Frank James

Good thing for President Obama the general election that will decide whether he's a one or two-termer isn't being held this Tuesday.

The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll suggests that he might have trouble getting the 270 electoral votes he would need to be re-elected.

The poll found nearly 60 percent of voters disapproved of the president's handling of the economy and a similar percentage unhappy with his management of federal deficits.

If Rep. Anthony Weiner, the New York congressman who on Monday admitted that he lied when he denied sending lewd photos to and "sexting" with six women over the last three years says he's not resigning.

Maybe he can survive. But events are largely out of his hands now as they have been ever since the scandal broke over the Memorial Day weekend.

Here are some reasons why he could get past this and some reasons why he might not.

Let's start with the reasons he could hang on.

It's apparently easier to win a Nobel Prize in economics than it is to navigate the perilous partisan waters of Washington politics.

That's one lesson to draw from the case of Peter Diamond, the Nobel laureate and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who President Obama nominated to be a Federal Reserve Board governor but who won't be coming to Washington, after all.

Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee soured on Diamond after several had initially seemed supportive.

Rick Santorum, the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania who has cultivated a following among some social conservatives in his party, said Monday he was officially entering the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

Santorum never really gave politics watchers any reasons to doubt he would enter the wide open race for the GOP nomination. His interest in the White House has long been known though his resounding 2006 Senate re-election defeat at the hands of Democrat Sen. Bob Casey placed more than a little speed bump in front of those plans.

Good news for politicians who happen to be Mormon like Mitt Romney, the newly announced candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, or Jon Huntsman, who may become one.

Sixty eight percent of Americans say a presidential candidate's Mormon faith is irrelevant to them, according to a Pew Research Center poll.

Certain words and people seem made for each other. For John Edwards, the word must surely be tragedy, in all its dimensions.

When he first came on the national radar in the 1990s, it was for his success as a personal-injury lawyer who was able to win large judgments for his clients, the families of those injured or killed in medical or other accidents, the daily tragedies caused by negligence.

Then, when he ran for the U.S. Senate, most of us learned about the loss of his teenaged son Wade in a car accident. Incomprehensible tragedy.

We have it from no less an authority than David Axelrod, his political strategist, that President Obama knows better than most that it was the prevailing economic gloom in 2008 that helped put him in the White House.

Axelrod recalls once saying wistfully to the president during a White House meeting as crises abounded: "I wonder what it would be like to be here during good times?"

To which Obama said: " 'Don't kid yourself. If things were good, we wouldn't have gotten the job.' "

"Barack Obama has failed America."

As that stark line from Mitt Romney's Thursday speech in which he officially announced that he is seeking the 2012 Republican presidential nomination for a chance to unseat President Obama, the putatutive GOP frontrunner is doing what the challenger to an incumbent president does. You call the president a flop and try to make the race a referendum on his presidency.

Romney, appearing at a rally at Bittersweet Farm in New Hampshire, had at least three narratives of the Obama presidency aimed at different groups of voters.

If you're seeking your party's nomination to run against a sitting president of the opposite party, one of the best arguments you can make is that your candidacy would be the one most feared by the incumbent.

Mitt Romney appears to be the Republican candidate who can best make that case though not by much, based on an unscientific National Journal poll of Democratic insiders.

With Mitt Romney officially entering the race for the Republican presidential nomination Thursday, expect to hear a lot more from the former Massachusetts governor on how the health-care legislation he signed in his state differs from that signed into law by President Obama for the nation.

One approach Romney has used to try to distance his health-care law from the federal Affordable Care Act is to say that his legislation only had 70 pages compared with 2,700 pages for the Obama-signed law.

You know you've got a problem as a congressman whose Twitter account was used to send a lewd crotch shot if you can't categorically say "that is not me."

During an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer Wednesday, Rep. Anthony Weiner, the New York Democrat whose Twitter account was used to send a lewd photo to to a female college student, said unequivocally he didn't send the photo.

But as was true in his other encounters with journalists Wednesday, he couldn't say definitively whether it was his crotch or not.

Here's a measure of how difficult a marketing job congressional Republicans have ahead of them on the Medicare issue - nearly six out of ten Americans oppose their proposal, according to a new CNN/Opinion Research poll.

Fifty eight percent of those surveyed opposed the Republican Medicare proposal to privatize the program while only 35 percent supported it, CNN said. The plan is contained in the House Republicans' proposed budget for fiscal year 2012.

Maybe people will now believe New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie when he insists he's not running for president.

Because probably one of the last thing any populist politician hoping to run for president would do, and Christie is nothing if not a populist, would be to fly in a state helicopter to his son's baseball game as the Newark Star-Ledger reported.

An excerpt:

It was a foregone conclusion that Wednesday's White House meeting between President Obama and House Republicans would result in no forward progress in addressing the nation's fiscal issues. Presidents don't negotiate with scores of lawmakers from the other party.

But that's not to say both sides didn't get something out of it.

For Obama, it was another chance to show himself reaching across the aisle to at least talk civilly with Republicans. Independent voters essential to his re-election have repeatedly told pollsters they like him better when he does that.

