Obama Makes GOP Miss Clinton

Long Timeline and GOP Opposition Have Stifled Support

(NEWSER) - Bill Clinton thought that once it was signed into law, Barack Obama's health care reform bill would become amazingly popular. But the polls are in, and now Clinton admits he miscalculated, the Hill reports. "First of all, the benefits of the bill are spread out of three or four years," he told Meet the Press. “And secondly, there has been an enormous and highly effective attack on it.” More»

Birthers, Limbaugh, Beck fill vacuum as Obama tries to stay above the fray

(NEWSER) - As recently as this spring, the Tea Party movement seemed anemic and wonky. But in the months that followed, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and others whipped the right-wing fringe into such a frenzy that a “separate reality grew like a second head on the American polity,” Philip Weiss writes in a New York magazine deconstruction of the anti-Obama movement. Nobody gets off easy: "I blame the whole birther movement on bad PR by the Obama campaign," says a veteran journalist. "They really bungled it." More»

(NEWSER) - President Obama’s agenda plays a very small role in the massive deficits facing the country, but it won't do anything to correct them, wither the New York Times reports. After reviewing a decade’s worth of Congressional Budget Office reports, the paper explains how the government turned a $800 billion surplus into a $1.2 trillion deficit: More»

GOP can check rush toward big government

(NEWSER) - The “day of reckoning” has come for Republicans, writes William Kristol in the Washington Post. On Tuesday, President Obama delivered “the most unabashedly liberal and big-government speech” since Lyndon Johnson, and seems poised to undo the whole Reagan agenda. “Conservatives can’t win politically right now,” says Kristol. Their only hope is to “find reasons to obstruct and delay” Obama’s agenda. More»

But Dems are in a better position than they were under Clinton

(NEWSER) - Barack Obama is banking on change, but Republicans are betting things haven’t changed much at all. They’re hoping to bounce back from the political wasteland using the same playbook that swept them into power in 1994, Jeanne Cummings writes in Politico. The strategy: Unite against Democrats' economic policy, and campaign against health care reform and spending scandals. More»