Is making President Obama the focus of Republicans’ midterm strategy – again – really going to work? The New York Times: “Not everyone in the party, however, is so sure that they can expand their ranks in Congress or improve their standing among voters by personally attacking the president, whose likability ratings stand near 80 percent even if only half of Americans approve of his job performance. And they are cautioning their fellow party members to avoid building their campaigns around the same kinds of messages that have fallen flat before.”
Chaser: Mitt Romney to the Wall Street Journal: "Having lost the election, I don't look at myself as the person best equipped to prescribe where the party should go, going forward." (h/t: Political Wire.)
“President Barack Obama [was] spending a night out with his family [Thursday] after a week of presidential duties that took him from Oklahoma to Illinois,” AP writes. “The White House says Obama attended a choral concert Thursday evening for 11-year-old daughter Sasha at Sidwell Friends School. Joining the president are his wife, Michelle, and his mother-in-law, Marian Robinson, who was seen carrying flowers as she loaded up to leave the White House in the presidential motorcade.”
The Washington Post’s Paul Kane reminds of James Comey’s consequential and riveting 20 minutes of testimony in 2007, in which he said he was pressured by the Bush White House in a dramatic hospital showdown, and even confronted by the president himself, to approve a classified program. It was reported that it was a terrorist surveillance program that he believed to be illegal.
Gallup finds that more than two-thirds (68%) of Americans do not want the U.S. to get involved in Syria. And a majority (58%) believes it cannot be solved with economic or diplomatic efforts alone.
AP: “President Barack Obama’s trip to Africa next month may result in a stark juxtaposition between the growing power of the gay rights movement in the U.S. and the criminalization of homosexuality throughout the African continent.”
