As I wrote earlier today, the New York Times wants Barack Obama to be more like Elizabeth Warren. The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza has his own suggestion: be more like John Edwards.

Of course, Cillizza doesn’t want the president to emulate the self-destructive personal behavior that torpedoed what was left of an already faltering political career when the former Democratic vice presidential nominee’s lies and infidelities were revealed. Rather, he’d like the president to excavate Edwards’s “Two Americas” stump speech in which he depicted the country as a savage place divided between haves and have-nots. Cillizza thinks that Edwards’s signature piece of economic populism strikes just the right tone for a president desperate to change the topic of conversation from a failed economy to evil plutocrats who are protected by Republicans. But what Cillizza seems to forget is that Edwards’s screed about inequality came across as blatantly insincere. For Obama, who unlike Edwards cannot pose as the “son of a millworker,” to adopt this tone would not only be hypocritical it would come across as patently fake.

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In addition to Alana’s post, there are a number of excellent commentaries (see here; here; here; and here) that have been written on a devastating late Friday afternoon admission by the Obama administration: The Community Living Assistance Services and Support (CLASS) Act, has been deemed unworkable.

In a letter to congressional leaders, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, wrote, “Despite our best analytical efforts, I do not see a viable path forward for CLASS implementation at this time.”

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The painful debate about Israel’s decision to trade 1,000 imprisoned Palestinian terrorists for kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit continues this week with the families of terror victims attempting to sue the government to prevent the swap. Though the vast majority of Israelis support the trade and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s willingness to pay the ransom for Shalit, the impending release of so many murderers is nothing to celebrate. That is, unless you are a Palestinian.

Mass rallies and celebrations are being planned in Ramallah to celebrate the freedom of those who were convicted of mass murders. Who will they be cheering? As the New York Times reports:

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If there’s one lesson both Democrats and Republican officials should learn with regard to Turkey, it is that no confidential conversation will ever remain secret. It doesn’t take a Wikileaks-like event for Turkish officials to divulge the topics of telephone calls with the White House; it only takes the prime minister’s bravado, and the indiscretion of his Israel-bashing, Hamas-sympathizing foreign minister.

During a retreat for the ruling party, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu discussed an Erdoğan -Obama phone call:

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Last Friday, the Obama administration quietly announced it was suspending progress on the CLASS Act, an unsustainable long-term care insurance program that was supposed to help offset the cost of Obamacare. But now that the CBO and House GOP are readying for the program’s presumable repeal, the Obama administration is balking:

President Obama is against repealing the health law’s long-term care CLASS Act and might veto Republican efforts to do so, an administration official tells The Hill, despite the government’s announcement Friday that the program was dead in the water.

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In the fight between supporters of the Islamic Republic and partisans of the Mujahedin, I side with neither: Partisans of Tehran support a terror-sponsoring Islamist dictatorship that claims to be a democracy, while the Mujahedin al-Khalq aspires to lead a terror-sponsoring Islamist dictatorship that claims to be a democracy.

Now that the smoke has cleared as to the allegations of an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, the Iranian government has come up with its line of defense: According to both Mehr News in Persian and PressTV in English, the Iranian government is saying that Gholam Shakuri, the deputy to the cousin in the Qods Force who Mansour Arbabsiar allegedly telephoned, is actually a member of the Mujahedin al-Khalq. To see how Shakuri allegedly fits in, see Maseh Zarif’s able outline of the plot:

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President Obama launched another campaign-heavy jobs tour across battleground states today, and the News-Record reports activists from the “Occupy Greensboro” movement may greet him with a protest at his North Carolina hotel:

A day after staging a 600-person march through town protesting financial inequities, about 200 campers and part-time demonstrators agreed by unanimous consent Sunday evening to pursue other tactics, including the possible picketing of the Proximity Hotel where they expect President Barack Obama to stay tonight during his two-day visit to North Carolina and Virginia.

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Trying to get re-elected in a country where most people still see big government and high taxes as evils to be avoided is a big problem for Barack Obama. But it’s not a dilemma that interests the New York Times. Obama’s recent turn to class warfare encourages the newspaper, but as far as they are concerned, Obama’s soak-the-rich rhetoric pales beside the advocacy of Elizabeth Warren.

