Free Republic

Written off for November. Bad polls and bleak news even in usually reliable Blue states. Among the herd of prognosticators and analysts, an overwhelming consensus for a GOP takeover. To borrow the recent verdict of the Associated Press, “Time has all but run out for [the president] and his party.” But what this also describes isn’t recent. The time was 1948 and the President was Harry Truman. It was 1 AM in the morning when he addressed a dispirited Democratic Convention, where the panic was almost palpable: Do we really have to run with this guy? The most famous part...

The GOP must decide whether to follow the Tea Party over a cliff. Dems must decide whether to distance themselves from Obama. And the president must prove once again that he can tip events in his favor. Republicans, Democrats, and the White House have all reached separate decision points for 2010—and possibly for 2012, as well. Republicans had assumed they were harnessing the energy of the Tea Party movement. Instead, with the ABC/Washington Post poll now registering majority disapproval of the Tea Party, Republicans find themselves in an accelerating march of folly. As a result, they have diminished their moment...

Sarah Palin sets the tone for a narrow, spiteful corner of American politics. That corner was occupied by the Tea Party convention last week in Nashville, where Palin served up a strong, carefully-brewed, neo-con-written speech featuring a blend of slurs steeped in personal animus toward Barack Obama. There were lies of a general nature, including the palm-reading Palin’s suggestion that the President is so out of his depth, so stupid—at least that’s what the cheering crowd heard—that he can’t function without a teleprompter. And the contradictory, but equally bogus, claim that Obama is a feeble egghead -- appealing to an...

Things may look bleak for President Obama in the first week of September. They'll look a lot different a few months from now. The cooler days of September have brought no change in the heated political weather. The stakes in the battle of health reform are too high to permit a cooling off, whatever the President may wish for. The outcome will be politically and historically decisive—for the Obama presidency and for both political parties. So let’s look past the arguments of the moment to a vantage point a few months ahead, when the commentators, many of whom today doubt...