Tales from the Trail

The last thing Republicans want to see this Christmas is the U.S. Senate giving President Barack Obama a nicely wrapped package of health care reform legislation.

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele made that plain today. He hopes the Senate will be a lousy Santa who leaves nothing in Obama’s Christmas stocking.

“I hope so. I really do,” he told NBC’s Today show.

Steele says that’s because the American public doesn’t want the kind of healthcare legislation that Senate Democratic leaders have been talking about lately.

“People are not listening to what folks back at home are saying. I think the latest polls are showing up to 60 percent of the people want this thing either stopped, slowed down or somehow modified,” Steele said.

Steele may have been referring to a recent Fox News poll that showed 57 percent of Americans opposing healthcare legislation now under consideration. That’s the highest level of opposition Fox has found so far.

NEW YORK - Few would doubt that Barack Obama has attracted more media coverage than his Republican rival John McCain, fueling suspicion that journalists are biased towards Obama. 

A Rasmussen Reports survey in July found that 49 percent of voters believe most reporters are trying to help Obama. Just 14 percent believed most reporters were trying to help McCain and 24 percent said most reporters tried to be objective.

Obama’s seventh appearance this year on the cover of Time magazine, compared to two for McCain, renewed those charges this week. Read our story on that here.

This week’s New Yorker magazine pokes fun at smears directed at Barack Obama , but the Democratic candidate isn’t laughing.

The cover portrays Obama in Middle Eastern garb bumping fists with wife Michelle, who sports an Afro, a rifle and military garb. In the background, an American flag burns in the fireplace.

The left-leaning magazine’s cover neatly summarizes several smears that have surfaced this year: that Obama’s a “secret Muslim” who hates America, Michelle is a ’60s-style black militant.

And that fist bump, the modern version of the high five? It’s been described as a “terrorist fist jab” by a Fox News anchor, who later apologized.