Free Republic

The media are eager to dub President Obama the "come back kid." Too eager, probably. He's had a very good month, without question -- but he really would've had no excuse for a bad month. This was a brief and politically peculiar reprieve from the new political reality th new political reality that came upon him and Washington in November. The question going forward will be how he governs when he's living in that political reality. The first peculiarity was that federal taxes were set to rise automatically on Jan. 1 unless Congress acted. Federal unemployment benefits were also due...

"When I began entering into the give and take of legislative bargaining in Sacramento, a lot of the most radical conservatives who had supported me during the election didn't like it. "Compromise" was a dirty word to them and they wouldn't face the fact that we couldn't get all of what we wanted today. They wanted all or nothing and they wanted it all at once. If you don't get it all, some said, don't take anything. "I'd learned while negotiating union contracts that you seldom got everything you asked for. And I agreed with FDR, who said in 1933:...