Barack Obama takes a step back on campaign finance. “We will not play by two sets of rules,” say his managers, announcing a superPAC to offset Republican money to defeat the President, despite his denunciation of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that unleashed tons of hard-to-identify funds for negative ads. As Mitt (“Corporations are people”) Romney edges closer to the GOP nomination, an Obama official explains the reversal: “We’ve been watching…the Republican primary...

Faced with the threat that a slowly improving economy may buoy the President’s reelection chances, Republican campaign strategy is tilting toward the Religious Right. After winning a tiny sliver of voters in three states, Rick Santorum is in Texas talking to pastors: “There’s not a management problem in Washington, all right. There’s a more foundational problem there that goes to the basic concepts of who we are as a people. And those are deeply moral questions… “I have...

When you find yourself agreeing with Donald Trump, it’s time for a sanity check. Still, The Donald knows about beauty contests (pace Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado), so he may be qualified to comment on the results: “Rick Santorum was a sitting senator who in re-election lost by 19 points, to my knowledge the most in the history of this country for a sitting senator to lose by 19 points. It’s unheard of. Then he goes out and says oh ‘okay’ I just lost by the biggest margin in history...

Reinventing yourself is a promise of the American Dream. Barack Obama, once a community organizer, is now in the Oval Office. Ronald Reagan, a movie actor, transformed himself into the same role. But evolution stops short of fantasy and now, as the GOP demonizes our 44th President and deifies the 40th, come reminders of the limits. Speaking near Reagan’s grave, Haley Barbour, a conservative, tells colleagues: “In the 2012 campaign every candidate for the Republican nomination has invoked Reagan…But...

As Mitt Romney takes another step to the nomination and gains momentum, the question of personal chemistry comes to the fore. Would Americans elect a president they viscerally dislike? In a Slate piece titled “Romney is Kerry. Maybe Gore,” Jacob Weisberg argues: “Romney strongly resembles two similarly unloved Democratic nominees from the recent past, Al Gore and John Kerry. Gore and Kerry both suffered from the same characterizations that get applied to Romney-—too wooden in person while...

Bill Day, Cagle Cartoons For a women’s magazine editor of half a century ago, the Planned Parenthood-Komen Foundation ugly furor recalls the time from introduction of the Pill when women, no matter what their circumstances, were without safe, reliable birth control and, before Roe v. Wade, had the choice of bearing unwanted children or being butchered by back-alley abortions. From the start, those new alternatives, sanctioned by science and government, were fiercely opposed by those of strong religious...

In Washington, the President affirms his humility at a National Prayer Breakfast to be followed by ego gone amok in Las Vegas as Donald Trump, after hinting for days he will endorse Gingrich, bestows his grace on Romney. Here is a contrast in current American culture between the place of the Cross and the Double-Cross as Barack Obama underscores “Jesus’s teaching that ‘for unto to whom much is given, much shall be required’” as Trump, to whom much was given at birth, grabs for more attention...

After spending all that money to win Florida big, the $21.7 million-a-year man takes a victory lap and disgorges a perfect line for attack ads on him in the future. “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there,” he tells CNN. “If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90 percent, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.” Must be some kind...

Reelecting Barack Obama this year won’t be enough. Unless Democrats retake Congress, gridlock in Washington won’t end. Now, a Democratic statistician reports that winning back the House of Representatives “is in the realm of possibility,” citing “a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, in which, when asked which party they prefer to control Congress, voters cited Democrats, 47 to 41 percent, as well as a recent National Journal poll that found 48 percent of voters prefer Democrats to take...

No GOP slugfests for the next three weeks—-how will we get through the month? Sunday Gingrich gave us some venom to go, in the parking lot of a Florida mega-church with a Starbucks in the lobby, tagging Mitt as a “pro-abortion, pro-gun-control, pro-tax-increase moderate from Massachusetts” with “money from Wall Street” to spread lies about him, “as big an outrage as I’ve had in my career.” (Aside from that, Mrs. Romney, did you enjoy the Sunday service?) Nationally,...

A Gail Collins admirer has to tell her she has been taken in by Republican plagiarism of Michelle Obama. In her column, she writes about Gingrich’s marital history and conservative voters: “When all else fails, they have even been known to argue that everybody does it. ‘I’m just saying, they all have stinky feet,’ former Congressman J. C. Watts, a Baptist preacher, said while he was campaigning for Newt in South Carolina. “Although actually, when you’re talking about 1) Committing adultery,...

After months of trying to ameliorate a disease ravaging the GOP, Jon Huntsman Jr. has moved into fighting cancers that afflict human beings rather than the body politic by taking over as chairman of a foundation that funds his family’s Institute, a research, education and treatment center with a full-time faculty and staff of 1300. In his political hiatus, Huntsman worked hard but failed to offer Republicans the radical surgery that might have saved it from the coma in which it now seems to be...

For a while the other day, my life turned upside down—-literally. My computer screen inverted itself and would not return to normal no what matter what I did. After numerous shutdowns, I adjusted to a world in which the cursor moved in the opposite direction from the mouse, managed to find a “restore point” and, clicking on it, brought the screen back to normal. Curious about why the computer had turned on me, I Googled for an explanation and found it, but the experience has led me into wondering...

