George H.W. Bush

Jeb Bush’s decision not to endorse Mitt Romney before Tuesday primary raises three possibilities about the former Florida governor’s role in the 2012 presidential election.       

According to Gallup, Barack Obama's quarterly approval hit an all-time low in the president's eleventh quarter in office at 41 percent.

In his statement celebrating the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill last week, President Obama said: "There will be no more taxpayer-funded bailouts -- period."

Really? Let's assume Obama is right. Even under the best-case scenario, in which Dodd-Frank performs exactly as its technocratic architects intended, the legislation would -- with all necessary caveats attached -- prevent bailouts just in the financial sector.

Though he did not win a single state, Ross Perot garnered almost 20 percent of the national presidential vote in 1992, dooming President George H.W. Bush's reelection campaign. Two years later, Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, Frank Luntz, and other architects of the Republican Revolution found a way to persuade the Perotistas to swing Republican. (Bill Clinton helped in his own way, too.) The result was GOP dominance in both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

The Perot issues -- government spending, deficits, and debt -- disappeared after the billionaire's last presidential campaign in 1996, when he took only 8 percent of the vote. The 1997 budget deal between Clinton and Gingrich gave us balanced budgets and an eventual surplus. But the Perot voters did not disappear. They remained dormant for years, until the Bush immigration proposals in 2006 and 2007 created a populist backlash. Then came 2009, and Obama's big government liberalism brought the Perot supporters and other disillusioned Americans back into politics. Another Perot moment had begun.