The caucuses are a strange animal. They are, first and foremost, a ground operation. And they are expensive. Mail and television may persuade, but it takes troops and highly motivated (and often highly paid) organizers to move even those ideologically committed people off their couches in -20 degree weather to spend not 10 minutes in a voting booth, but hours attending caucuses and often several rounds of balloting that can go into the wee hours of the morning.Read More

Newly elected Presidents, Governors and County Executives are often tested early in their terms.

Ronald Reagan’s steel was tested by the Air Traffic Controllers. He won. They lost. And thereafter no one dared challenge Reagan absent consideration of the consequences.Read More

Those who lived through the Carter years find them a painful memory of double digit inflation, unemployment and interest rates. Carter may not have directly caused the oil shocks that rocked the economy. But they happened on his watch, and he was rightly blamed for what many Americans found to be an inept response by a self-righteous man who smugly dismissed those who believed we needed more energy exploration in the U.S. to reduce our dependence on foreign sources of fossil fuels.Read More

Obama’s efforts to portray himself a centrist got a setback when the Washington Post revealed that White House operatives were behind the public employee riots in Wisconsin. And the left got a black eye.Read More