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President Barack Obama had a mildly good month in the polls during December. Not a fantastic month, mind you; maybe not even a great month... but a mildly good month, nonetheless.
[Note: This time, next year, the big political news story will be the Republican primary campaign for who will take on President Obama in 2012. The first primaries and caucuses will be right around the corner (although, hopefully, they'll be in February, 2012 -- a modest improvement on how early the primary calendar has [...]
Welcome back to our annual year-end awards column!
President Barack Obama gave an afternoon press conference today, and he sounded a lot more confident than he has sounded for quite a while. The reason for this is that the 111th Congress is ending with a bang, and not the expected whimper. After the Democrats' "shellacking" (to use Obama's preferred term) in the midterm elections, few inside-the-Beltway prognosticators figured much of anything would get done in the lame duck session of Congress before the newly-elected Congress is seated in January. As it turned out, this conventional wisdom was wrong. The lame duck Congress produced more weighty legislation than most lame ducks manage -- a fitting end to two years with more significant legislative victories than any Congress since Lyndon B. Johnson (or even Franklin D. Roosevelt, depending on how you score these things). Which is why President Obama had good reason to sound as confident as he did today.
My apologies to anyone tuning in who was expecting to see the 150th "Friday Talking Points" column, since it will be pre-empted for two weeks here. But the good news is we're doing so to bring you our annual "McLaughlin Awards," which are even more fun!
The holidays are just around the corner, and the preparatory legislative sausage-making on Capitol Hill is in full swing. What a happy, happy time of year!
President Obama gave a speech today in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Billed as a speech on the economy, it may provide an early forecast of what is likely to be the overarching theme of Obama's State Of The Union speech next month. While this speech has not gotten a whole lot of attention so far, one phrase of it is garnering some mild interest: the idea that America is experiencing a "Sputnik moment." What remains to be seen is whether this talking point is going to catch on and become an actual Democratic narrative next year. It certainly is worth mentioning, due to the almost complete lack of any Democratic narrative these days. Whether it inspires the public's imagination, though, is an even tougher row to hoe.
So the good news this week was apparently that giant mutant space monsters are not, in fact, about to arrive and (assumably) enslave humankind and eat our children for snacks.
President Barack Obama has a busy week scheduled, as Congress begins the lame duck session. Everyone in Washington has a few busy weeks ahead, until the 111th Congress wraps up business and heads off into the sunset, but President Obama will be at the center of this whirlwind. So it's worth taking a look at how the week is going to play out. To put it in football-watching terms, we're just returning from the "two-minute warning" commercial break, in the fourth quarter. And anything could happen.
Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I thought that was a pretty good week for Democrats.