Second prize in the GOP presidential contest is a lucrative stint as a commentator for Fox News, and the Pizza Man has a lock on that, which makes it surprising that Karl Rove is the first to count him out as the nominee. Holding up a list of Cain flip-flops and walkbacks, his future colleague decrees that it “has created an image of him as not being up to this task. That’s really deadly.” But in the Fox alternate-reality stable, that’s no disqualification—-check out Sarah Palin, Mike...

Barack Obama has answered a question David Petraeus posed eight years ago. A division commander as the Iraq invasion began in 2003, the General was troubled about what a young Illinois legislator would call a dumb war, asking “Tell me how this ends.” Over 4400 American lives and more than a trillion dollars later, President Obama has replied to Petraeus by withdrawing all troops from Iraq by year’s end. In his Weekly Address, the President notes, “As we remove the last of our troops from...

Eric Cantor is a rising Washington star, as JFK was when he published his 1955 best seller about political fortitude. But sadly Cantor doesn’t have a stylish collaborator like Ted Sorensen, and his turgid essay on American success was scheduled for more turbulent times, producing a chapter to qualify for “Profiles in Caution.” At the Wharton School of Business yesterday, the House Majority Leader was to enlighten future tycoons about income inequality when his staff made the discovery that...

News from Libya provokes reactions as weird as the man himself: “CBS: Qaddafi. ABC: Gadhafi. NBC: Khaddafy,” tweets a White House correspondent. A satellite radio reporter adds: “Gadhafi is dead–someone reach into his wallet and look at his driver’s license so we finally know how to spell his last name!” Along with death jokes, a tyrant’s last minutes are on prime-time in a cellphone cinéma vérité montage for family viewing, a long way from early days of TV when Abraham...

A year ago, Washington rumors had Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton switching jobs for 2012, and that was before the Tea Party wrecking crew came in, brought government to a standstill and created an anti-Obama climate that threatens a hostile takeover of the White House next year. (President Perry? Cain? A compliant Romney?) The idea was dismissed out of hand back then, even though Bob Woodward, after months researching an Obama book, said, “It’s on the table. And some of Hillary Clinton’s...

The candidate who gained most from a Republican bickerfest in Las Vegas was the one who saved airfare and stayed in New Hampshire talking to voters face to face. At the very least, Jon Huntsman was not embarrassed by squabbling on the stage. It started with Rick Santorum introducing himself as someone who was going to catch the redeye to be with his daughter in the hospital and quickly went downhill in political relevance. Starting in poll-numbers order, Herman Cain took 999 heat but kept insisting...

Rupert Murdoch seems sufficiently recovered from his Fleet Street troubles to be tapping into the Wall Street protesters with the full weight of his attack journalism. Yesterday he takes down the Journal paywall to tell us all: “In interviews, protesters show that they are leftists out of step with most American voters. Yet Democrats are embracing them anyway.” A former Bill Clinton pollster, based on results of “the first systematic random sample” (oxymoron, anyone?), reports that “the...

Force-feeding was an unexpected subject this weekend as Herman Cain aces a “Meet the Press” grilling while gourmands stuff themselves with soon-to-be-illegal foie gras at a Los Angeles eat-in protest. David Gregory does little to ruffle the candidate’s smooth-as-pate patter, even as Associated Press reveals that Cain’s “economic ideas, support and organization have close ties to two billionaire brothers who bankroll right-leaning causes through their group Americans for Prosperity.” On...

Police arrested 175 Occupy Chicago protesters in Grant Park yesterday, recalling not only the night Barack Obama was elected but one when I was tear-gassed there 43 years ago. [corrected: see comments] “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible,” the President-elect told 250,000 celebrants three years ago, “who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy,...

With twelve months to go before The Election, Occupy Wall Street has to morph soon into more than a messy mirror image of the Tea Party without its political focus. Half a century ago the emotional energy of street theater protest was not enough to save America. We started the 1960s with a Cuban Missile Crisis victory of JFK followed by the Civil Right Act and Great Society dreams of LBJ, but the rage over Vietnam and what it did to the economy gave us Nixon, four more years of war and Watergate....

