Barack Obama

Karl Rove claims Clint Eastwood's Super Bowl ad for Chrysler was a devious pitch to promote the Obama reelection campaign. Apparently the bulb-headed Pillsbury Doughboy of the political right thinks he's man enough to pick a fight with America's most virile octogenarian. Go ahead, Karl, make his day. In the sweepstakes for most memorable advertisement from Sunday's Super Bowl game, the Eastwood halftime ad was the clear winner. Gritty, moody, yet uplifting, the ad interspersed images of beleaguered but resilient Americans with shots of Eastwood walking toward the camera along a shadowy passageway.

Barack Obama wanted to be a transformational president, and as we head into the general election, he may have gotten his wish - just not the way he or his supporters might have thought. Obama seems to have transformed the cohort of 18- to 29-year-olds, a whopping 66% of whom preferred him over John McCain, from passionate voters who thought Obama really did offer change they could believe in, into people feeling, in the words of veteran political analyst Charlie Cook, "disappointment and disillusionment.

Barack Obama announced Saturday that he and his wife had resigned as members of their Chicago church in the wake of controversial remarks from its pulpit that have become a serious distraction to his presidential campaign. In a letter dated Friday to the pastor, the Rev. Otis Moss III, Obama said he and his wife, Michelle, had come to the decision "with some sadness."

WASHINGTON -- A pending plan by top GOP strategists would bring back a familiar face from the 2008 presidential campaign, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, in a massive $10-million campaign directed at drawing attention to connections between President Obama and the controversial reverend. “The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way,” the proposal pledges, according to documents obtained by the New York Times . The plan, titled “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End His Spending for Good,”   is one of many being presented to Joe Ricketts, an outspoken supporter of conservative causes and founder of TD Ameritrade, who is more than willing to put his money where his political views are. Ricketts is currently the main financer of the “super PAC” Ending Spending Action Fund.

Barack Obama wanted to be a transformational president, and as we head into the general election, he may have gotten his wish - just not the way he or his supporters might have thought. Obama seems to have transformed the cohort of 18- to 29-year-olds, a whopping 66% of whom preferred him over John McCain, from passionate voters who thought Obama really did offer change they could believe in, into people feeling, in the words of veteran political analyst Charlie Cook, "disappointment and disillusionment.

With the 2012 presidential election before us, the country is again caught up in debating national security issues, our ongoing wars and the threat of terrorism. There is one related subject, however, that is rarely mentioned: civil liberties. Protecting individual rights and liberties — apart from the right to be tax-free — seems barely relevant to candidates or voters. One man is primarily responsible for the disappearance of civil liberties from the national debate, and he is Barack Obama.

It looks like the Obama campaign may have settled on its slogan for the 2012 election: "Forward. " Four years ago, Barack Obama ran on another one-word slogan, "Change. " Now, as President Obama prepares to hold the first public campaign rallies for his reelection, his team is giving a sense of what his pitch to voters will look like. A seven-minute Web video (watch below) lays out what it says was the precarious state of the nation when Obama took office in 2009 and the steps he took to begin addressing the challenges.

Presidential election exit polls showed that the economy was uppermost on the minds of most Americans. But when Baghdad-based Army Maj. Ian Howard cast his ballot, his top concern was whether this would be his last deployment to Iraq. So Howard, a lifelong Republican, threw his support to Barack Obama, who has advocated a swift withdrawal of U.S. forces. "I don't want to come back here for another tour," Howard said Wednesday.

Sipping coffee in a strip mall, Joseph Farah looks like something out of a spy novel -- suave, mysterious, bushy black mustache. He's surprisingly relaxed, considering he believes his life is in danger because of his occupation. He runs a must-read website for anyone who hates Barack Obama. Once a little-known Los Angeles newspaper editor, Farah has become a leading impresario of America's disaffected right, serving up a mix of reporting and wild speculation to an audience eager to think the worst of the president.

On Oct. 28 and 29, 1929, when the great crash devastated the stock market, Herbert Hoover had been president just shy of eight months. For more than three years, he lingered in office as the nation's economy sank into Depression. By the time ofFranklin D. Roosevelt's inauguration, hard times and Hoover had become near synonymous. Barack Obama's timing resembled Hoover's far more than Roosevelt's. The 2008 financial panic hit on George W. Bush's watch with the collapse of Lehman Brothers less than two months before the election.

