For the past week or so, I have been examining President Obama's past year, and what he could make of his second year in office. This has unsurprisingly been a mix of optimism and pessimism. Because while Obama's second year could easily shape up to be better than his first, mostly it depends on Obama himself and what he chooses to do with it.

Let's be blunt -- this coming year may be Obama's last, best chance to have a successful presidency. Or, at the very least, make any progress at all on his agenda. Because, no matter what happens in the House of Representatives, all it is going to take is Democrats losing one or two seats in the Senate for massive legislative gridlock to descend upon the Nation's Capital until 2012.

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Is White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs truly this clueless, or is he just doing his job offering up the best possible spin for the White House and for his boss, President Obama? You decide. The following is an excerpt from a good article by Sam Stein at the Huffington Post today:

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs acknowledged on Wednesday that progressive voters' disinterest and unhappiness was threatening what traditionally should be a blowout Senate election victory for Democrats in Massachusetts.

Briefing reporters in his office, Gibbs said he did not know "why some segment of political observers don't seem to be as motivated" going into the special election between Democratic Attorney General Martha Coakley and Republican State Senator Scott Brown.

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We've now officially entered what I have decided to call "Flagpole Season" -- as in: "run it up the flagpole, and see who salutes." I could just have easily called it "Trial Balloon Season," but we're all still a little too close to Balloon Boy for that one to "fly" (as it were). But whatever you call it, the time has come for Barack Obama's White House to figure out what they're going to tackle next (other than, of course, "jobs, jobs, jobs"). As they do, they're going to be leaking like a sieve for the next few weeks -- all in preparation for the biggest presidential speech of the year, the State Of The Union, which is now roughly three weeks away.

To be blunt, Obama needs to pick a few fights. Healthcare reform is winding up, but this particular fight has been so long and hard-fought that even proponents of the reform bill are exhausted and would really prefer not to hear or talk about it much longer. This is telling, because Democrats (all the way up to Obama) have simply not done a good job on the communications front during this battle. Who would have thought, a year ago, that Obama's main problems would be a lack of communication skills, and a perceived lack of passion in fighting for what he said he believed in?

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Every so often, I wake up knowing exactly the column I'm going to write. Only to find out, upon browsing around, that someone else has written it for me. Today was one of those days.

Harry Reid's situation seemed to me to be a perfect opportunity for him to follow in Chris Dodd's footsteps, and announce that -- after healthcare reform legislation is successfully put on Barack Obama's desk to sign -- Harry Reid would be stepping down as Senate Majority Leader, and giving someone else a shot at it. My reasoning had very little to do with the recently-revealed gaffe from Reid.

But, as I said, someone else had already said exactly what I was going to say, so I will direct you to Dylan Loewe's excellent article today up on Huffington Post, and you can read it for yourself. Lowe made exactly the points I was going to make, used exactly the reasoning I would have, and did it in probably about one-third the space I would have taken. So I have to take my hat off to him, and say "Well done!" And encourage everyone else to read his article.

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UPDATE: [15:30 Pacific]

OK, everything is uploaded, so all old links should be working. Site seems stable for now. There are still bugs and things not working exactly right, but I'm still working on them, so hopefully they'll get better.

If you regularly comment here, you may have to either delete all "chrisweigant.com" cookies, or totally reload the page (or even quit and relaunch your browser) before you start getting the new site. Try logging in, and you should see a new login page. If you don't, you're still in the old site somehow.

[End update... more later...]

Well, we're up and running. Kind of.

The core code of the site has been upgraded at this point, but nothing has been adequately tested. So today (Sunday, Jan. 10, 2010), the site will have a lot of quirks. As the day progresses, bugs will be fixed, and things will start working again.

One thing you should be aware of is that your old "cookies" will not work anymore. What this means to you is that you may experience problems logging in to the site, or viewing it.

You should re-load this page and will have to change any "automatic" login settings, and manually log in before they will work again.

Again, we apologize for the inconvenience, and promise that throughout the day, the site will look better and better, so reload it often to see our progress!

Before we begin our weekly talking points, we must sadly offer our condolences to Vice President Joe Biden, whose mother just passed away. No matter what side of the political divide you come from, or what you think of our Vice President, losing your mother is something everyone can sympathize with, so we offer our thoughts to the Biden family in this sad time for them.

Of course, in Washington, the craziness goes on as usual, forcing us once again to pay attention to various bits of lunacy. Topping the list of lunatics this week was a man arrested for jogging naked near the White House. Now, I've got to admit, although "streaking" is a fad we all wish would make a comeback, you've got to hand it to this guy for pulling such a stunt in January in Washington, rather than waiting until at least the cherry blossoms had peeked out. Jogging around The Ellipse naked in January? Brrr!