Not a whole lot is certain about Weinergate, at least not for anyone not directly involved.

A few things do seem safe to say, however. One, Rep. Anthony Weiner's strategy of refusing to talk further about the crotch shot that was sent from his Twitter account to a college student (Weiner says his account was hacked) will only get us news media types more worked up.

Some journalists will see his refusal to answer more questions as a challenge to stay on the story, if only to show the New York Democrat and everyone else that they won't be easily dissuaded.

Politics is not only the art of the possible; it's the art of setting traps for your opponents.

Which is why House Democrats are being told by one of their leaders to vote against the very thing many of them said they wanted.

For weeks, a number of Democrats have called for a "clean" vote on raising the $14.3 trillion debt-ceiling, a vote on legislation containing no controversial spending cuts.

President Obama has chosen his new Commerce secretary. He's John Bryson, former chief executive of Edison International, the large Southern California electric utility.

By choosing Bryson, 67, who sits on the boards of Boeing and Walt Disney Co., the president appears to be sending another pro-business signal to corporate America.

Should Bryson be confirmed by the Senate, he would provide the president with another administration member well-connected to the U.S. business community.

Arnold Schwarzenegger might be a little radioactive for most politicians right about now, especially in a state full of social conservatives like Iowa.

But that didn't stop Mitt Romney who was campaigning in Des Moines Friday from telling a story in which he referred to the former California governor as "my friend" and seemed completely oblivious to the actor-turned-politician's lovechild scandal.

President Obama's authorization of an aide back in Washington to use an autopen to affix the presidential signature to the bill extending the Patriot Act is is being challenged by some, including a Republican House member who sent a letter to the White House.

But the president, who was in Europe at the time, has some sound legal backing for his use of the autopen (here's what some look like) to "sign" a bill into law and from an unlikely source, the President George W. Bush's Justice Department.

Voters in just about every poll where the question is asked say their number one priority is jobs and the economy.

But House Republicans have gotten mired in a debate about their proposal to privatize Medicare. And other issues that have drawn a lot of attention to culture war issues, like efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, haven't exactly addressed what voters say they're mainly concerned about.

Mitt Romney's choice of a place called Bittersweet Farm as the site to make his campaign for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination official next Thursday might at first strike as odd since the farm's name doesn't seem especially propitious.

But not to worry if you're a Romney supporter. The farm is apparently a popular stop for the national Republican establishment.

From Seacoastonline.com, a New Hampshire news outlet:

For anyone who hasn't been closely following the debate over the new Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, NPR's Tamara Keith provided a useful review on Friday's Morning Edition of where things stand.

It was more than passing strange when former President Bill Clinton said Wednesday that the nation could endure a short default on its debt without a calamity ensuing.

His precise words at a fiscal summit hosted by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation were:

"If we defaulted on the debt once for a few days, it might not be calamitous. But if people thought we were literally not going to pay our bills anymore, then they would stop buying our debt."

Can't an Alaskan woman announce an East Coast bus tour that will take her to New Hampshire; buy a house in the lower 48, and be the subject of a new, authorized documentary without triggering all kinds of speculation that she'll soon be running for president?

Not if she's Sarah Palin.

News of all these events is generating coverage of the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee this week and causing some to ask whether she's gearing up for a presidential run. Or not.

You don't get to be chairman of a major congressional committee like the House Budget Committee if you're the type to shrink from a challenge and Rep. Paul Ryan certainly doesn't appear to be that.

His current challenge, of course, is a daunting one, to convince fellow Republicans that his plan to privatize Medicare won't be as toxic to their 2012 electoral hopes as Democrats gleefully insist it will be, especially if they have anything to say about it.

It looks like we have a textbook case of presidential brain fade.

In signing the guest book at Westminster Abbey during his state visit to Great Britain, President Obama dated his message "24 May 2008."

Now, most of us have had the experience of writing the prior year's date when writing a check? But being a whole three years off? That's a little different.

Here's hoping that by this time Wednesday we'll all know the winner of the special election to fill the vacancy in New York's 26th Congressional District.

The polls close at 9 pm Tuesday so it could be a long night in a race that is being seen by many as a referendum on the House GOP proposal to privatize Medicare.

Recent polls have given Democrat Kathleen Hochul a small lead over Republican Jane Corwin in the district that's been reliably Republican.

It would be a mistake to read too much into President Obama's trip to Ireland Monday.

Then again, it would be also be wrong to ignore entirely some of the ways in which it could prove useful to the president.

The long-standing ties between the U.S. and Ireland and the tens of millions of Americans with Irish ties would be enough of a reason for a presidential visit.

But the president's own genealogical link to Ireland certainly comes in very handy.

Remember when Sarah Palin got stumped look when then-ABC News anchor Charlie Gibson asked her in September 2008 if she believed in the Bush doctrine?

On Fox News Sunday with host Chris Wallace, Herman Cain, the former head of Godfather's Pizza who's running for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, got that look, too.

As he prepares for his big announcement Monday that he is officially entering the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, Tim Pawlenty can take comfort in knowing he has higher name recognition than, say, Mitch Daniels though he's essentially tied with Rick Santorum.