Free Republic

Twitter, Meta and TikTok are three of the world’s biggest social media giants. They’re also three of the brands with the worst reputations in the U.S., according to the recently released 2023 Axios Harris Poll 100 reputation rankings. Millions of monthly active users across the country couldn’t keep the social media companies off the list, which Axios and The Harris Poll compiled by asking more than 16,000 Americans to score the 100 companies they considered “most visible” across nine categories of reputation. Meta and Twitter both scored poorly in the “culture” and “ethics” categories. Each business recently faced public backlash...

CLEVELAND — Sen. Ted Cruz's camp fired back at Chris Christie Thursday, accusing the governor of having "turned over his political testicles long ago." Jeff Roe, Cruz's former campaign manager, took to the airwaves to hit New Jersey's governor after Christie spent lthe morning and last night trashing Cruz after the Texas lawmaker failed to endorse GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday. "That guy turned over his political testicles long ago," Roe said on the Chris Stigall Show on Philadelphia radio. "So I don't take what he has to say with any meaning. You...

Exeter, N.H. — I’ve spent the past couple of days on the campaign trail in New Hampshire with Ted Cruz. A few things are immediately clear: Cruz is an incredibly disciplined campaigner: There’s general agreement among the reporters covering him, including the network embeds who have been with him for months, that he’s a boring candidate from the media’s perspective because he so rarely veers off message. Another reporter offhandedly compared him to Jeb Bush, whom he said he’d enjoyed spending time with far more because Bush was like a little kid who got himself into trouble any time he...

BOCA RATON, Fla. — Mitt Romney crossed a major threshold early this week, moving above 50 percent in his favorability rating, according to the Real Clear Politics average of polls — and, for the first time in the campaign, he now leads President Obama on that measure. The Republican presidential nominee has clearly benefitted from the debates. He had a 44.5 percent favorability rating at the end of September, before the debates. But by Monday, when he and Mr. Obama faced off for the final debate of the campaign, Mr. Romney’s favorability average was up at 50.5 percent. “He’s did...

It was the Puss in Boots eyes. If you've seen the "Shrek" movies or the spin-off cartoon starring the storybook cat voiced by Antonio Banderas, you know what I'm talking about. Whenever Puss in Boots really needs something from someone, he flashes these enormous kitten eyes that melt anyone in their path. Whenever my daughter really wants something, she tries to lay them on me, and I have to say, "Stop trying to give me the Puss in Boots eyes ... you can't have chocolate cake for dinner." I knew Barack Obama was miserable when he tried to give debate...

A recent poll shows that 85 percent of middle-class Americans believe they're worse off now than they were 10 years ago. Yet shockingly, just 34 percent of those people blame Barack Obama. More Americans blame Congress (62 percent), banks (54 percent), corporations (47 percent), former President George W. Bush (44 percent) and foreign competition (39 percent). Why the disconnect? These folks aren't entirely wrong. Congress did nothing about an out-of-control Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for a decade, and allowed the Federal Reserve to inflate the currency all the while. Banks played along with the regulatory regime in order to...

“I like Obama,” said a man I know of when explaining his support for the president. His sentiment isn’t unusual, as Barack Obama is, we’re told, a likeable man. In contrast, we hear that people have trouble “connecting” with Mitt Romney, that he’s an overly-starched blueblood who can’t relate to the common man. Of course, it’s hard for people to connect with you when the only connection they have to what you say and do is through a media that hates you. In contrast, when that same media smoothes out your rough edges and whites out damning comments you make,...

Likability The use of the word “likability” to describe political candidates puzzles me. There are people I truly love whom I do not like and I wouldn't vote for someone I loved if I didn't like them.

TAMPA, Fla. — The Republicans who are assembled here have been told time and time again that Barack Obama's great advantage over Mitt Romney is likability. And many of the 15,000 or so journalists who endured the gusts of rain on Monday and groaned in the sun on the 1.5-mile walk from the nearest parking lot to the metal detectors outside the convention press center have been writing and sound-biting that the chief task of the Romney campaign is to introduce Romney's personal background and character to the public to improve his favorability ratings. Both talking points are true, but...

Remember John McCain? Yeah, we hardly do too. Let us remind you that one reason he’s a faint memory is that not many people liked him. Even the people who voted for him in 2008 didn’t much care for him. He lacked the pizzazz needed to captivate a national electorate. Consequently, Barack Obama, an utterly unqualified, not-so-closeted Big Government socialist in the European tradition was able to trounce McCain. The reason primarily was that Obama was more likable. Almost no one could tell you what his positions really were or predict accurately the disaster he would bring with him in...

