Outside the Beltway

Can a candidate appealing enough to the base to win the Republican nomination beat Obama?

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

Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum is the latest Republican to reject the idea that America is a secular nation.

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.

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

Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum thinks we’ve been too hard on the Crusaders.

Rick Santorum is upset that a Google search for his name produces a string of unflattering material. You should be, too.

Polls matching President Obama against potential Republican contenders are entertaining but not informative.

Ron Paul has won the CPAC straw poll for a second straight year. But YAF has voted him off its board over his opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The media are wildly exaggerating the heckling at a gathering of conservatives.

It’s straw poll season already. First up, New Hampshire where things turned out about how you’d expect them to considering Mitt Romney lives there now.

Yes, I think that Palin is running in 2012.

More than ever before in the past, Fox News Channel will be the exclusive medium through which many of the candidates for the 2012 Republican nomination communicate with the public. And that’s a problem.

Is Sarah Palin running for President in 2012 ? It’s looking more and more likely that the answer might be yes.

On January 3, 2008 Mike Huckabee celebrated a victory in the Iowa Caucuses, will be able to repeat that in 2012 ?

Mitt Romney is the frontrunner for the 2012 Republican nomination. Aside from it being Romney’s “turn,” he’s got very strong organization and fundraising capabilities and has demonstrated the ability to get through a campaign without committing major gaffes.