -- with a landslide victory in South Carolina on Saturday night that erased Romney's lead in national and Florida polls. SNIP Gingrich's stunning South...