Barack Obama

As the second Obama term gets underway, much is being said and written about the president finally emerging as a tougher, stronger Democrat in the liberal mold of past party greats. His second inaugural address pressed Republicans in Congress to accept a broader, more aggressive package of social programs and reforms than he embraced in his first term. Standing at his side, even more visibly during the second inaugural festivities than before, has been Vice President Joe Biden, not merely in ceremonial roles but as a key supporting player in Mr. Obama's most prominent second-term initiatives.

As Barack Obama prepares to be sworn in for the second time as president of the United States, he faces the stark reality that little of what he hopes to accomplish in a second term will likely come to pass. Mr. Obama occupies an office that many assume to be all powerful, but like so many of his recent predecessors, the president knows better. He faces a political capital problem and a power trap. In the post-1960s American political system, presidents have found the exercise of effective leadership a difficult task.

If ever there were an issue that both defines and energizes the political left versus right, gun control would have to be in the top three. As a result of the tragic shootings in Newtown, Conn., the Obama administration and state legislatures all over the country are crafting new legislation to at least make it look like something is being done about the use of guns in the commission of crimes. I guess in a representative democracy like ours this is to be expected. This is a very human, albeit emotional reaction to a terrible event.

With all the moaning coming from the Tea Party Express and their loyalists in the House Republican Caucus, you would think conservatives had lost everything, including their virtue, in the fiscal cliff parlay with President Barack Obama because taxes are going up on the wealthy. However, if they could just get past their prudish sensibility about backroom compromises, they might recognize that their side actually did rather well in the dead-of-night deal making. Yes, Democrats can claim some good results in the last-minute bargain that was struck to avoid the immediate across-the-board tax hikes and budget cuts that were set to begin on January 1. The Bush era tax cuts for people making more than $400,000 a year were eliminated, and capital gains taxes and estate taxes were raised, providing new revenue sources that Democrats insist are necessary.

The most ironic part of the partisan fight over the "fiscal cliff" is that, if Republicans want Barack Obama to act according to Republican principles, they should encourage the president to do nothing and simply let the country - and the Republicans - go over the cliff on Jan. 1. Doing so would be bad for the American economy. Many economists believe the coupling of massive spending cuts and simultaneous expiration of income, payroll, earned-income and alternative minimum tax breaks could plunge the U.S. economy into a recession after four years of digging out of the last one. But why should Republicans care?

Two recent letters to the editor caught my attention. One was the contention of a writer who thought that the reason so many "front line" journalists are left-leaning is because they live in close touch with "the real world" ("The GOP lost because it's out of touch with the reality facing a majority of Americans today," Nov. 28). I would refer him to the book "The Amateur" by Edward Klein, a former editor at the New York Times, and to a commentary in the Washington Post by Matt Patterson in which he states that "years from now historians may regard the 2008 election of Barack Obama as an inscrutable and disturbing phenomenon.

I notice how positive articles about Sarah Palin seem to really get her critics stirring ("Palin for president? Very funny," Nov. 28). Not only does the comments section seem to be overwhelmed, but letters to the editor surface as well. As a Palin supporter who hopes she runs - and wins - in 2016, let me respond to the usual snark that surfaces. She's not qualified. Compared to whom? Barack Obama was a junior senator from Illinois before running for president. In Alaska, Ms. Palin accomplished everything she set out to do in two-thirds of the time.

In the days following Barack Obama's re-election, we learned that Mr. Obama didn't win because voters trusted him more than Mitt Romney on the economy, or because he ended the Iraq war and killed Osama bin Laden. He didn't win because he started to turn around an economy that shrank by 4 percent in his predecessor's final 15 months. He didn't win because his advisers built a state-of-the-art field organization that overpowered the Romney campaign's beached "Orca" targeting program. No: President Obama won re-election because Americans want "free stuff," and millions of lazy takers-not-makers gave him another four years to dish out the goodies.

The Progressives won on Tuesday. I don't mean the people who voted Democrat who call themselves "progressive. " Though they won, too. I mean the Progressives who've been waging a century-long effort to transform our American-style government into a European-style state. The words "government" and "state" are often used interchangeably, but they are really different things. According to the Founders' vision, the people are sovereign and the government belongs to us. Under the European notion of the state, the people are creatures of the state, significant only as parts of the whole.

"How ya like me now?" -- Barack Obama OK, so President Obama didn't really say that, but surely he must have thought it behind a private smile at some point Tuesday night. There are no smiles among the Republicans, however, only a pressing question: Can the GOP fix itself? Can a party whose appeal is wholly white and mainly male learn to appeal to a rainbow electorate that is neither? Especially after it has spent so many years denigrating that rainbow, drawing lines in sand, placing chips on its shoulder.