Mike Huckabee told Newsmax that President Obama “pretends to be” a Christian.
Said Huckabee: “I’m less concerned about what faith the person has. I’m more concerned about the authenticity of their faith and how that plays out in their politics … I’m also concerned about a guy that believes he’s a Christian and pretends to be and then says he is, but then does things that makes it very difficult for people to practice their Christian faith.”
A new CNN/ORC poll finds 43% of those who identify as Republicans believe President Obama is a Muslim, while only 15% of those who identify as Democrats agreed he is Muslim.
Columbia University President Lee Bollinger said at convocation that the school “is looking forward to hosting the president in 2017,” the Columbia Spectator reports.
“He didn’t elaborate at convocation about what type of role or presence Obama will have on campus.”
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Vice President Joe Biden received President Obama’s “blessing” to make a 2016 bid for the White House, CNN reports.
“But that’s if Biden chooses to run — the decision is his. While he doesn’t need the President’s permission, of course, a potential presidential candidacy was among the topics of their lunch Monday at the White House. The President made clear he would not stand in his way or counsel him against a run, the senior Democrat said.”
“As historians begin to assess Barack Obama’s record as president, there’s at least one legacy he’ll leave that will indeed be historic—but not in the way he would have hoped. Even as Democrats look favorably ahead to the presidential landscape of 2016, the strength in the Electoral College belies huge losses across much of the country. In fact, no president in modern times has presided over so disastrous a stretch for his party, at almost every level of politics,” Politico reports.
“The party’s record over the past six years has made clear that when Barack Obama leaves office in January 2017 the Democratic Party will have ceded vast sections of the country to Republicans, and will be left with a weak bench of high-level elected officials. It is, in fact, so bleak a record that even if the Democrats hold the White House and retake the Senate in 2016, the party’s wounds will remain deep and enduring, threatening the enactment of anything like a ‘progressive’ agenda across much of the nation and eliminating nearly a decade’s worth of rising stars who might help strengthen the party in elections ahead.”
New York Times: “Publicly, Mr. Obama betrays little urgency about his future. Privately, he is preparing for his postpresidency with the same fierce discipline and fund-raising ambition that characterized the 2008 campaign that got him to the White House.”
“The long-running dinner this past February is part of a methodical effort taking place inside and outside the White House as the president, first lady and a cadre of top aides map out a postpresidential infrastructure and endowment they estimate could cost as much as $1 billion. The president’s aides did not ask any of the guests for library contributions after the dinner, but a number of those at the table could be donors in the future.”
“You don’t have that much time to take away Americans’ guns and declare martial law… if you’re going to do that, you better get started”.
— Jon Stewart advising President Obama, who was making his final visit to The Daily Show.
President Obama and Chief Justice John Roberts “got off to a rough start from the very beginning, when they tripped over each other’s words during a key line in the oath at Obama’s first inauguration,” the Washington Post reports.
“Both Harvard Law School graduates, they occupy nearly opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. Obama, as a senator, had voted against Roberts’s confirmation the court, saying the judge lacked sufficient empathy for the powerless and could not be counted on to vote the right way in the most important cases.”
“But in Thursday’s Supreme Court decision upholding federal subsidies offered under the Affordable Care Act, Roberts again helped sustain the president’s policy legacy in a way that few could have anticipated when Obama took office. In voting with the majority and writing the opinion, the chief justice has ensured that the legacies of both the Obama presidency and the Roberts court are forever intertwined.”
First Read: “Why is that number important? Because the poll shows — once again — how Hillary Clinton and Obama are inextricably tied together. And so an Obama approval in the high 40s is good news for Hillary’s general-election prospects, and an Obama approval in the low 40s is bad news (like we saw in 2014).”
“Oh, and don’t forget this: George W. Bush’s approval rating at this same point in time heading into the 2008 contest was 29%. “
David Remnick: “Obama is a flawed President, but his sense of historical perspective is well developed. He gives every sign of believing that his most important role in the American history of race was his election in November, 2008, and, nearly as important, his re-election, four years later. For millions of Americans, that election was an inspiration. But, for some untold number of others, it remains a source of tremendous resentment, a kind of threat that is capable, in some, of arousing the basest prejudices.”