This time of year, email boxes fill up with all sorts of unsolicited appeals from politicians, always in the service of fundraising. Most pitches have straightforward subject lines: “Stand with Me,” urged recall target Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin, in a March 11 missive that pleaded with supporters not to let “the liberal elite and Big Government Union Bosses control this election.” “CNN Attacks Joe the Plumber,”...

Re "A year later, raid on Bin Laden becomes campaign fodder," May 1 In 2007, Mitt Romney said he wouldn't spend billions of dollars tracking down one man. During his second term as president,George W. Bush said he didn't know where Osama bin Laden was and didn't spend much time thinking about it. By the time Barack Obama was elected president, the trail to Bin Laden had long gone cold. In 2009, his first order to Leon Panetta, then his new CIA director, was to make the killing or capture of Bin Laden the top priority in the war against Al Qaeda.

A future president sits shirtless in his rent-controlled Manhattan apartment working the New York Times crossword while his girlfriend looks on, an emotional barrier separating him from those close to him. He is unsure of his future path in life but certain that it will be one he builds himself. That's the portrait David Maraniss paints of a young Barack Obama in an upcoming biography, "Barack Obama: The Story," which is excerpted in Vanity Fair. The biography ends as Obama heads to Harvard Law School, but the excerpt is mostly about Obama's early love life.

This post has been corrected. See note at bottom for details. A future president sits shirtless in his apartment working the New York Times crossword as his girlfriend looks on, amid conflict over an emotional barrier between himself and those close to him, unsure of his future path in life but certain that it would be one he would build himself. That's the portrait David Maraniss paints of a young Barack Obama in an upcoming biography. Details of Obama's past love life, excerpts of which have been published by Vanity Fair, are the focus of a preview piece of "Barack Obama: The Story.

WASHINGTON - If Barack Obama's first presidential campaign was part cultural phenomenon, part national movement, his second may look a bit more modest - like a series of well-run Senate campaigns. Facing the reality of running as a bruised incumbent in a politically divided country, Obama's advisors say they are plotting a strategy that doesn't depend on a wave of support to lift the president's chances across the country. And it won't hinge on a single theme based on ideas such as "hope" and "change" that defined the campaign and captured the zeitgeist in 2008.

It looks like the Obama campaign may have settled on its slogan for the 2012 election: "Forward. " Four years ago, Barack Obama ran on another one-word slogan, "Change. " Now, as President Obama prepares to hold the first public campaign rallies for his reelection, his team is giving a sense of what his pitch to voters will look like. A seven-minute Web video (watch below) lays out what it says was the precarious state of the nation when Obama took office in 2009 and the steps he took to begin addressing the challenges.

President-elect Barack Obama sent an explicit message Tuesday to international negotiators of a new global warming treaty that, under his administration, the U.S would move to slash its own greenhouse gas emissions by more than 80% by mid-century, and "help lead the world toward a new era of global cooperation on climate change."

Reg Rozell and Kim C. Sweitzer seem like they'd be sure-fire Obama 2012 supporters. Both have good-paying union jobs at a busy steel mill here and are benefiting from a manufacturing surge that's keeping their employer operating three shifts and granting overtime to whoever wants it. But though both voted for Barack Obama in 2008, they say they won't vote to reelect him, even though they're noticing positive signs in the economy. They already voted Republican in 2010, helping elect Gov. John Kasich, who has been battling with public employee unions ever since.

If you've been holding your breath to see whether Mitt Romney would pivot to the center now that it's a two-man race between him and President Obama, you can exhale; he won't. Romney made that clear in his victory speech after last week's primaries in the Northeast. Instead, at least for now, the presumptive nominee's campaign will focus relentlessly on what he sees as the president's wrongheaded approach to the economy. His message boils down to this: Obama favors government intervention in the economy, "a path where our lives will be ruled by bureaucrats and boards," a path that "leads to chronic high unemployment, crushing debt and stagnant wages.

President Obama has given a lot of major speeches. But never before has he punctuated one by dropping the microphone after, like he did Tuesday night on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" (watch videos below) . It's the rhetorical equivalent of the end zone dance in the NFL, and came after Obama joined the NBC host in "slow-jamming" the news. And it was just one of the standout moments from the president's latest foray into late night television. Photos: The search for Romney's running mate Obama's appearance was part of his weeklong messaging effort to press Congress to extend lower interest rates for some student loan programs.