As a candidate in 2008, Barack Obama declared his support for green energy development. "For the sake of our economy, our security and the future of our planet," he said, "we must end the age of oil in our time."
A candidate's strengths can also be his weaknesses. Take the case of Rick Santorum.
One of his strengths is perseverance. For more than a year, he made hundreds of appearances in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, with no visible result in the polls.
He persevered and ended up finishing first in the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3. Then, after poor showings in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida and Nevada, he finished first in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado on Feb. 7.
Real votes make clear what polls cannot fully pick up. The Republican election season has been shaped by two forces, other than the obvious one to oust President Obama. First, the strongest potential candidates did not enter the fray, and the remaining contenders do not satisfy most GOP voters.
Imagine this family budget:
Last year, you earned $24,700. But you spent $37,900, incurring $13,300 in debt, and you were already $153,500 in debt.
The white working class is in big trouble, and the liberal elite is largely to blame. So says Charles Murray in his latest book, "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010." As a scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, and this being an election year, wouldn't he just.
Many Republican House members, and the bloggers and tea partiers who cheered their victory in gaining a majority in November 2010, seem to be seething with discontent and eager for confrontation.
Missiles are pointed at Social Security and Medicare, the broad-based programs for older Americans. Some are stealth missiles. Some are misguided missiles. But both parties are pointing them.
In a campaign defined by Republican reluctance to embrace Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum has emerged as the latest not-Romney candidate to surge ahead. While it's impossible to predict what will happen in this volatile election season, the data suggests that Santorum might be more of a challenge for Romney than earlier flavors of the month.
What is most striking about the showdown over contraceptive freedom is not the political victory that President Obama earned by standing up for women's reproductive rights, although his Republican adversaries are certainly helping him to make the most of it. Those adversaries don't seem to realize they have fallen into a trap, whether the White House set them up intentionally or not.
Believers in central planning should take a look at Washington's Metro rail transit system. While they will find many things to like, they will also see examples of how central planners -- and especially rail transit planners -- can get things disastrously and expensively wrong.
President Obama said in his State of the Union speech, "We've already agreed to more than $2 trillion in cuts and savings."
One item in the annals of American exceptionalism is how exceptionally badly behaved American children are. We who hang around international airports often marvel at how European toddlers wait calmly while their American cohorts run down the halls or lie sprawled on the floor in a screaming tantrum.
Rick Santorum won big victories in three small contests in the Republican presidential race last Tuesday. In doing so, he reshaped the oft-reshaped nomination battle once again. But he has not installed himself as the favorite, and neither he nor Mitt Romney has established himself as the candidate who can do best in the general election.
If the Conservative Political Action Conference can be expected to accomplish anything more than angry bellowing, it is to reliably embarrass every decent and sane conservative in America. Sometimes the problem is a conspiratorial extremist co-sponsor, like the John Birch Society; sometimes the problem is a certifiable kook giving the keynote address, like Glenn Beck; and sometimes the problem is just vicious bullying of gay conservatives, who have been officially expelled from the conference.
Every sports fan knows that close contests are often decided by mistakes rather than heroics. In this year's Super Bowl, Tom Brady threw just one interception, but Eli Manning didn't throw any. Manning's team won. What's especially disheartening for fans are unforced errors. Right now, President Obama's fans have reason to worry about a substantive unforced error that threatens his support among Catholic voters.
My, how you've changed, Big Brother. What happened to the sourpuss in "1984," George Orwell's grim novel about a thought-controlled future? Gone are the piercing eyes and the perennial threat: "Big Brother is Watching."
You've had quite the fashion update. I like how you dress in T-shirts and sweats, just like the proles. I like your boyish grin. No longer a tyrant without a name, you're now Facebook's founder and supreme leader, Mark Zuckerberg.
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson called the pursuit of happiness an unalienable right. This was a radical idea. For most of history, most people didn't think much about pursuing happiness. They were too busy just trying to survive.
The blowup at Susan G. Komen for the Cure set off a political alarm that Republicans dare not ignore. The leading breast cancer group, Komen tried playing Republican-base politics by cutting its funding to Planned Parenthood for breast-health services. The sisterhood and its allies exploded, and Komen reversed course with abject apologies.
It's unusual when a reporter sympathetic to a politician writes a story that makes his subject look bad. But Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker has now done this twice.
The first time was in an article last April on Obama's foreign policy in which he quoted a "top aide" (National Security Adviser Tom Donilon? It sounds like him) saying that the president was "leading from behind" on Libya. Not what most Americans expect their presidents to do.
Now, in an article based on leaked White House memos marked up by Obama, Lizza has done it again.
Back in September, the Crystal Ball examined the possible electoral impact of state-by-state unemployment figures because, after all, presidents are elected in 51 individual battles (50 states plus Washington, D.C.)