Ghosts of GOP past are rising from political tombs to sound alarms about Newt in the White House even as the last Florida debate has him on the defensive about the past and future. Gingrich fails in his attempt to use Wolf Blitzer as the kind of tackle dummy he made out of CNN colleague John King in South Carolina, while 1996 candidate Bob Dole is joined by Tom Delay, Ann Coulter, Elliott Abrams and other Conservatives in a Matt Drudge firing squad against the former Speaker. “If Gingrich is the...

…is the GOP Congress as the President does a deft job of trying to reboot his final year with small unilateral steps to get around the pachyderm squatting on the path to economic recovery, leading up to a plea for bipartisan cooperation on larger issues that hits a blank wall in the faces of McConnell, Boehner, Cantor and their Tea Party obstructionists. Without explicit blame, Barack Obama (the man knows how to work a room) acts out a psychodrama of the leader who killed bin Laden and saved...

In the wake of a relatively brisk, civilized debate, ringmaster Gingrich is complaining about losing his rabble-rousing rights. Reacting to NBC’s control of the kind of whooping and cheering that went on in South Carolina, Newt’s morning-after regret is that “I wish in retrospect I’d protested when Brian Williams took them out of it because I think it’s wrong. And I think he took them out of it because the media is terrified that the audience is going to side with the candidates against...

Now that future Presidents Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have had their say, a person named Barack Obama, who claims to hold the office, will face TV cameras tonight with what purports to be a State of the Union address. Fact-checking of Gingrich and Romney eliminates many of their more stimulating claims, reducing Mr. Obama to such boring proposals as refinancing for homeowners in trouble, tax breaks for companies that bring back jobs to the United States and clean energy incentives along with new...

During the 1960 campaign, JFK said he felt sorry for Nixon: “It must be hard getting up every morning and having to decide who you’re going to be that day.” Now, Mitt Romney’s authenticity problem is front and center. Wobbling into a belated release of some tax returns for whenever, he is, like Nixon back then, still trying to create a real person Republican voters can believe in. The obvious answer to Romney resistance is that he appears willing (flip-flops, anyone?) to be or do anything...

In South Carolina, Prof. Gingrich combined theology with science: When a snake, i.e. the media, drops a bitten apple on you, deflect it back and reverse the momentum of your campaign. Not quite Sir Isaac’s formulation, but Dr. Karl Rove, Newt’s former colleague at Fox University, validates the theory, “John King couldn’t have set up the question in a more positive way for Gingrich to just nail it and haul it right out of the park.” Credit this new formulation to a series of earlier debate...

The tone of Thursday night’s GOP séance was set in the first minute, not by the candidates or moderator, but whooping and applause of hand-picked partisans in the hall when Newt Gingrich attacked CNN’s John King and all the media as “despicable” for asking about his second wife’s character charges against him that had dominated the news cycle all day. In contrast, for 1960’s first presidential debate ever between JFK and Nixon, the only people in the studio, besides a panel of four journalists...

Is Mel Brooks directing this movie? Tonight’s final South Carolina debate will no doubt start as usual with the gang sitting under the palmettos full of Tea Party beans, competing to exude the loudest brain gas about Barack Obama and one another, but where do they go from there? Will Rick Perry, who almost started a war with Turkey last time, punch another horse? (Nope, late news is that he’s doing a “Shane” and riding off into the sunset.) Can Ron Paul, booed for preaching...

Apology is overdue to George W. Romney for my remembering him only as an unsophisticated man whose remarks about being “brainwashed” in Vietnam cost him the 1968 GOP nomination. In Rolling Stone, Rick Pearlstein summons up the elder Romney, with ancient videotape, to recall a time when some politicians still tried to tell the truth, even if it derailed their ambitions. The lessons Mitt Romney drew from his father’s defeat were all the wrong ones. Back then, George Romney was a successful auto...

The First Lady turns 48 today. I know because an e-mail from the President last week reminded me with two links to a fund-raising site: “The decision to become part of this campaign was deeply personal for a lot of people, and Michelle and I are no exception… “This fall, Michelle and I will have been married 20 years. The next 10 months will be harder than any we’ve experienced together, and I couldn’t do it without her. I know she’d love to hear from you today.” With...

Five years ago, in another political world when Barack Obama was getting ready to run for president, I wrote this: West Side residents of Chicago now have a U.S. Senator who looks like them and it may be, in more ways than one, due to the man whose birthday we celebrate tomorrow. Martin Luther King Jr. preached nonviolence to the oppressed. “Our weapon is love,” he told them, and he used it with stunning force. At the dawn of TV, he brought into American homes images of peaceful Southern protesters...

The PBS series is becoming the “West Wing” and “Sopranos” of the century’s second decade, mirroring Americans’ longing for escape from the Obama and Tea Party era as surely as its predecessors reflected a desire for a more human society, high and low, during George W. Bush’s time. As second season ratings soar, what is “Downton Abbey” telling us about ourselves? In midlife, a dozen friends and I hired a small bus with a guide to tour England’s stately homes. After a week, the...