Free Republic

DERRY, N.H. — Mitt Romney says he can appeal to Tea Partiers, even though activists and groups aligned with the movement are stressing that they need to defeat him in 2012. “I think I line up pretty well with the Tea Party,” he said in response to a question from The Daily Caller after touring the Derry Feed and Supply store. “They want to see smaller government. So do I.” But not everyone associated with the movement see Romney as one of them. Joe Miller, a former U.S. Senate candidate in Alaska and a Tea Party darling, is now running...

(snip) Other Republican leaders such as Ron Kaufman, the longtime confidant to President George H.W. Bush, believe 2012 could be a banner year for the state GOP. He pointed to Brown’s upcoming reelection campaign, last November’s gains by Republican state representatives, and the possibility of having former governor Mitt Romney on the presidential ticket. "For us, it’s about getting the message out," said Kaufman, who added that GOP candidates would focus on the economy and their opposition’s record next year. "If you look at the last three speakers of the House in Massachusetts, they’ve all been indicted for one problem...

Sarah Palin blasted the Obama administration's handling of the Egypt crisis on Saturday in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network. "This is that 3 a.m. White House phone call, and it seems for many of us trying to get that information from our leader in the White House, it seems that that call went right to the answering machine." Palin's reference to a 3 a.m. phone call referred to the 2008 bruising primary battle between now-President Obama and now-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over responsiveness to unexpected foreign policy crises. In the CBN interview, which was conducted Friday immediately...

Mitt Romney became, on Tuesday, the first of the potential 2012 GOP presidential contenders to call for the exit of Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak. Speaking on ABC's "Good Morning America," Romney said although President Obama should not publicly support Mubarak's removal, the time for it had come. "I don't know that I would say to the president, 'You should call for Mubarak's resignation,' " Romney said. "That, I think, flies in the face of a long history of friendship between he and our country and our friends, but it is very clear that [Mubarak] needs to move on and transition...

On the kick off to his "No Apology" book tour Mitt Romney is on message – refusing to apologize for the Massachusetts health care law that, like President Obama’s federal legislation, requires citizens to buy health insurance. “I’m not apologizing for it, I’m indicating that we went in one direction and there are other possible directions. I’d like to see states pursue their own ideas, see which ideas work best,” Romney told me. That stand seems to reject the advice of Karl Rove and others who say that Romney can’t get the GOP nomination in 2012 unless he finds a...