“Obama hates to talk about this. He allows himself so little latitude. Maybe that will change when he is an ex-President focussed on his memoirs. As a very young man he wrote a book about becoming, about identity, about finding community in a black church, about finding a sense of home—in his case, on the South Side of Chicago, with a young lawyer named Michelle Robinson. It will be beyond interesting to see what he’s willing to tell us—tell us with real freedom—about being the focus of so much hope, but also the subject of so much ambient and organized racial anger: the birther movement, the death threats, the voter-suppression attempts, the articles, books, and films that portray him as everything from an unreconstructed, drug-addled campus radical to a Kenyan post-colonial socialist. This has been the Age of Obama, but we have learned over and over that this has hardly meant the end of racism in America. Not remotely. Dylann Roof, tragically, seems to be yet another terrible reminder of that.”
“With all that bad news, is it not true that arguably President Obama is the worst foreign policy president in history? I think he is.”
— Mitt Romney, quoted by the Washington Post, after giving a presentation to about 200 GOP donors.
President Obama “dropped some hints about what he’ll do after his time in office, saying he could return to his roots as a community organizer,” The Hill reports.
Said Obama: “I’ll be done being president in a couple of years and I’ll still be a pretty young man,” he said. “And so I’ll go back to doing the kinds of work I was doing before, just trying to find ways to help people.”
Harry Enten: “Clinton’s favorable rating has fallen into line with Obama’s. The latest local regression estimate puts Clinton’s favorable rating at 48.9 percent and Obama’s at 48.5 percent. And that understates the relationship.”
“Even when Clinton’s favorable rating was stronger than Obama’s, the two generally fell and rose at the same time. The correlation between the two has been 0.79. Now the relationship is even stronger.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said that he is more experienced than President Obama was when he started his presidential campaign, The Hill reports.
Said Rubio: “Well, I don’t think there is any doubt about that in terms of the years, but also what we did. I mean, he was, as I said, he was back bencher in the Illinois legislature; I was the speaker of the Florida house, the majority leader, the majority whip.”
He added: “I’ve been in the Senate now for 4-1/2 years. I’ll have been in the Senate for six years where I’ve spent a significant amount of time every day working on intelligence issues and also on foreign relations.”
New York Times: “He defeated her in a grueling Democratic nomination battle. Then she pursued his agenda across the world as secretary of state. Now, the delicate relationship between Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama is about to get even more complicated.”
“For months, Mrs. Clinton and her team have pored over Mr. Obama’s poll ratings, policies and constituencies, seeking to solve a central riddle for the campaign she is about to begin: How can she run for president as her own person, without criticizing the sitting president she served — while her Republican opponents will be working to demonize them both?”
Dan Balz: “Her every step will be analyzed for signs of change or continuity. Has she learned from her loss to then-candidate Barack Obama in the 2008 primaries? If so, what? Does she act entitled or hungry? Has she shifted on foreign policy issues since she was Obama’s secretary of state?”
Politico reports Hillary Clinton “is expected from the start to have access to two potent collections of names, email addresses and other useful information — Obama’s vaunted 2012 campaign list of roughly 12 million supporters, and a separate list of about four million people gathered over the last two years by the outside group Ready for Hillary. While the legal details for the lists’ transfer are still being worked out, Democratic strategists say they expect both will eventually help Clinton raise money and build her team of volunteer field staffers.”
Former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu (R) said that President Obama is “inciting” birther conspiracy theorists by planning a trip to Kenya this summer, TPM reports.
Said Sununu: “I think his trip back to Kenya is going to create a lot of chatter and commentary amongst some of the hard right, who still don’t see him as having been born in the U.S. I personally think he’s just inciting some chatter on an issue that should have been a dead issue a long time ago.”
A new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that 34% of Republicans called President Obama an imminent threat to the United States, versus 25% who ranked Russian President Vladimir Putin and 23% who viewed Syrian President Bashar al-Assed as that dangerous.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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