Christian Broadcasting Network
The annual Conservative Political Action Conference is underway in Washington, D.C., and this year’s focus aims to kick out the Democrats and take back Congress.
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Barack Obama last night headed election fundraising events in two western states that played an important role in his 2008 election victory in what many see as his first attempt to shore up support for his re-election campaign in 2012.
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At an annual conference of grassroots conservatives, activists promised to crank up the pressure on Obama and his fellow Democrats and marveled at the political turnaround since he entered the White House in January 2009 on a wave of goodwill and high expectations.
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Set a group of plugged-in conservatives to talking presidential politics, and you’ll get the same complaints about the 2012 field.
Since then, though, he’s become America’s best governor. In a just world, Daniels’s record would make him the Tea Party movement’s favorite politician.
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Glenn Beck, a hero of the political right and the closing speaker at a conference of political conservatives here, offered a sweeping denunciation of progressivism on Saturday, calling it a cancer that must be cut out of the nation’s political system.
Mr. Paul, who inspired an intense following when he ran for president in 2008, swept the conference’s presidential straw poll. With 31 percent of the nearly 2,400 votes cast, he finished ahead of Mr. Romney, who won the straw poll last year and captured 22 percent of the vote on Saturday.
Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, who did not attend the conference, was third, with 7 percent of the vote, and Mr. Pawlenty received 6 percent.
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For all the talk of Sarah Palin these days, there are two Republicans who are already laying the groundwork to run for president in 2012 — Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts.
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At the same time, conservatives and Republican leaders face a challenge as they try to harness the Tea Party movement’s energy and sudden influx of new faces and views. Speakers showed no hesitation in denouncing Republicans, often with the same intensity they brought in denouncing Democrats; Tea Party leaders made clear that Republicans could no longer count on the automatic backing of conservatives.
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Senator Evan Bayh’s comments this week about a dysfunctional Congress reflected a complaint being directed at Washington with increasing frequency, and there is broad agreement among critics about Exhibit A: The unwillingness of the two parties to compromise to control a national debt that is rising to dangerous heights.
Yet rarely has the political system seemed more polarized and less able to solve big problems that involve trust, tough choices and little short-term gain. The main urgency for both parties seems to be about pinning blame on the other, before November’s elections, for deficits now averaging $1 trillion a year, the largest since World War II relative to the size of the economy.
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Today, that is a list of paid Fox News political analysts. Two years from now, it could be a list of Republican presidential candidates.
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Obama Stays Course, but the Winds Change
New York Times
But the record indicates that those shifts pale compared with the underlying constancy in Mr. Obama’s stated goals through huge events: the Wall Street crisis and subsequent bailout, his election, recovery from recession and rising joblessness, legislative gains and electoral losses.
“When you’re dealing with an economic crisis, it’s hard to achieve elegant communications,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s top strategist. Yet, Mr. Axelrod said, “when people ask me what is the most salient quality I have seen in Obama, the one that strikes me the most is his consistency.”