Free Republic

Today, let’s look at the polls — all of them. To start with, health care: Just 6 percent of Americans think health care is the most pressing issue, according to the latest Gallup poll. Why? Because lots of those Americans don’t have jobs or are underemployed — the real jobless rate nationwide is more like 14.9 percent, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. So savoring his big win on health care is most definitely a waste of time for President Obama, and he knows it. After less than a week of spiking the football (a relatively short time for America’s...

Mitt Romney addressed the press 90 minutes after the BLS released the June jobs report, and hammered Barack Obama for his economic policies and ObamaCare. “This kick in the gut has to end,” Romney told the press, and during a question-and-answer period put a large amount of the blame on ObamaCare. “When three-quarters of small businesses say that ObamaCare is keeping them from hiring,” Romney replied, “it shows that President Obama has put his liberal agenda ahead of job creation.” We’ll add the transcript and the video as soon as they’re available, but the “kick in the gut” line is...

Obama: 'I Hope You Still Believe In Me' Fire it up Obama: 'I hope you still believe in me' By Emily Minner, CNN Atlanta (CNN) – President Barack Obama spoke to an excited crowd in Atlanta Tuesday, defending his Affordable Care Act on the eve of the Supreme Court's decision on the constitutionality of the law. Speaking at a fundraising reception at the Westin Peachtree Plaza hotel, Obama told supporters "the American people understand we're not going to make progress by going backwards. We need to go forward. They understand we don't need to re-fight this battle over healthcare. It's...

On the sixth floor of a sleek office building here, more than 150 techies are quietly peeling back the layers of your life. They know what you read and where you shop, what kind of work you do and who you count as friends. They also know who your mother voted for in the last election. The depth and breadth of the Obama campaign’s 2012 digital operation — from data mining to online organizing — reaches so far beyond anything politics has ever seen, experts maintain, that it could impact the outcome of a close presidential election. It makes the...

Former President Bill Clinton appears to be playing a game that is calculated to embarrass the current president, Barack Obama, whom it is reported he has despised since the 2008 campaign. First, according to Big Government, Clinton appeared on the Piers Morgan show and slammed the Obama campaign's attack on Mitt Romney's tenure as the CEO of Bain Capital. He is just the latest high-profile Democrat to so. Then, Clinton went to Wisconsin for a get-out-the-vote effort in advance of the recall election, the Chicago Tribune reports. President Obama has studiously avoided venturing to Wisconsin, concluding as have most people...

According to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, veterans favor Obama over Romney by as much as seven percentage points. They favor cutting the defense budget. Read more... COLUMBIA, South Carolina (Reuters) - Mack McDowell likes to spend time at the local knife and gun show "drooling over firearms," as he puts it. Retired after 30 years in the U.S. Army, he has lined his study with books on war, framed battalion patches from his tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, a John Wayne poster, and an 1861 Springfield rifle from an ancestor who fought in the Civil War. But when it comes...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama will use a tour of three election battleground states next week to push Congress to prevent the doubling of interest rates on federal student loans -- an effort aimed at re-energizing his support among younger voters. Obama will speak at universities in North Carolina, Colorado and Iowa, the White House said on Friday. All three states are considered critical to his re-election chances, and the youth vote is one of his key constituencies. The two-day trip is part of a campaign by the Obama administration to get Congress to extend low interest rates on...

Fresh off of President Obama's "flexibility" comments to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev last week, Obama supporters are reminiscing about the 2008 campaign and getting excited. Why? According to the left, if Obama wins a second term, he doesn't have to deal with Congress, the right rolling back his achievements and "it's on." Hope and change big words? Who knew? When you combine Obama's flexibility comments with the comments above and then add in Obama's "we're working on gun control under the radar" comments to anti-gun zealot Sarah Brady, another term for Obama is looking more and more like a major...

President Obama on Friday thanked his "good friend" Oprah Winfrey for being an early endorser who got Americans to support him, just as they buy the books and skin cream she recommends. At a fundraiser at the Atlanta home of movie and TV mogul Tyler Perry -- a close friend of Winfrey's -- called out the former talk show host, who was in the audience, by name. "And then, there is my good friend, Oprah, who very early on, when I was still running, just decided that she would support this guy with a name that nobody could pronounce. And...

ATLANTA - President Obama opened his Friday of fundraising with a rousing speech to 600 donors in Chicago and closed it with an intimate appeal before 40 "friends" that included talk-show host, business woman and American icon, Oprah Winfrey. "There's my good friend Oprah, who very early on when I was still running, just decided that she would support this guy with a name that nobody could pronounce," Obama said as he addressed guests seated around five candle-lit tables adorned with bouquets of red roses inside the cavernous Chateau-style home of actor/producer Tyler Perry. "And just like books, skin cream...

