Dear GOP, Americans Are Just Not That Into You: Maher

Orthodoxy vies with electability among party faithful

(NEWSER) - Herman Cain's surprise win in Florida's straw poll yesterday shows how unpredictable this election cycle is—but it also provides some valuable lessons about that state of the GOP nation, reports the St. Petersburg Times .

• The top GOP contender is still Not-Mitt-Romney: Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry—Republicans are still waiting for the great candidate who can lead them to the chosen land. All they know for now is that frontrunner Romney is not him. Next up ... Chris Christie? .
• It's too late for a new candidate: A major reason Perry imploded was that he just did not have enough time to get the infrastructure in place that he needed. Money, volunteers, the whole process takes way too much work to ramp up so late in the game. So maybe Christie is not an option, after all.

Journos' 'language of conspiracy' stems from lack of understanding: Ross Douthat

(NEWSER) - Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry’s time in the spotlight has brought back a “fear of theocracy” not seen since the days of George W. Bush. Liberals are concerned that “Christian extremism is again on the march,” writes Ross Douthat in the New York Times . And while it’s fair for the media to question how candidates’ faiths might influence their policy, Douthat wishes journalists would follow some key ground rules:

• Remember that conservative Christianity has its own centers and fringes; don’t count the radicals as the best representatives of a given viewpoint.

Republican star minces words at rally for Bachmann

(NEWSER) - Sarah Palin had a little fun with the Republican Party’s reputation as the “Party of No” during a rally in Minnesota for Rep. Michele Bachmann … or maybe she just got a bit tongue-tied. “Republicans have been getting criticized lately with this, this mistaken concept, I guess, sort of surrounding Republicans right now that they’re the Party of No,” she said. So the GOP’s not that party, then? More»

Obama allowed Democrats to scorn Republican input: Rove

(NEWSER) - President Obama's televised question-and-answer session with House Republicans was a photo-op aimed at boosting his poll numbers instead of a real effort to seek input from the GOP, writes Karl Rove. The beleaguered president did get a modest bounce after the meeting, but it came at the expense of further alienating the GOP with his dishonest answers on the budget and stimulus package, Rove notes in the Wall Street Journal . More»

President's miscalculations include scale, momentum

(NEWSER) - Scott Brown’s Senate victory in Massachusetts is the final nail in the coffin of the Obama administration’s first-year political strategy, John F. Harris and Carol E. Lee write for Politico . The miscalculations cover “three major counts":

• Believing 2008 was a game-changer: The Obama team thought the "election represented something seismic." But "the assumption that Obama would be swimming mostly with the current rather than often against it on issues such as health care, financial regulation and global warming was naive in retrospect."