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Politico was in such a state of panic over what they perceived as President Joe Biden's dwindling election chances in 2024 that they were hyping an election gimmick promoted by political author Ruy Teixeira, that came off as nothing more than a desperate election ploy of too little, too late. It was a mark of this desperation that it was the lead story of Friday's Politico Playbook, "The case for triangulation on immigration."After almost three years of largely putting little weight on the border crises during the current administration, Politico writers Ryan Lizza, Eugene Daniels, and Rachel Bade had finally,...

Last night, on his Fox News show, host Tucker Carlson stunned his viewers with his prediction about who will be the Democrat Presidential candidate. Carlson told them not to rule out the possibility of the divisive former first lady, Michelle Obama, jumping into the race, even though she says she isn’t interested in running. Last week, the former Democrat governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson appeared on CNN, where he predicted the Democrats would have a brokered convention and that the delegates would choose Michelle Obama to be their candidate. “If you’re wondering who the Democratic nominee will be, don’t...

Deputy Assistant to the President Dr. Sebastian Gorka, formerly National Security editor for Breitbart News, addressed the controversy over National Security Adviser Mike Flynn’s pre-inauguration phone calls to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak on Monday’s Breitbart News Daily. “I can’t comment on what was said, or what wasn’t said, on those telephone calls even though the good general himself says that he can’t remember all the details,” Gorka said. “All I can tell you is my personal experience. I spent several months working very closely with General Flynn and the transition team, in his National Security Council transition team. He’s a...

He may be known as an unyielding conservative, but on issues from national defense to political experience, the Texas senator is staking out a position as the goldilocks candidate.One underappreciated element of Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign—which has recently come in for a great deal of praise by savvy operators on both sides of the aisle and in the press—are his quiet but effective acts of triangulation.The Texas senator's self-image is premised on his uncompromising, unyielding, principled conservatism...While that may play well among, say, socially conservative Iowans, it makes it tough to win a primary nationwide. But Cruz is very smartly...

Has Barack Obama finally learned a belated lesson from his second midterm debacle? Initially, the President sounded defiant, promising a unilateral change in immigration law and abandoning the 52-year diplomatic break with Cuba. According to the Wall Street Journal, though, the last several weeks have provided an opportunity for Obama to face a new reality of having no firewall on Capitol Hill, largely because of his own policies and performance. With one eye on the typical lame-duck project of establishing a legacy, Obama has begun an outreach to the opposition leadership, Carol Lee reported on Friday: The White House...

[Hillary Rodham Clinton said]: "Kissinger is a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state. He checked in with me regularly, sharing astute observations about foreign leaders and sending me written reports on his travels."

For those of us who oppose ObamaCare both on principle and on practical considerations, repeal is the only possible fix we can see. For those who support ObamaCare on principle, the only path is to allow it to roll out completely so its benefits can be fully seen — although it’s worth pointing out that even the law’s originators in the White House apparently don’t agree, since they keep unilaterally delaying full implementation as the law creates more political disasters. Polling shows that the electorate is somewhere in the middle, with a plurality or thin majority wanting fixes now within...

Looking at Newt's record: From his love of the transnationalist Tofflers to the Department of Education, global warming(Pelosi/couch), "The Era of Reagan is dead", the fairness doctrine, GATT, and a few other things that I'm currently forgetting, it's safe to say that Newt is a big government guy. Yet, as speaker of the house(94) he did some good things, many things that I agree with and like. So Newt was big government before the 1994 sweep, and big government afterwards, then isn't it safe to say that his years as speaker of the house - his years as a "conservative"...

“In the speech that the president gave to Congress, he didn’t propose any new taxes. The speech was $250 billion in tax cuts, $250 billion in spending over a period of two to three years. It focused mostly on a rather innovative set of payroll tax cuts and incentives to hire people. “I personally don’t believe we ought to be raising taxes or cutting spending until we get this economy off the ground. If we cut government spending, which I normally would be very inclined to do when the deficit’s this big, with interest rates already near zero you can’t...

Former President Bill Clinton, still widely considered one of his party’s foremost politicians, said on Wednesday that Democrats should cut a “reasonable” deal with Republicans on Medicare savings rather than conclude from Tuesday’s upset in a special Congressional election that bashing Republicans on the issue is the key to a party comeback in 2012. Mr. Clinton’s message, while more politically pointed, followed similar comments on Wednesday morning from Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner as both responded to a Democrat’s victory in a conservative district in upstate New York. The race turned on House Republicans’ budget plan to replace Medicare with...

