Imagine if someone assured you on Election Day morning of the following:  Barack Obama would barely exceed John McCain’s 2008 popular vote total, and he’d win almost 8 million fewer votes among whites, 1.5 million fewer votes among blacks, 4 million fewer from women and almost 2 million fewer from voters aged 18-29 than he did in 2008…

With a clear victory ushering in his second term, President Barack Obama is in the driver’s seat for the next three months. From now until February, he will negotiate some sort of tax deal with Republican House Speaker John Boehner, deliver his second inaugural address and speak to the nation about the State of the Union.  In each case,…

Barack Obama, it turns out, is not magic. That was the opening I had prepared for a column announcing Mitt Romney’s defeat of the 44th president, but it turns out that it applies equally – and perhaps more menacingly – to the reality of Obama being reelected with surprising ease on Tuesday night. Obama’s not magic. He’…

For those who are right of center, this week’s election results look worse and worse the longer they are stared at. The situation is this: When all the votes are counted, Mitt Romney’s raw vote total will be almost exactly equivalent to the pathetic numbers achieved by John McCain four years earlier. Ten times more money, at least, was…

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again.  There is nothing new under the sun.  ~Ecclesiastes 1:9  Regardless of one’s religious outlook, that famous Ecclesiastical wisdom neatly captures the essence of conservative thought.  Moreover, it bears consideration no matter whom America elects as President…

Almost exactly four years ago, as a speechwriter serving George W. Bush in the final days of his presidency, I stood on a terrace outside of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (the gargantuan facility directly adjacent to the West Wing) puffing on a cigarette – the only fleeting respite one could find from the manic schedule of a White…

If you’re weary of the constant campaigning and looking forward to a quiet lame duck session from Congress, think again.  Once the winner for President is declared, attention in Washington will shift immediately to debating “Taxmageddon,” the $500 billion tax hike that takes effect January 1.  If Congress fails to act,…

Apparently, Democrats are just as irresponsible with their own dollars as they are with taxpayer dollars.  In fact, considering recent revelations that the Obama campaign accepts donations from illegal foreign sources, they’re even blowing foreigners’ money.  Regardless, perhaps it’s finally time for Debbie Wasserman-Schultz…

Back in January of 2009 – a time when Barack Obama still believed that scripture could issue from somewhere other than his own lips – the new president saw fit to cite the Bible in his inaugural address, telling the overflow crowd on the National Mall in Washington that “the time has come to set aside childish things,” a reference…

In 2008, 66 percent of voters ages 18 to 29 helped put Barack Obama in the White House.  Four years later, they are suffering the consequences.  Anyone in or familiar with the 20-something cohort knows about the group’s depressing economic prospects.  Currently, 53 percent of college graduates under 25 are unemployed or underemployed…

Now is a time not to bury George W. Bush, but to praise him. One of Governor Mitt Romney’s best answers in Tuesday night’s debate came when he was asked to differentiate himself from former President Bush. Romney correctly and effectively distanced himself from Bush’s deficit spending, believably pledged to do more to encourage fossil…

On Tuesday night, President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney met for their second debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. Unlike his listless performance in the first debate in Denver, the president this time was energetic and aggressive. What he wasn’t, however, was particularly cogent. Here, then, are some of his most misleading statements…

Desperately grasping for a rationale other than Barack Obama’s utter implosion as a public speaker after last week’s inaugural presidential debate, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow took to the air in the moments after the scrimmage and called the result a draw, noting peevishly that the proceedings had spun out of control thanks to the absentee…

Leading into the vice-presidential debate on Thursday night, Mitt Romney obviously had the momentum in the presidential race – but he still has left a number of useful issues in a file drawer somewhere rather than effectively using them on the campaign trail. The Obama team, on the other hand, has hit Romney on just about every conceivable weakness…

Parents with the good sense to resist the hysterical impulses of modern child-rearing – where the young are handled with a delicacy previously reserved for antique porcelain – have long understood a counterintuitive fact: Kids who get filthy, run around outdoors and even eat the occasional serving of dirt tend to have fewer health…