Mitt Romney is liked but not well-liked. Herman Cain could sell ice cubes to Eskimos. Images from post-World War II theater arise as “Death of a Salesman” meets “The Music Man” in a 21st century culture clash that defies rational explanation. Like “Dr.” Harold Hill, who sold band instruments and uniforms without knowing how to read music, Cain is dazzling even stubborn Iowans with his 9-9-9 version of “76 Trombones.” Alongside him, “inevitable candidate” Romney is looking like...

The next debate may have to carry fact-check subtitles but, to get the flavor of this one, the Caucus blog parses some of the more flagrant examples of Truthiness. My favorite is Newt Gingrich’s inversion of an advisory on prostate tests for men from a policy that could save lives and needless suffering into an example of Sarah Palin’s death panels, which was named “The Lie of the Year” in 2009 by an award-winning fact check site. But how to choose? Practically everything out of Michele Bachmann’s...

Mushrooming from lower Manhattan, the inchoate backlash brings expectable reactions in Washington from Democratic cheerleading to GOP hypocrisy. As Eric Cantor calls protesters “a mob…pitting Americans against Americans,” Nancy Pelosi reminds the Tea Party toad, “I didn’t hear him say anything when the Tea Party was out demonstrating, actually spitting on members of Congress right here in the Capitol, and he and his colleagues were putting signs in the windows encouraging them.” But...

The clearest voice for sanity in the GOP race has gone all in for tonight’s New Hampshire debate with a foreign-policy speech that actually makes sense. But will sanity sell? “We still have remnants of a top-heavy, post-cold war infrastructure,” Jon Huntsman says. “It needs to be transformed to reflect the 21st Century world and the growing asymmetric threats we face.” The former ambassador to China argues that “America once had a foreign policy based on containment–the containment...

In this political climate of loud no’s and yesses, good journalism is vital to disentangle all the maybes and what if’s. As Republicans brand the 2009 stimulus of $787 billion a total failure and Democrats defend it as keeping the recession from getting worse, Ezra Klein of the Washington Post reports what economists and politicians were actually thinking and doing back then. He cites the 2008 book of Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, “This Time Is Different,” a study of nine centuries of financial...

This weekend, GOP presidential candidates are groveling at the “Values Voters Summit” in Washington, a noisy minority with frontrunner Mitt Romney defending his faith from attacks as “a cult.” All this is reported with a straight face by media large and small, who a generation ago would have dismissed such fringe doings as a crackpot sideshow. Today, the Tea Party and the Religious Right hold America hostage, with few signs of dissent among America’s real Silent Majority (not the one Nixon...

The contest for the GOP presidential nomination is like one of those grade-school elocution contests, in which the winner was always the kid who declaimed the best, without the least idea of what he or she was talking about. Herman Cain is spouting nonsense, but he does it with enough verbal dexterity to keep pundits busy pointing out that none of it makes sense while Tea Party voters lap it up. Rick Perry, on the other hand, has dived in the polls, less for his policy positions than hoof-in-mouth...

With Chris Christie and Sarah Palin folding, it looks like Mitt Romney has won the Republican tontine—-a survivor not a savior. As he celebrates on the campaign trail in Florida, he may be within shouting distance of his logical running mate, freshman Sen. Marco Rubio, the Tea Party favorite who would bring youth, Latino-ness and a few months of legislative experience to the ticket. Rubio has been busy polishing his credentials. Just back from a trip to Libya with John McCain, the 40-year-old...

A majority now see Barack Obama as a one-term president and he calls himself the “underdog,” but social networks may be changing the political landscape for 2012 in a way that the new medium of television did during the “youthquake” of the 1960s. What started as a small disorganized rally on Wall Street three weeks ago is spreading to Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and elsewhere into a movement. “With little organization and a reliance on Facebook, Twitter and Google groups to share methods,”...

As the GOP plods through its revival of last century’s Absurdist masterpiece, “Waiting for Godot,” (Christie, Palin, whoever), there are reminders that Americans have an actual president trying to govern in the real world. In his Weekly Address, Barack Obama says, “It’s been almost three weeks since I sent the American Jobs Act to Congress–three weeks since I sent them a bill that would put people back to work and put money in people’s pockets…And now I want it back. It is...