09-24) 06:25 PDT DENVER (AP) -- People like Christine Alonzo are keeping President Barack Obama afloat and giving his political team hope that he can win re-election despite high unemployment and sour attitudes about his policies and the country's future. Alonzo volunteered for Obama during the 2008 campaign. A few months after Obama's victory, she lost her job. She's still looking for work. Instead of blaming Obama for the economic crisis, she's volunteering full time to help him capture a second term. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/09/24/national/a062218D89.DTL#ixzz1Yt5KLq6S

I wrote recently about the political dangers to President Obama when people stop liking him. Many of us, me included, found it impossible to like Obama as soon as it became clear that he was a disciple of prophets of evil like Saul Alinksy. Many Americans (too many, in fact) are mesmerized by television. Good-looking, relaxed, well-spoken people have a big advantage in national politics. This does not mean that the leftist establishment media does not create false images which enhance the likability of leftist politicians. Camera angles, editing, selection of questions asked, choice of news covered, and a dozen...

President Obama's image of leadership flounders in the Gulf of Mexico. While Governor Jindal displays the true qualities of leadership, our president is stuck in Saul Alinksy gear, demonizing a foreign corporation instead of actually doing anything constructive. Disgust at Obama's genuine incompetence at this genuine ecological disaster stretches across party lines and the ideological spectrum. Barry blames Bush for everything about our dismal economy. A partisan rubber-stamp Congress has given Obama the wild and wasteful expenditures which his childish, failed, quasi-Keynesian witches' brew prophesies will spend us into prosperity. It hasn't worked. Now, oddly, congressmen facing electoral apocalypse have...

New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, trying to warm up an image some voters perceive as cold, starts a drive Monday to showcase her personal side with testimonials from friends, associates and constituents she has helped. The online and in-person campaign, complete with a website called TheHillaryIKnow.com, comes a day after Clinton won a key endorsement from The Des Moines Register and her chief rival in the Democratic nomination race, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, was endorsed by The Boston Globe. The rush of endorsements comes as candidates angle for advantage in Iowa's Jan. 3 caucuses and New Hampshire's Jan. 8...

In the weeks, months and probably years to come, pundits and academics will be discussing how the greatest war hero that ever lived got 3.5 million less votes than the most despised man that ever lived. Despite all of the talk about moral values, Iraq, terrorism and the economy, the recent presidential election came down to just one thing--beer. Allan Gotlieb, who served as Canada’s ambassador to the United States during the 1980s opined that the Democrats have to stop selecting privileged Massachusetts intellectuals as presidential candidates. Said Gotlieb: “I’ve always said that the very important quality in U.S. politicians...

NANTUCKET, Mass. - Forget the economy, it may just be the personality, stupid. Swing voters do not like Sen. John Kerry much, one recent poll suggests, and that is just the latest survey pointing to a stubborn ``personality gap'' he suffers compared with President Bush. Some political analysts believe simple likability is the Democratic nominee's greatest challenge as the presidential campaign enters its two-month stretch run. This phenomenon persists even though virtually every poll shows that a solid majority disapproves of Bush's handling of the Iraq war and the economy. Most voters also believe the country is headed in the...

Kerry Hides as Americans Fail to Warm to His Style Posted July 1, 2004 By Scott Stanley Jr. Washington insiders are saying that John Kerry is proving to be the laziest presidential candidate since Adlai Stevenson. For three days he has been hiding out at his wife's pickle farm in Pennsylvania without receiving important visitors of any kind, and tomorrow he heads for speeches in Cloquet, Minn., and Boomer, Wis., before stumping in Iowa river towns. Then it's back to one of his wife's mansions for Independence Day, remaining there Monday with nothing scheduled. There is speculation that Kerry will...

<p>Despite the constant torrent of vitriol from his political opponents, President Bush's standing among voters on questions of character appears solid. Moreover, notwithstanding the odious Michael Moore and a national news media obsessed with systematically undercutting the rationale for the war in Iraq, Sen. John Kerry has yet to capitalize on the constant barrage of attacks on the president's character and judgment.</p>

Bush likability not to be underrated By Godfrey Sperling WASHINGTON – For president Bush the gloom had thickened - there was bad news in Iraq, bad news in the polls, and bad news at the gas pump. And Kerry campaign pollster Mark Mellman, speaking at a recent Monitor breakfast, noted that John Kerry had moved ahead of the president, "something that no challenger of an incumbent president had ever been able to do in the last 50 years." For some time now I've been predicting in my columns that this is the president's election to lose - that Mr. Bush...

NEW YORK -- Bored with the political speechmaking in Harlem's Alhambra Ballroom, 6-year-old Iris Kerry Kaler reached out with both arms for her uncle, Sen. John Kerry, to pick her up. The Massachusetts senator, however, ignored his niece's entreaty, offering Iris only an awkward pat on the stomach despite the array of television cameras poised to record the potentially precious moment. It was a missed opportunity to demonstrate his warmth by holding the little girl in his arms just days before last month's New York primary. As Kerry runs for president, he is not competing only against President Bush. He's...