New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg could further combine his political and business ambitions by purchasing the Financial Times Group, which includes the Financial Times newspaper and a stake in half of the Economist, according the Daily Beast.
“The tide of war is receding,” President Barack Obama is fond of saying. Who’s he kidding? It has not been two weeks since the president’s reelection and already foreign policy crises are metastasizing. Israel’s justified retaliation at Hamas rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip may escalate into the second Gaza war in four years. But the Middle East of 2012 is not the Middle East of 2008. Gaza neighbors an Egypt governed not by the secular dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak but by the religious-inspired democracy of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi.
Republicans (and I) thought the 2008 election was a fluke. We thought the Obama coalition of minorities, young people, and white liberals had been brought together under unusual circumstances: the unpopularity of the Bush presidency, the war in Iraq, and the recession and financial crisis. The 2010 midterms, in which the Obama coalition did not appear and Republicans had their best performance in decades, supported this assumption. A combination of GOP enthusiasm and a lackluster economy would spell trouble for Obama’s reelection. Obama would not be able to replicate his 2008 performance. His voters would not show up. We were wrong.
Remember when President Barack Obama was likable? Once upon a time the public viewed the incumbent more favorably than his challenger by large margins. These days Obama’s favorable and unfavorable ratings are similar to Mitt Romney’s.
Hold it, I’m confused. I watched all of the vice presidential debate last night, and someone did not show up. Vice President Joe Biden was there, but where was the Ayn Rand-worshiping, rape-redefining, fanatically exercising zealot who wants to throw grandmothers off of cliffs and whose budget plan is, according to the president, “thinly veiled Social Darwinism” that is “antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility”? That Paul Ryan was nowhere to be found.
As Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama debated Wednesday evening it was possible to detect, if one was alert, the ground of American politics shift beneath one’s feet. Sometime during the first 45 minutes or so, when it became clear that Romney, not moderator Jim Lehrer, was in command, the tectonic plates of Obama’s ego and of reality crashed together.
You are probably eager to vote on Nov. 6. You have followed the news closely, watched the ads, listened to the conventions, and waited for the debates. If you are like most people, you are worried about the direction of the country, and for good reason.
As the media continue to examine Mitt Romney’s alleged “gaffes,” might we take a moment to take a look at the world as it actually exists, right now, independent of the presidential campaign?
I don’t know whether President Obama or Mitt Romney will win on November 6, but I do know what the MSNBC talking heads will say in the event that Obama loses.
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