At long last, the 2012 Republican presidential nominating calendar is coming into focus. But it is not all that GOP schedule makers wanted. Rather than a February start in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, Florida's recent decision to hold its primary Jan. 31 has moved all the other early-voting states forward a month.
With 13 months still to go before the end of another presidential cycle that began the day after the last one finished, it's worth asking: Does it have to be this way?
As "Occupy Wall Street" sweeps up attention, a smaller group is running something called Occupy K Street. If the goal is to loosen the financiers' grip over the American economy, the folks protesting on K Street are getting closer to bingo. K Street is Washington's famous boulevard of lobbyist influence, the place where money buys politicians to do money's bidding.
How dangerous is the European financial condition? On Monday, while stock markets from the DAX and FTSE to the New York Stock Exchange were up sharply on report of French and German cooperative murmurs regarding sovereign debt negotiations (and on temporary easing of U.S. double-dip recession fears), the financial and political European press were warning of a coming financial crisis of unmatched dimensions.
"Home-Health Firms Blasted." The headline refers to a Senate Finance Committee finding that major providers of home-based services to Medicare patients were bilking the government program. Big time.
Leadership, said New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in his press conference Tuesday announcing he would not reverse his decision not to run for president, is something you can't be taught or learn. "Leadership today in America has to be about doing the big things and being courageous."
In the last election cycle, several "non-politician politicians" -- candidates who have never held public office who ran for a major office -- went from obscurity to high office.
William F. Buckley, Jr., founding father of the modern conservative movement, famously asserted his doctrine of voting for the most conservative candidate who is electable.
In Washington, D.C., conference rooms, the proposed pipeline running from Alberta, Canada, to Texas refineries on the Gulf of Mexico may look rather attractive. The 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline would supply the United States with abundant crude from a friendly neighbor. It would create 20,000 jobs, says owner TransCanada. And it would be reasonably safe for the environment, according to a U.S. State Department study.
Is Herman Cain a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination? It's a question no one in the pundit world was asking until the past week.
Cain has never held public office. When he ran for the Senate in Georgia in 2004, he lost the primary by a 52 percent to 26 percent margin.
Just a day before Election Day, the painful reality hit home for Jimmy Carter: He was toast.
Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels did not attract as large a crowd when he spoke at American Enterprise Institute (where I am a resident fellow) earlier this week as he did when several months ago, before he disappointed admirers by announcing that he wouldn't run for president.
More speech is not necessarily a positive development. News sites' online forums have unleashed speech in quantity, for sure. But they've given a stage to swarms of moronic insults and outright lies, most cloaked in anonymity or false identities. Such comments waste our time -- but of larger concern, they degrade the civic culture and undermine thoughtful attempts to craft public policy.
President Obama, like most American presidents, is lucky that the public pays little attention to foreign policy and rarely casts its votes on the basis of presidential foreign-policy performance. It required something as dramatic as the November 1979 Iranian seizing of our diplomats as hostages, followed the next month by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to turn Jimmy Carter's foreign policy mess into a major negative issue for him in his failed 1980 re-election bid.
To what are Americans entitled? Government-guaranteed health coverage in old age? Government-guaranteed health coverage at any age? Subsidized housing if they're low income? Subsidized food? Subsidies for growing wheat but not making shoes? Subsidies for homeowning?
The Republicans' presidential debate Thursday night sponsored by Fox News and Google gave primary voters and caucus-goers at least one good reason to reject every candidate on the stage. The interesting question now is whether someone else will enter the race -- at just about the same point in the election cycle in which Bill Clinton entered the Democratic race in 1991.
As Barack Obama huffs and puffs about his tax plan, which is unlikely to pass in the Democratic-majority Senate much less the Republican-controlled House, Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, has provided a much broader view of where the United States stands amid great changes in the world and some useful guidance on what direction public policy ought to take.
Anyone who has seen a friend kick an addiction -- be it to alcohol, drugs or cigarettes -- knows the extreme discomfort and force of will required. America has long suffered repeated bouts of binging on real estate. The booms inevitably trigger busts, one of which we're now in deep.
In one of the least needed reassurances in modern political history, President Obama's top political man David Plouffe, "told Democrats late last week that the White House would not suffer from overconfidence. 'What I don't want to suggest is that we're sitting around and thinking everything is great,' he said."
President Obama's deficit-cutting plan is not perfect, but close to it. It's fiscally smart and politically smart.