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[Note: Since we spent much of the week either looking back at 2009 or looking forward to what 2010 has in store, I thought my New Year's column from the beginning of 2009 was worth looking at again, to see how my suggestions for New Year's resoultions from last year stacked up against reality.

This column originally ran January 2, 2009, which was a Friday. Meaning for the first time ever (I believe) we're running a special Thursday Talking Points... or something. The column originally had "Friday Talking Points [59]" in the title, which I replaced, for clarity's sake, with "[2009]" above.

One last thing, if you missed it, earlier today I posted a Program Note which spells out what to expect from this site this weekend. We will be upgrading the site during the weekend, which means service may be interrupted at times. The Program Note is in the form of "Frequently Asked Questions" to let you know what to expect.]

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First off, I'd like to thank all my readers for their continued patience. If all goes well, today will be the final "re-run" column in a long time. Because this weekend is going to be Upgrade Weekend here at ChrisWeigant.com. So allow me to present an Upgrade Weekend FAQ for you here.

What will this mean to you? The site may be down for extended periods this weekend. We may be unavailable from roughly Saturday afternoon until whenever we get everything working. That's kind of a vague estimate, I realize. Target is to get everything done by Sunday evening, at the absolute latest. But since this is our first upgrade ever, it is impossible to estimate the downtime better than that, sorry. If everything blows up, then at some point we will restore the whole site from backups, and regroup and try again later, so worst-case scenario (hopefully) is that Monday you'll see exactly the same site you saw Friday.

What will this mean for the site? The biggest changes won't even be visible. What we are doing is upgrading the core software which runs the site (WordPress) to a newer version that is more stable and has much better security. This involved upgrading all of the custom files which actually display the site as well, but if everything works perfectly then the site will look almost exactly the same as it did before. There are a few exceptions. The first is that the Login page and the "User Settings" page will both look different to you, as a site user. These pages come straight from WordPress itself, and they have a new look and feel to them, but are pretty easy to learn how to use. Your password will not change, if all goes well, so logging in should still work the same. Feel free to change it yourself, if you'd like (for good site security, you should change your password every so often, and make it as complicated as you can easily remember).

Isn't there anything new? Why, yes. Yes, indeedy! I'm glad you asked. The biggest new feature to the site will be (finally) giving the ObamaPollWatch.com and FridayTalkingPoints.com pages their own look-and-feel. These pages will have new headers, new sidebars, and new features, most of which were not even possible with the old WordPress software. So, when you check the site Monday, don't forget to check out the ObamaPollWatch.com and FridayTalkingPoints.com areas.

Will there be any future changes? Yes, but I can't swear when they will happen. What we are doing (especially with the OPW.com and TFP.com pages) is building a framework that we can add features to later. Right now, getting the framework up and running and bug-free is the main objective. So some of the features on these new pages will be rather basic, at first. But later, we hope to expand and improve these over time.

What should I do if I notice something that isn't working right? Send me an email. Drop me a note for any reason -- something's broken, something doesn't look or work right, or any other problems you notice. Also, let me know if there's something about the site that bugs you or you'd like to see improved in the future, as we're looking at ways to change things for the better.

Thanks again for all the patience and understanding. It's taken three or four weeks to get to the point where we're ready to begin the upgrade, but we're finally at the point of starting the process this weekend. Actually, if truth be told, we were pretty ready last weekend, but since the OPW column ran Monday, we thought it'd be a better idea to bump it back a week, since that is one of the highest-traffic columns of the month. Speaking of traffic, I'd like to end by thanking everyone for their support of the site, as even though we ran a lot of re-runs last month, it was our biggest traffic month ever, with over 100,000 page views. This wouldn't have been possible without you, so I thank you all for your continued support.

Because this Program Note was so long, we will run today's "from the archives" column as a separate post.

-- Chris Weigant

President Barack Obama has the potential of having a pretty good second year in office. Conventional inside-the-Beltway wisdom is that "nothing much gets done in a congressional election year," but this ignores the fact that life itself does not halt for electioneering, but rather keeps right on happening. And there are quite a few positive things either explicitly scheduled for 2010, or at least very likely to happen. This doesn't automatically mean the president is guaranteed to have a great year, but it certainly sets the scene for Obama managing to have a fairly good year.

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The national Tea Party movement is planning something to mark the first anniversary of Barack Obama's inauguration. Or, to be more accurate, they're planning "nothing" -- they're planning on staying home. With a vengeance.

The Contra Costa Times recently reported on this phenomenon, and the article is remarkable when you read between its lines. Now, perhaps this is just because the Times is a regional paper (the East Bay of San Francisco Bay) and not a national one, or perhaps the article was longer and was edited down for space or something. Because the most striking thing, to me, about the article is the degree of disagreement in the Tea Party movement.

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