The ham-handed Barack Obama campaign attack ads on Mitt Romney's former firm Bain Capital have drawn a lot of ire from other Democrats.

To win just under 40 percent of the vote in a primary with five active candidates is pretty impressive, even for a candidate like Mitt Romney, who started off with significant advantages in New Hampshire.

If you want redistribution, you better first produce growth. Which the Obama Democrats' policies have failed to do.

What does 2012 hold, both in terms of policy and politics, for the developing relationship between public-sector workers and taxpayers? What does a proactive reform agenda for 2012 look like? Is a pro-reform platform a winning issue for reformers or their opponents? This event will address these and other questions in two panel discussions.

Republicans in many states are pursuing two avenues to tilt elections their way—changing the electoral college rules in the middle of the game and using laws and regulations to block likely Democratic voters from exercising their legitimate franchise. Both ploys demand new thinking to enhance our elections, not constrain them in partisan ways.

Is it panic time at Obama headquarters in Chicago? You might get that impression from watching events -- and the polls -- over the past few weeks.

Could it be that those who represent the isolationist impulse are not overwhelmingly popular? That Americans actually believe in all that 'empire for liberty' claptrap? Apparently.