A lot of the goals are going to relate to spending, as opposed to going after a radical tax-reform package. |
Dick Cheney does not wake up in the morning worried about what the press is going to say about him. |
Even though the president's job-approval numbers are down a bit, the RNC is still raising money at a record clip. It's likely a case where it's the party activists that give, and they give no matter what. And perhaps they give more when the party faces challenges. |
Gas prices are the classic pocketbook issue for the average person and the average family, and these are things that they notice very much. It helps explain the paradox we see in the polls: The economy is very good, but right now a majority of people say it isn't. The hurricane, and its aftermath, will only exacerbate this problem. |
He's reaching out and trying to repair things. He is working very hard at it. |
I don't think he's lost any of his zeal for Social Security reform, ... The action has sort of shifted to the Hill now and the Ways and Means Committee so we'll have to kind of see what they can come up with. |
I'm not sure there's a big win available. You've got to hit a bunch of singles. |
If he can sometimes be a lightning rod and keep some of the criticism away from the president, I think that's fine with him. |
If the president decides he would be the best choice, he's going to pick him. That's it. |
It's naive all of a sudden to say that the White House just realized that there's going to be a tough confirmation fight in the Senate. Of course there's pressure from both sides, but he's not going to cave to pressure from the left or the right. |
My personal preference is to go along with the press' sense of entitlement because it's easier to go along with it than try to fight it. But I don't think he thinks that way. |
Some of the conservative activists would prefer to have a sitting judge who has taken conservative positions on all their favorite issues. I'm sure the president considered some people like that, but that was never his goal or his job description. |
The (Bush) campaign would prefer not to have a floor fight on anything. Because the more we talk about the things we want to talk about, the better. |
The average American out there doesn't give a damn whether they called the press Saturday night or Sunday morning, and they don't care whether they called the Corpus Christi paper as opposed to the White House pool. |
The biggest problem is that the Democrats will not go along. They will keep their current primary calendar, which means their nominee will emerge in March, while the Republicans continue to fight until May or June. |