John Feehery

I recently wrote an article about the legacy of Barack Obama, and I wrongly threw Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian, under the bus.
 
This is what I wrote:
 
“Historians will rate President Barack Obama as one of our nation’s greatest presidents. The question is: Was he any good? That the history profession is dominated by a liberal elite comes as no surprise. Robert Dallek, Arthur Schleschinger, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Michael Beschloss would all rank both Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson toward the top of the list, and Ronald Reagan toward the bottom. George W. Bush will never, ever get his due for how he handled the 9/11 attacks as he passed landmark education and Medicare legislation or for his remarkable commitment to fighting AIDS in Africa.”

It had been 31 years since a bunch of American businessmen had organized a coup against the monarchy that had ruled Hawaii for generations when Daniel Inouye was born. His parents came from Japan, and along with Korean and Chinese workers, the Japanese had come to work on the Sugar plantations. That same year, Congress passed a law banning further immigration from Japan to Hawaii or anywhere else in the United States.

In 1924, on the mainland, Calvin Coolidge was President and Republicans had majorities in both the House and the Senate. It was the era when a President could get away with saying little and doing even less, and Congress basically let the good times roll.

According to Wikipedia:

“Opportunity cost is the cost of any activity measured in terms of the value of the next best alternative forgone … It is the sacrifice related to the second best choice available to someone, or group, who has picked among several mutually exclusive choices. The opportunity cost is also the ‘cost’ (as a lost benefit) of the forgone products after making a choice. Opportunity cost is a key concept in economics, and has been described as expressing ‘the basic relationship between scarcity and choice.’ ”

As my friend Steve Bell, of the Bipartisan Policy Center, reminded me yesterday, the opportunity costs of not doing a “big” deal that includes fundamental entitlement and tax reform in the context of the fiscal cliff are enormous.

Mike Simpson is thinking big.
 
Barack Obama is thinking small.
 
Simpson, an Idaho Republican, recently spearheaded a bipartisan letter in the House urging negotiators to go big when dealing with the financial cliff. Mike is no Johnny-come-lately in his thoughts. He urged the same thing of the so-called supercommittee last year, and his efforts landed him a primary opponent.

The Republican Party is now almost exclusively a creature of the House of Representatives.
 
Perhaps that is why Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan to be his running mate.
 
From the House perspective, it was a pretty good night.
 
They picked up a few seats despite a relatively easy victory by President Obama.
 
When you look at that sea of red in the map of the United States, that is all represented by House Republicans. Only a few of those districts voted for Barack Obama in this election.

The tiebreaker is in Florida, moderated by Bob Schieffer, and will be focused on foreign policy.

Obama got blown out in the first debate, narrowly edged out Romney in game two, and now it all comes down to this final round.

Four years is a lot of on-the-job training when it comes to foreign policy.

The vice presidential debates are usually meaningless.

The one last night was more meaningless than most meaningless vice presidential debates.

The most famous debate put-down in history came when Lloyd Bentsen tore into Dan Quayle, who, let’s face it, was no Jack Kennedy.

Quayle looked like a fool, but his playing partner still won the election.

The Republican convention's goal was to serve two purposes.
 
One was to convince the party’s most ardent supporters that the GOP was going to continue to tug harder to the right, so that the country wouldn’t be pulled over to the left in a heaping mess.
 
The other was to convince folks in the middle that the party wasn’t nearly as conservative as it was letting on.
 
Achieving these twin goals is not easy. Indeed, it is darn near impossible.

What will this election’s October Surprise be?
 
According to Mike Rogers, the House Intelligence Committee chairman, it could be an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
 
Rogers (R-Mich.) was speaking to a breakfast group organized by The Hill, where he was asked point-blank by the moderator, A.B. Stoddard, about the likelihood of such an event.
 
The chairman had just returned from the Middle East and had been briefed by the highest levels of the Israeli government.

In many ways, President Obama’s new position on the whole issue of gay marriage is completely irrelevant. This has largely been a state issue, and while the Justice Department decided not to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, the president’s signature or veto is not pending on any piece of legislation produced by the Congress.
 
But that is not how the media played it. For them, this issue is far bigger than Social Security reform, Medicare reform, the debt limit, the largest tax increase in history (which is just around the corner) and the shocking lack of leadership from this president on a host of other issues.