Free Republic

No, we're not talking about Barack Obama's opposition to the post-9/11 antiterror law. We're referring to the Senator's support for something called the Patriot Employer Act, which deserves more attention as an indicator of his economic agenda. Along with Democratic co-sponsors Sherrod Brown and Dick Durbin, Mr. Obama introduced the bill in the Senate in August 2007. Recently in Janesville, Wis., he repeated his intention to make it a priority as President: "We will end the tax breaks for companies who ship our jobs overseas, and we will give those breaks to companies who create good jobs with decent wages...

THE first vote is still more than a year away, but the campaign to replace President George W Bush in the White House is already throwing up surprises. Unfortunately for Senator Hillary Clinton, long the front-runner in the Democratic drive to retake the presidency, most of them are coming at her expense. A brace of Christmas opinion polls has left Clinton with a political hangover after a year that had appeared to cement her status as the Democrats’ best-organised, best-financed and best-connected contender for her party’s presidential nomination. Despite winning re-election to the US Senate by a handsome margin in...

Politics: The media have anointed Sen. Barack Obama the next great thing, our best hope for the presidency — other than Hillary Clinton, of course. But beyond the publicity, there's not much there. While Oprah and the big thinkers at the Huffington Post and Daily Kos go on about the junior senator from Illinois, others point out that less than two years into his first term as a U.S. officeholder, Obama doesn't have much to show. No legislative triumphs that offer a glimpse into how he would lead, no defining efforts of statecraft that reveal the core of his character....