John Sununu

When Obama gutted Medicare by taking $717 billion out of it, the Romney plan does not do that. The Ryan plan mimicked part of the Obama package there, the Romney plan does not. That's a big difference.

Energy and environmental regulation, transportation, and broadband policy all benefit when legislators have a basic grounding in the technical concepts behind business models, products, and innovation.

President Obama has outsourced a major portion of the U.S. space program to the Russians. That's national policy. Taxpayer money. So let's stop playing games with this outsourcing distortion and talk about the fact that when we need is a president that knows how to manage big enterprise and create jobs.

The American formula for creating business is not to have the government create business.

A candidate who tries to steer a path down the middle in an effort to 'win independents' runs the risk of convincing everyone that they have no core values. As much as - or more than - any other voters, independents want to see conviction and authenticity.

For most Americans, Friday afternoons are filled with positive anticipation of the weekend. In Washington, it's where government officials dump stories they want to bury. Good news gets dropped on Monday so bureaucrats can talk about it all week.

The campaigns of Steve Forbes, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, and John McCain all outperformed expectations on their support from independent voters. They made no effort to shy away from ideology, but conveyed to voters that their policies were driven by principle, not party talking points.

Candidates and their consultants keep making the same mistake. They assume that all independents are bundled neatly together ideologically between Republicans and Democrats.

The debt-ceiling vote isn't about what will be done in the future; it is about the integrity of America's commitment to support the bonds we issue. Elected officials have an obligation to maintain that integrity, regardless of whether they voted for the programs that required the borrowing in the first place.

I do not support raising the minimum wage, and the reason is as follows. When the minimum wage is raised, workers are priced out of the market. That is the economic reality that seems, at least so far, to be missing from this discussion.

Politicians are usually the first to forget that if you assume someone else is acting in bad faith, they will do the same to you. Questioning motives poisons the well.

Mitt Romney has made it clear that he believes that President Obama was born in the U.S.