W’s elevator endorsement trick

The 43rd president is a willing accomplice in the Romney effort to pretend 2008 never happened

Poverty In America: Defining The New Poor

Welfare reform in 1990s helped slash cash benefit rolls, and yet the use of food stamps is soaring today. About 15 percent of Americans use food stamps, and it has become what some call the new welfare. A big reason why is because of a deal struck between President Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress in 1996. At that time, the number of Americans who received cash payments — what's ...

Obama’s next fringe headache

On Wednesday morning, the political world awoke to the news that a federal inmate had won nine counties and 41 percent of the statewide vote against the president of the United States in West Virginia’s primary. It was not Barack Obama’s first primary season embarrassment: An antiabortion fanatic beat him in 15 Oklahoma counties back in March, and nearly walked away with a convention delegate ...

The Bain beast returns

With the release of a new two-minute (!) negative ad from the Obama campaign, it’s now official: Mitt Romney’s perfect record of being attacked over his Bain Capital days is still intact. OK, there’s an asterisk: Technically, Bain didn’t come up in Romney’s first campaign, for the 1994 Republican Senate nomination in Massachusetts. But that was barely a race: His opponent, John Lakian, had been ...

Ron Paul’s chaos threat

This weekend brought another reminder of the real threat that Ron Paul and his supporters pose to Mitt Romney: chaos in Tampa, Fla. As they’ve done elsewhere, hundreds of supporters of the libertarian congressman descended on Saturday’s state Republican convention in Arizona, which was being held to choose delegates to the party’s national convention. The state’s delegation will be pledged to ...