Election 2012 has had few surprises. So it's somewhat surprising that heading into the final weekend of the election season, we are unable to confidently project who is likely to win the White House.
When reading one of the endless stories about a just-released poll Thursday night, a pair of numbers struck my eye: 60 and 37.
In Election 2000, Florida was the decisive state in the Electoral College. In 2004, Ohio was the ultimate battleground that put George W. Bush over the top. This year, it might come down to Wisconsin.
Mitt Romney is running ads explaining that he does not object to birth control. But no one questions his stance that women should have, as the ads say, "access" to contraception. They already do. They also have access to Coach handbags and flights to Acapulco. And that's where the Romney smokescreen, intended to close a gender gap favoring Democrats, needs clearing.
Back in May, I wrote a column laying out possible scenarios for the 2012 campaign different from the conventional wisdom that it would be a long, hard slog through a fixed list of target states like the race in 2004.
On TV, my Fox colleague Bill O'Reilly says, "The recession was brought on largely by greedy Wall Street corporations."
Give me a break.
Dubach, La., was named "Dogtrot Capital of the World," and how cool is that? Very cool in the "small house" obsession embraced by urban hipsters. A dogtrot house is typically a modest home in which the cooking and living sections are divided by a breezeway (the dogtrot). Another Southern invention is the "shotgun house," a narrow rectangle whose handful of rooms line in a row. Elvis was born in one.
How will this election be seen in history? Obviously, it depends on who wins. If Barack Obama is defeated, the irresistible comparison will be with Jimmy Carter. A one-term president was rejected after pursuing big government programs amid high energy prices and attacks on America in the Middle East.
When innocent citizens asked about unemployment last night at the town hall presidential debate on Long Island, would Mitt Romney again tout his plan to create 12 million jobs? Unable to Etch-a-Sketch away that often repeated claim -- one that he has hired several conservative economists to endorse -- the Republican candidate had little choice. It's up on his campaign website, it's there in his own well-advertised words, and it is the central appeal of his candidacy for the non-billionaire voting bloc.
When 2012 began, the presidential race looked too close to call, but most analysts thought the Republicans had a good chance to win control of the Senate. The numbers were just too daunting for the Democrats. They had too many seats to defend and too many vulnerable incumbents.
An interesting story from last winter: An email friend who lives in an affluent suburb far from Washington, a staunch Republican, was watching one of the Republican debates with his wife, a staunch Democrat.
Nine years ago, the Ohio Art Co. closed its Etch A Sketch operation in Bryan, Ohio, and moved the jobs to Shenzhen, China. The 100 laid-off American workers weren't surprised. They'd been training their Chinese replacements.
We take free speech for granted in America, unlike elsewhere. The furor over that anti-Muslim video is the latest reminder of that.
A weird war between the generations is growing, and the Republican candidates are the mongers.
When a politician is in trouble, he usually falls back on what he knows best -- the world he saw around him when he entered into political awareness as a young adult.
Driverless cars are on the horizon, and we can all start feeling ancient now. The youngest among us will remember the days when we had to keep our hands on the steering wheel and foot near the brake. Joining "icebox" and "fire stable" will be such terms as "behind the wheel," "pedal to the metal" and "in the driver's seat."
According to Political Class pundits, the race for the White House was turned upside down by a single debate. The reality, however, is that a very close race shifted ever so slightly from narrowly favoring President Obama to narrowly favoring Mitt Romney. Either way, it remains too close to call.
Unemployment is still too high, income is still too low and the recovery is still much too slow -- but the United States is faring considerably better than other developed nations against the threat of a renewed recession.
"The Illegal-Donor Loophole" is the headline of a Daily Beast story by Peter Schweizer of the conservative Government Accountability Institute and Peter Boyer, former reporter at The New Yorker and The New York Times.
We live in the Divided Era of American politics. Nearly equal numbers of people are now on the side of almost every political issue. This phenomenon of partisanship is neither accidental nor temporary. Throughout all of history, the larger the stakes the more divided a people and the larger the government, the larger the stakes. This year, the presidential election is taking America to new partisan heights.
