Outside the Beltway

All signs are that Michele Bachmann is running for president. What impact will she have on the race?

We won’t have Mike Huckabee to kick around in 2012.

Newt Gingrich says the coming presidential election will be the most important since the Civil War.

How much of public opinion is about tribal political identification and how much is about the actual policies themselves?

Gingrich 2012: He will always love America. Unless it gets cancer.

David Brooks declares Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels, and Jon Huntsman the only serious candidates for the Republican nomination.

A study shows that most national columnists and talking heads are about as accurate as a coin flip.

Obama’s main politics are hardly as leftist as many make them out to be. Indeed, much of them could have fit well in the the GOP of 1990s and early 2000s.

Why are many of the top Republicans are sitting out the race despite a seemingly vulnerable incumbent?

President Obama is vulnerable, but he’s facing a GOP field that is underwhelming even for Republicans.

For the first time, Donald Trump is leading a poll for the GOP 2012 nomination. That’s bad news for the GOP.

Donald Trump is waiting to announce whether he’s running for president until after taping of “The Apprentice” concludes. Some thing NBC shouldn’t allow him to wait.

Two new polls show that the public supports the budget deal, but has no idea what to do to solve our long term problems.

Donald Trump has been surging in polls of Republican voters recently, but that doesn’t mean much of anything.

What, if anything, does the budget deal mean for the future?

The race for the 2012 Republican nomination is missing the one thing that GOP nomination battles have almost always had, a frontrunner.

Newt Gingrich on Libya: “This is as badly executed, I think, as any policy we’ve seen since WWII, and it will become a case study for how not to engage in this type of activity.”

With minor exceptions, all of the potential candidates for the GOP nomination in 2012 seem to have accepted the idea that defense spending, and the Bush-era interventionist foreign policy, are off the table when it comes time to talk spending cuts.

Republicans are starting to sour on Sarah Palin, meaning that they’re finally starting to catch up to the rest of the country.

All of the plausible Republican contenders for 2012 have significant downsides.

Mitt Romney starts his 2012 run as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. But, in reinventing himself yet again, the “authenticity” issue that troubled many of us in 2008 looms again.

A day after apologizing for an odd comment about the President’s upbringing, Mike Huckabee now feeds into the conservative myth that Barack Obama isn’t a real American.

A look at history reveals that President Obama’s decision to decline to defend Section Three of DOMA is hardly unprecedented.