Raising campaign cash in Republican territory, President Barack Obama on Friday hailed a rebounding economy and accused Republicans of banking on voters having "amnesia" about the steps that led to a brutal economic collapse. "The recovery is accelerating. America is coming back," Obama told 600 supporters at a Texas fundraiser. Bidding for re-election, Obama bounded between a rally-style event in a sprawling Rolls-Royce manufacturing plant south of Richmond, Va., to a pair of Houston fundraisers. Framing the trip: a new monthly jobs report showing employers 227,000 jobs in February, the latest sign that the economy is headed in the right...

WLS Radio has learned that President Barack Obama faces three local challenges to his eligibility for the Illinois primary ballot. At least one involves a group that believes the fight will be worse than the one Mayor Rahm Emanuel faced with his residency challenge.

President Obama is running for re-election with an unusual pitch: He can't work with others. He only gets along with yes-men. "I refuse to take no for an answer," Obama said Wednesday of his decision to make a "recess" appointment that placed Richard Cordray as head of a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Constitution, of course, gives the president the power to make appointments during Senate recesses. Technically, however, the Senate was in session. The imperial president bypassed Senate rules and years of precedent, because he wouldn't or couldn't cut a deal.

Now that the dust has settled on the 2010 midterm elections, it's slowly becoming clear just how monumental the results really are. We saw an extreme left-wing agenda suffer a crushing defeat. At the ballot box, voters took Obamacare and the stimulus and wrapped them right around the necks of those same House members and senators who had arrogantly dismissed the concerns voiced in countless town halls and Tea Party rallies up and down the country. Voters sent commonsense conservatives a clear mandate to hold the line against the Obama agenda? Does that mean Republican candidates can look forward with...

There’s something profoundly tragic about the failed presidency of Barack Obama. He was supposed to be a new kind of president, a man who embodied hope and would transcend petty politics and even race. Instead, we’re left with a downgraded America that is stagnating under the weight of its bloated government. As tragic as that alone is, even this is but a mere symptom of Mr. Obama’s larger fundamental failure: He simply does not trust the Americans who entrusted him with the presidency. Most presidents, we believe, ascend to the Oval Office, but for the 44th president, the reverse seems...

HONOLULU — President Barack Obama paid his respects at Pearl Harbor on Thursday, offering a solemn tribute to the thousands of Americans killed on the “date which will live in infamy.” The president swapped his casual vacation outfit for a dark suit as he and the first lady toured the memorial on his first visit to the site since he came here in late 2008 as president-elect.

The foreign policy crisis horizon shows little respect for the calendar New Year: The Obama Administration ought to have a pretty good idea of the crises that await it in different global hotspots as it braces for election year, 2012. But a recurring theme in the current menu of challenges, whether in the Middle East, north or south Asia, Africa or Europe, is the declining leverage available to Washington to shape favorable outcomes. President Obama's reelection prospects may be in part shaped by events from America's shores, and yet in most cases the outcome of those events will be determined...

Capt. Pamela Barnett (Ret.) has founded a website and initiative which seeks to assist citizens wishing to challenge Obama’s constitutional eligibility and name placement on the presidential ballot for 2012. She and her team are currently compiling election law from all 50 states and will be providing forms and sample letters which registered voters can use to file a complaint. Barnett has recently appeared on The Roth Radio Show and the Andrea Shea King Radio Show to detail her plan to challenge Obama’s eligibility based on the claim that he is not a “natural born Citizen” as required by Article...

Mother Jones crunches the numbers on President Obama's fundraising pace, and concludes that he has averaged one fundraiser every five day in 2011: Sixty-nine fundraisers this year by December 1. That's an average of more than one fundraiser every five days. (Though, as Obama's latest New York trip shows, these events are often clustered together on a single day.) This is a blistering pace of rainmaking for the 44th president in 2011. Obama's fundraising activity surpasses that of predecessors George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. According to Brendan Doherty, a political scientist at the US Naval Academy, Bush attended 41...

Every once in a while you need to bring yourself back down to Earth and make sure you’re prepared for hard times, no matter how optimistic you may be feeling. No, we’re not talking about the coming zombie apocalypse or the idea that the Patriots might still win the AFC East title this year. This is even more dark and foreboding. What would happen if Obama wins the election next November? That’s pretty much the point of a lengthy essay at Outside the Beltway by Doug Mataconis this week.After noting that Obama’s prospects are certainly looking dim, Doug reminds us...