Jim VandeHei

When President Bush gave his fifth State of the Union address on January 31, 2006, he sat at 43 percent approval in the Gallup tracking poll, in no small part because of public perception regarding his administration's handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. When President Obama delivered his fifth State of the Union last night, his Gallup approval number was lower a mere 41 percent,…

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough has been making some fairly conservative arguments on his program as of late. On Thursday’s Morning Joe, for instance, he took his liberal guests to task, blasting Politico’s Jim VandeHei and The New York Time’s Steve Rattner for characterizing the House GOP as a do-nothing, radical conference. Scarborough insisted that Republicans have stood for the same…

Bloomberg columnist Margaret Carlson tied immigration reform to the shooting of Trayvon Martin on Wednesday’s Morning Joe, claiming Republican voters oppose the Senate immigration bill because they believe “immigrants are, you know, people in hoodies.” While the inflammatory line would no doubt be well-received on a liberal network like MSNBC, it seems somewhat unbecoming of a professional…

Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei showed up on PBS’s Charlie Rose Wednesday night, and from the comfort of Rose’s pitch-black studio he tossed aside his journalistic objectivity and aired out his own political opinions – particularly his disdain for Republicans. Rose had asked his guests -- Politico’s Mike Allen was there, too -- what it would take to fix the country economically and whether…

When Politico isn’t busy sending editors to an off-the-record chat with a potentially perjurious U.S. Attorney General, it spends its time mocking a retiring conservative legislator. A panel of reporters from the Washington tabloid ganged up on Michele Bachmann on Thursday’s Morning Joe, blasting the Minnesota congresswoman as a “celebrity politician” who will become “irrelevant to politics…

Imagine that. Politico has a very negative story on our second-term president. After over five years during which the online publication has engaged in virtual non-stop fawning over the wonders of Barack Obama -- going all the way back to shortly after its founding in January 2007, when Ben Smith found someone who described him as "frighteningly coherent" -- Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei…

Instead of doing the work they were supposed to be doing last night -- i.e., following their publication's mission statement, which is (or maybe was) to "turn ... reporters (i.e., themselves) loose on the subject we love: national politics" -- Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen spent over 1,800 words whining. Their disingenuous complaint: The Obama administration supposedly has insurmountable…

It's a classic MSM tactic: delegitimize opposition to a liberal proposal.  Suggest that there can be no principled objections, only base motives.   Take the current proposals on "the pathway to citizenship"—AKA amnesty—being floated.  On today's Morning Joe, Politico co-founder and executive editor Jim VandeHei proclaimed that it was probably "the right thing to do," but fretted that it…

You don't know whether to laugh or cry upon reading the Sunday night shots campaign Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen at Politico took at Mitt Romney and his campaign. Maybe these guys really believe that the Romney campaign is the one which still desperately needs a "last chance to move the needle in any significant way in the swing states that will decide the election," and that "Obama is…

Politico editor Jim VandeHei appeared on MSNBC, Thursday, to blame Barack Obama's poor debate performance on the burdens of the office. The journalist spun, "The President had to be the President, and had to be a candidate, and so he didn't have nearly as much prep time." [See video below. MP3 audio here.] VandeHei did not try and sugarcoat the debate performance itself, knocking the…

Let's see. Who has the bigger problem with Libya and the Middle East? Is it the guy who's in charge with a foreign policy in disarray who has described the first murder of a U.S. ambassador in 33 years a "bump in the road"? Or his presidential campaign challenger Mitt Romney? If we're to believe Mike Allen, Jim Vandehei, and Politico, it's Romney, where "Romney advisers at odds over Libya"…

As NewsBusters has been reporting, the press's gushing and fawning over Michelle Obama's speech Tuesday at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte has been almost sick-making. So over the top was the praise that Politico's co-founder and executive editor Jim VandeHei said on C-SPAN early Wednesday morning, "The mainstream media tends to be quite smitten with the Obamas" (video follows…

For sheer arrogance and self-importance, it's pretty hard to top a pair of political pundits at Politico on the power they  believe media "insiders" have to tell Americans what Mitt Romney really said and meant in his nomination acceptance speech at the Republican convention Thursday night. I daresay that most Americans, almost six years after the web site's founding (January 23, 2007,…

The gang at Politico is under fire from liberal friends for a piece by Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei alleging major newspapers have a pro-Obama, anti-Romney bias. For example, Devin Gordon, a former Newsweek writer who's now a "senior editor" at GQ, lamented "The house position of Politico, as evidenced by this piece, is that they are fair and their chief competition is not. It's a thinly…