If this election is a close one, it could well be stolen by what would otherwise be the losing side. Those weren’t the exact words uttered in a program last Friday at the Heritage Foundation by co-authors of an important new book, but that’s one practical message an attentive listener would take away from the event. The authors are John…

Good policy is good politics. While policy wonkishness rarely wins major elections, it is true that voters in tough times sometimes do want a sense, backed by at least some details, of how a candidate proposes to change things. For whatever reason, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has gone a bit light on the policy front in most of his…

When Barack Obama was elected to the presidency in 2008, even his most voracious critics conceded that one possible benefit of his tenure in office would be a new era of reduced racial tension. It wasn’t an unreasonable proposition at the time. Born of a black father and a white mother, Obama’s public record – from his two autobiographies…

Unless Congress acts quickly to stop a federal pilot program to convert thousands of foreclosed houses into long-term rental properties, homeowners in once thriving communities will likely see their property values plunge and crime statistics jump.  When the housing bubble burst in 2008, Congress had two options.  Either let the market bottom…

“On average, Republican voters fare somewhat better than Democratic voters (7.8 versus 6.9 questions correct) on the twelve-question knowledge quiz.” “Somewhat better?”  Not exactly.  Given an eleven-to-one disparity, “significantly better” would be more accurate.  The preceding quote of questionable…

Against the notion that innovation is synonymous with progress, one of the stronger arguments may be the current state of the American news media. Thanks to cable news networks, Twitter, talk radio and the blogosphere, we now inhabit the world of the 24-hour news cycle (upon observation, however, it becomes obvious that this is a 30-minute news cycle…

Conservatives should not be overconfident: The Romney-Ryan ticket still faces a daunting task. There are several ways to analyze and predict election results, with the best ways combining almost equal degrees of art and arithmetic. Before Mitt Romney chose Paul Ryan as his running mate, I had run my more artistic/impressionistic model in two ways…

“Have any of you all met Paul Ryan?  We should get him to come to the university.  I’m telling you, this guy is amazing.” That was Erskine Bowles, former White House Chief of Staff during the Clinton Administration.  More recently, he co-chaired the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission that Barack Obama appointed but…

According to two liberals who know Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s running mate is apparently the nicest, and also the most dangerous, politician since Ronald Reagan.  After allowing that Ryan is “a nice guy who’s fun to talk to,” E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post goes on to call the Wisconsin Republican congressman “an…

Imagine a government so capricious in administration that it would use the black market to estimate an heir’s estate taxes, prohibit a manufacturer from selling or destroying a product for the sake of global warming and penalize refineries for failing to use a type of biofuel that is not available.    Here are three true stories…

 “You didn’t build that!  Somebody else made that happen!”   It’s the summer blunder that refuses to go away.  And justifiably so.  It betrays the ugly business antipathy of a man whose viability demands artifice, whose reelection demands continuation of his 2008 opacity.  Consider: …

Earlier this week, we commemorated the centennial of the birth of Milton Friedman – the economist and public intellectual who probably did more than any other figure in the 20th century to popularize and render intelligible the ideas animating free-market economics. The fact that Friedman nearly got to see the occasion – living until…

For all the outrageous marketing tactics behind the Obama Administration’s attempts to dramatically increase the number of food stamp recipients, surely first prize goes to its claim in a radio ad that food stamps “help me eat right when money’s tight.” The ad was part of a series of Spanish and English language radio ads sponsored…

“AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers,” not citizens.  Thus opined Barack Obama this week before the Urban League convention in New Orleans, Louisiana.  Tell that to Syrian rebels, resisting the soldiers of Bashar al-Assad’s army.  Tell that to Korean-American shopowners, who defended their lives and livelihoods…

In recent years, American liberals have developed an undying affection for a quote from the late comedian George Carlin expressing their deathless paranoia that the nation is always one Republican administration away from totalitarianism. “When fascism comes to America,” Carlin said on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,&rdquo…