President Barack Obama has always believed that America succeeds when business succeeds. He has a deep, abiding commitment to doing what is necessary to strengthen our economy and make America more competitive. That is why, having spent decades in government and business myself, I was amazed to see the critical comments George Buckley, chief executive and chairman of 3M, made in the Financial Times this week, when he dubbed the president as “anti-business”. As a government our responsibility is to lay the foundations for the private sector to thrive; indeed, that is at the heart of our strategy for growth....

The Senate has rejected a plan backed by President Barack Obama to create a bipartisan task force to tackle the deficit this year.

It's going to be interesting to watch House Speaker Nancy Pelosi play bad cop to President Obama's good cop. He's presenting himself as the agent of consensus building; she's swinging the partisan hammer. He invites Republicans up to the White House for talks. She puts together the votes that make the Republicans irrelevant, then announces the results from the floor.She will be the keeper of the Democratic agenda just as Newt Gingrich was the keeper of the Republican agenda. It's a position that will help her with her own party membership, but will play havoc with her image nationally.

Nizar Rayyan, the Hamas military commander who was killed in Thursday's air raid on his home in the Jabalya refugee camp, was a sworn enemy not only of Israel, but also of the Palestinian Authority and its president, Mahmoud Abbas. Rayyan, who had four wives and a dozen children, led the Hamas militiamen who defeated Abbas's security forces in the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2007. He is the third most senior Hamas leader to be killed by Israel, after the targeted killings of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in March 2004 and his successor, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, a...

He ain't triangulating, he's my post-partisan. That's Eugene Robinson innovative new MSM means of covering for Barack Obama. As Obama sprints toward the center and away from many of the positions that won him the nomination from the liberal Dem base, WaPo columnist Robinson has suggested that the nominee isn't engaging in the kind of cynical "triangulating" that made Bill Clinton famous. No, Obama's just being the real post-partisan he really was all along. EUGENE ROBINSON: "My headline tonight is a question: is it post-partisanship, or plain old triangulation? I think everyone's instinct, when we heard Barack Obama talk about...

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Clintons Suffer From Premature Triangulation Penn, a professional pollster who was political adviser to President Bill Clinton, is chief strategist for Hillary Clinton's campaign. He has embraced the triangulation -- coming across as a third force somewhere between the liberal and conservative poles -- that characterized Bill Clinton's politics after 1994, based on advice from Dick Morris. To many Democratic operatives, Penn's triangulation prematurely introduced a general election strategy when in fact the party nomination was still in doubt. Clinton was even more obviously engaged in triangulation in September, when she voted for a resolution declaring the Iranian Revolutionary...

Sen. Hillary Clinton faces tonight's Iowa caucuses not as the inevitable Democratic presidential nominee but seriously challenged by Sen. Barack Obama, thanks in no small part to committing a strategic error: premature triangulation. The problem is reflected by what happened to a proposal for a simplified, though sweeping, health care plan. One longtime Democratic consultant, not involved in any campaign this time, suggested that Clinton propose a genuine universal health care scheme. Everybody would be covered by Medicare, except people who chose to retain their private health insurance plans. The consultant gave the idea to somebody close to the senator,...

According to The Politico, New York Post columnist and FOX News contributor Dick Morris has been secretly advising former client Mike Huckabee on his Presidential campaign. Morris claims he is acting in an entirely voluntary capacity by simply offering free advice. Keep in mind that nationally syndicated columnist George Will was pilloried by the media when it became public that he had secretly and voluntarily helped Ronald Reagan prepare for his Presidential debates in 1980. A prominent national GOP insider tells Politics1 that he believes Morris -- despite his claims to the contrary -- is paid for his services through...

Summary: At a Democratic debate in Philadelphia, Sen. Hillary Clinton ducked some questions and gave misleading answers to others. She falsely implied that the reason White House documents about her communications with her husband haven't been released is due to bureaucratic delays, and she avoided saying whether she would ask Bill Clinton to clear their release from the National Archives. She avoided a yes-or-no answer to whether she supports giving New York driver's licenses to illegal immigrants and at one point denied saying the idea made sense, when in fact she said less than two weeks earlier that it "makes...