President Barack Obama lags in several polls on fixing the economy. His favorability rating is virtually even with that of presumed GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. His signature health care reform law appears on the verge of being overturned. Women, once central to his base, are now drifting toward his opponent. He has even lost support among once-passionate young voters. Yet, according to a USA Today/Gallup poll released this week, 56% of those polled believe the president will cinch re-election this fall, compared to 36% percents who think Romney will win. Read More...

Another North Carolina congressional candidate has expressed birther beliefs about President Obama. Scott Keadle, who is running for the Republican nomination for the state's 8th Congressional District, told a Tea Party crowd last month that he would stop at nothing to track down the president's birthplace, according to McClatchy. Read More...

President Obama is attempting to shore up the 2008 coalition that helped him achieve a decisive victory over John McCain, but he is doing so in a more piecemeal way this time around.

As an incumbent, Obama's method is to target various constituencies -- albeit ones that supported him four years ago -- and make the sale with this argument: On the issues they care most about, he has advanced specific policies to help them, programs opposed by the Republican Party and its presumptive nominee, Mitt Romney. Read More...

The line you often hear in Washington is that Republicans won’t talk taxes and Democrats won’t talk entitlements. The two parties, the thinking goes, are similarly irresponsible, albeit on opposite sides of the budget. Read More...

Last week, the Obama reelection campaign told Mark Halperin that it believes Mitt Romney’s one chance of winning the election would be to establish himself as a credible economic fix-it figure, and that it intended to focus its attacks on destroying that reputation. Today the campaign launches a missile straight at its target with an unusually long two-minute campaign ad assailing Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital, along with a website (romneyeconomics.com) reinforcing the message that Romney's record is all about extracting profit for the very rich, at the expense of the middle class. The name of the website, of course, implies that Romney’s record at Bain defines his economic philosophy. Read More...

Michele Bachmann’s short-lived experiment as a Swiss citizen ended awkwardly this week, when her beloved philosophy of American exceptionalism came back to bite her in the tushy. It turns out the far right concluded that her brief bout of dual citizenship made her anti-American. Remember that this is the congresswoman who skyrocketed to fame on an accusation that Barack Obama was anti-American. Oh, the irony! Read More...

Like many black Americans, Dorsey Jackson does not believe in gay marriage, but he wasn't disillusioned when Barack Obama became the first president to support it. The windows of his suburban Philadelphia barbershop still display an "Obama 2012" placard and another that reads "We've Got His Back." Read More...

Bill Clinton dismissed Barack Obama as an ‘amateur’ and urged his wife Hillary to run against him in this year’s U.S. presidential election.

According to a new book Mr Clinton tore into Mr Obama and branded him ‘incompetent’ and that he ‘did not know how to be President’.

He urged Mrs Clinton to quit her job as U.S. Secretary of State and challenge him for the Democratic ticket as she knew how to do a better job of it Read More...