KaavyaWriting: “See that Discovery World building in the background? The line starts half a mile away from that building, snakes in a triple bend, then wraps around the building to come out the other side and snake onward. And people are still arriving. So huge, and I’m so PROUD Obama has such strong support. Long line, continue on!”
USA Today: President Obama announced a new military strategy on Thursday that will cut the Pentagon budget by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.
Speaking from the Pentagon, Obama said the plan is “smart, strategic” and sets priorities.
…. The new military strategy includes $487 billion in cuts over the next decade. An additional $500 billion in cuts could be coming if Congress follows through on plans for deeper reductions. The announcement comes weeks after the U.S. officially ended the Iraq War and after a decade of increased defense spending in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
Dana Milbank: If this is Mitt Romney’s idea of a victory rally, one shudders to think what would have happened if he had lost the Iowa caucuses. The day after his impossibly thin eight-vote victory …. he flew here for a town hall meeting at Manchester Central High School, where he was to bask in the endorsement of his 2008 arch rival, John McCain.
But the senator grimaced when he was introduced, and as Romney delivered his own stump speech, an increasingly impatient McCain pulled up his sleeve and checked his watch. McCain gave his endorsement address without mentioning Romney’s Iowa win until the end. “By the way, we forgot to congratulate him on his landslide victory last night,” he said, laughing. Romney ignored him.
….. Romney continued to wrestle with words when he took the stage … “What a, uh, big night we had last night, or what a big morning we had, uh, last morning, this morning, in, uh, Iowa,” he began…..
Washington Monthly: What If Obama Loses? … there’s a widespread assumption that extreme positions taken in the (GOP) primaries will fade in the general election as candidates “move to the center,” and will disappear entirely once the serious business of governing begins. Surely President Newt Gingrich would not get rid of child labor laws. Surely President Perry would not seek to eliminate three cabinet departments.
We don’t think that this year, with this GOP, those assumptions are warranted. And so we asked a distinguished group of reporters and scholars to think through the hitherto unthinkable: What if one of these people actually wins?
Steve Benen: It was easy to imagine Mitt Romney winning the Iowa caucuses. It was harder to imagine Romney winning Iowa and looking weaker at the same time.
And yet, that seems to be a fairly reasonable assessment of the race for the Republican presidential nomination this morning….
….. there’s not much for Romney to boast about here. After five years of near-constant campaigning, Romney managed to get fewer votes in Iowa last night than he did in his first campaign. He also picked up the dubious honor of the weakest win in the history of the caucuses – no victor has ever managed to finish first with less than 25% of the vote until last night.
After spending nearly $4.7 million, most of it towards the very end of the contest, these are not results Romney should be proud of.
Steve Benen: In the immortal words of the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “All right, we’ll call it a draw.” Whichever one of these two manage to come out on top, the results are effectively the same: Romney spent well over $4 million in Iowa, only to discover (a) three-quarters of Republicans still don’t like him; and (b) he tied a guy who spent about one-eighth the amount of money and was polling in single digits as recently as a few weeks ago.
Tonight’s big winner is obvious: his name is Barack Obama.
President Barack Obama prepares to sign legislation in the Oval Office, Jan. 3, 2012. Staff Secretary Rajesh De is pictured at left. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)