hope

Last night, President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama attended the last ball of the Second Inauguration--the Staff Inaugural Ball.

“My main job here tonight,” Obama told the campaign staff, volunteers, and Democratic National Committee staff, “is really simple: It’s just to say thank you. All of you have come to represent for me and Michelle our deepest hopes for America. The average age here is probably around 20 something. And that’s only because I’m here, which brings the average age up, quite a bit.”

Times are good in Washington and the political class is enjoying itself enormously in a game where the players see who will dance closest to the edge of a cliff.

Tampa
Artur Davis, a former Democratic congressman from Alabama, has been a Republican for only a few months. But his speech tonight at the Republican convention is important because he reflects a major theme of Mitt Romney’s campaign against President Obama and another theme promoted by the GOP.

A campaign spokesman for President Obama's reelection team, Jen Psaki, seemed to agree with an MSNBC host earlier today that the president is not able to run on "hope" and "change" this election cycle:

James Piereson has an important article in the June New Criterion on the "forthcoming political revolution" in America. Here's the heart of the argument:

In an interview tonight with News Channel 8’s Keith Cate from Tampa, President Obama praised his administration's ability to "[use] the Internet more effectively" so that folks, "If they need a government service, they don’t have to navigate through 50 websites, they can go to one website so on those fronts we’ve done a lot, we’ve made a lot of progress."

During the Obama presidency (still less than three years old), the number of Americans who think their country’s best days are in the future, rather than in the past, has taken a 33-point turn for the worse, according to a newly released Rasmussen poll.

An upbeat beginning to the school year in today's Washington Post: The new ABC/Post poll has Obama's overall approval at 43 percent, with 53 percent disapproving. If these numbers hold, it's very unlikely Obama will be reelected.

Kevin Williamson: "Hope Is Not a Policy"

Walter Russell Mead: "The Death of the American Dream I"

Philip Klein: "Obama solicitor general: If you don't like mandate, earn less money"

The American people are in for it. When Republicans lose elections, they blame each other: Talk radio blames the RINOs; the squishes blame the pro-lifers; the social conservatives blame the Big Business types, and so on. Each faction maintains that their party will never find acceptance with voters until the rest of the movement looks just like them.

Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C. 

Radio and television personality Glenn Beck today hosted hundreds of thousands of rallying citizens from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. In what was an amazingly apolitical rally, Beck and his fellow speakers focused on three themes: faith, hope, and charity.