Visual source: Newseum
Dan Balz:
Iowa is awash in presidential candidates right now, and for the next week they will be focused on turning out their voters for the caucuses. But a larger worry should be part of their calculation: how to reverse the damage the Republican brand has suffered in the past year...
The shifting allegiances of Republican voters suggest not only a vote of no confidence in many of the candidates but also unresolved divisions within the party. The next nominee will have to bridge that divide. Republicans are united on many policy issues, but the tea party’s influence has pushed all the presidential candidates to the right. And Obama has seized the opportunity to argue to independent voters that, whatever their disappointment with his record, they should think twice before handing power to the Republicans.
There’s little that Republican candidates can do about all of this in the next few weeks. They’ll be busy competing with one another to win over voters in their own party in the Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida contests. But if they don’t address the larger doubts about the party, they risk underdog status when facing Obama next November.
NY Times:
A week before the Iowa caucuses open the Republican nominating contest, the candidates are in a final push to win over undecided voters, with most candidates taking aim at Ron Paul.
Matthew Cooper:
So thinking [the pay]roll agreement is anything but putting off another major fight seems naive. And when the fight does come in late February the Republicans will probably still be choosing their nominee. (These primary battles never end as early as people think they will.)
The terrain will not be pretty for Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, or whoever is left standing come then. GOP candidates didn't sign on for John Boehner's failed crusade for a year-long extensions and it's not at all clear that they'll want to fight for the House some time later in February.
The bigger deal is whether the decline in popularity of Congress and Obama's recent tick up in the polls continues. Will the GOP frontrunners, whoever they are, have to adjust their rhetoric accordingly?
Jill Lawrence:
Newt Gingrich has finally found a politician he considers even worse than the president he calls socialist, anti-colonialist and radical. That would be his fellow Republican Ron Paul.
"I think Barack Obama is very destructive to the future of the United States. I think Ron Paul's views are totally outside the mainstream of virtually every decent American," Gingrich said Tuesday in a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer.
Could he vote for Paul? "No." If it came down to Paul vs. Obama? "You'd have a very tough choice at that point."
Jonathan Capehart:
The Republican party has a race problem. I mean, it always has, ever since Southern Democrats did what President Johnson said they would do when he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “[W]e just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come,” he famously remarked.And the GOP would ride racial resentment and fear to electoral victories and greater political power up and down the ballot across the country. But as we’re seeing in the contest for the nomination, race is boomeranging on the Republicans.
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), the latest front-runner in the impending Iowa caucuses, has been tripped up by racist newsletters that bear his name from the late 1980s and the 1990s. He’s trying his best to skitter away from them by saying things like “I didn’t write them, I disavow them. . . .” But that simply isn’t good enough, especially after you read James Kirchick’s “Angry White Man; the bigoted past of Ron Paul” from 2008 and “Why Don’t Libertarians Care About Ron Paul’s Bigoted Newsletters?” from last week.
Just a reminder: H5N1 (bird flu) is
still out there.
You are not going to believe this one,” he told Ron Fouchier, a virologist at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. “I think we have an airborne H5N1 virus.”
The news, delivered one afternoon last July, was chilling. It meant that Dr. Fouchier’s research group had taken one of the most dangerous flu viruses ever known and made it even more dangerous — by tweaking it genetically to make it more contagious.
What shocked the researchers was how easy it had been, Dr. Fouchier said. Just a few mutations was all it took to make the virus go airborne.
Cue the scary music. Get your flu shot and be glad it's just seasonal flu that's circulating this year. And read John Barry's
The Great Influenza if you haven't already.