The defining image from the October 22 debate between President Obama and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney is of the two candidates passionately disputing their prescriptions for the U.S. domestic economy. The moderator, veteran TV journalist Bob Schieffer, caught the spirit of the evening with his final words before inviting the debaters to make their closing […]
Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at JPMorgan Chase, has a fascinating analysis out Thursday on how Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is moving to lock in new procedures for setting interest rates that will last long after his term ends in January 2014. The upshot is that Bernanke, who vowed to depersonalize the Fed, could end […]
The 2012 farming season may be in its waning days, but the consequences of this year’s drought, the worst of its kind in 25 years, are yet to be known. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that the drought will push retail food prices up by between 3% and 4% in 2013. That’s a higher-than-average […]
Throughout the U.S. presidential campaign, Republican and Democratic political operatives have strived to articulate major foreign-policy distinctions between President Barack Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney. Several close foreign-policy watchers, however, have struggled to identify any such differences. The final presidential debate on Oct. 22 finally cemented what has been apparent to many over the course of the campaign: […]
A forceful President Barack Obama put Republican challenger Mitt Romney on the defensive on foreign policy issues on Monday night, scoring a solid victory in their third and final debate just 15 days before Election Day. Obama displayed the experience of a commander-in-chief in explaining U.S. policy under his leadership and attacking the views and […]
At Monday night’s foreign policy debate, the first round of questions for the presidential candidates will involve “America’s role in the world.” The answers from President Obama and former Gov. Mitt Romney likely will focus on military readiness and anti-terrorism efforts. That’s what most Americans would expect to hear, given that their country has been […]
Mitt Romney has a George W. Bush problem. In fact, that’s Romney’s biggest problem. It’s George W. Bush, not Barack Obama, who has made voters skeptical of many of Romney’s core policies. It’s George W. Bush, not Obama campaign strategist David Plouffe, who persuaded voters that our economic troubles aren’t mainly Obama’s fault. And so it is, in a sense, […]
Two weeks ago, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, delivered the Landon Lecture to hundreds of U.S. servicemembers and students at Kansas State University. During the question and answer session, a cadet in the Air Force ROTC asked, “What [do] you see being the focus of our nation in 5 to 10 years, […]
I thought Mitt Romney’s second debate was nearly as bad as Barack Obama’s first debate. Two weeks ago, Obama seemed to have no awareness of what he was doing wrong, and he spent the evening staring at the lectern and searching for something to say. Romney seemed to suffer from a similar malady Tuesday night, […]
President Barack Obama retained a slim lead over Republican challenger Mitt Romney in the Reuters/Ipsos daily tracking poll on Monday, as he appeared to have stemmed the bleeding from his poor first debate. Three weeks before the November 6 U.S. election, Obama leads Romney by 2 percentage points, with 47 percent support from likely voters […]