For the Times, the former Harvard Law professor isn’t just a viable Democratic alternative to Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown. As the paper editorialized yesterday, Warren’s collectivist battle cry ought to serve as the model for Obama and his party in 2012. The Times editorial page’s crush on Warren is such that they have proclaimed a YouTube video of one of her campaign speeches as exactly what every Democrat ought to be saying. But before Democrats go down this road, they should think clearly about whether they really want to go to the American people next year running on a platform that channels the Great Society liberalism of the 1960s as reimagined by the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

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The new Pew study out today highlights one of the challenges Mitt Romney has had to overcome simply to maintain his status at or near the top of the GOP primary polls. Not only do conservative grassroots voters fall into the “anyone but Romney” camp, but the former Massachusetts governor has also been on the wrong side of the free media war.

Alexander Burns grabs the relevant portion of the study’s results: “Mitt Romney remains the one constant—portrayed as the ever-present if not passionately embraced alternative in the GOP field. Despite often leading in the polls, Romney has typically received less coverage and less positive coverage than his chief rival of the moment—and that remained true in early October after [Rick] Perry faltered. Overall, he is second in the amount of attention received and the tone of that narrative has been unwaveringly mixed.”

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In 2008, Obama rode to victory on a wave of fawning media coverage. He shouldn’t expect a repeat of that in 2012, according to a Pew Research Center study:

One man running for president has suffered the most unrelentingly negative treatment of all, the study found: Barack Obama. Though covered largely as president rather than a candidate, negative assessments of Obama have outweighed positive by a ratio of almost 4-1. Those assessments of the president have also been substantially more negative than positive every one of the 23 weeks studied. And in no week during these five months was more than 10 percent of the coverage about the president positive in tone.

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Politico leads with an interesting piece today about whether Mitt Romney is too unloved by the Republican grass roots to win his party’s nomination. Resistance to Romney is still strong, leading some to question the wisdom of pundits who have anointed him as the inevitable GOP standard-bearer.

The points raised there about conservative qualms about a man who has flip-flopped on social issues and still must explain why he championed a government mandated health care law in Massachusetts are all on target. But the lack of enthusiasm for Romney among many conservatives doesn’t mean the pundits predicting his triumph are wrong. To focus only on Romney’s shortcomings at this point is to ask the wrong question. His inevitability is a function of the collapse of every viable conservative alternative. Had any of the more conservative GOP candidates panned out, Romney would have had no chance at the nomination. But they didn’t.

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Politico reported that on Friday, CNBC’s John Harwood sat down with White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley and asked about President Obama’s remark the previous day to Ed Henry of Fox News. Henry, you’ll recall, asked the president a question which included a critical comment of Obama by Mitt Romney, to which Obama said, “I didn’t know you were the spokesperson for Mitt Romney.”

“I want to ask you about the thinking within the White House,” Harwood said to Daley. “Yesterday at a press conference one of my colleagues asked the president to respond to something Mitt Romney said. The president said, ‘I didn’t realize you were a spokesman for Mitt Romney.’ Is the White House — you feeling — the president feeling under siege from events right now?”

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Forget the “99 percent.” Just 33 percent of Americans blame Wall Street for the financial crisis and recession, according to the latest poll by The Hill. But the majority of Americans do hold one institution responsible for the economy – the federal government:

The [Occupy Wall Street] movement appears to have struck a chord with progressive voters, but it does not seem to represent the feelings of the wider public.

The Hill poll found that only one in three likely voters blames Wall Street for the country’s financial troubles, whereas more than half — 56 percent — blame Washington.

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The key word in the headline of Jonathan’s post on Herman Cain’s evident disinterest in foreign policy is “proudly.” While it’s true that foreign policy will likely stay on the back burner for the coming election, it’s also true that Cain’s deficit on this issue would be easily remedied. The last three presidents (including President Obama) all possessed a basic but passable grasp of foreign affairs when they ran for their first terms. Cain doesn’t have that knowledge base yet and hasn’t shown any interest in acquiring it.

It’s instructive to remember that President Obama’s supporters in the foreign policy community resembled his other supporters—they really liked the idea of him, but even his admirers were unable to explain what Obama actually knew about the world aside from the fact that he would “represent” something different about the way the world looked at America. To be sure, Obama’s opposition to the Iraq war represented a tangible break from the Democratic party, which had been making the case for regime change in Iraq for a decade before the war. But the specifics were still vague, even to those close to him. This is the relevant paragraph from James Traub’s glowing New York Times Magazine profile of Obama in November 2007:

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