Newark Mayor Cory Booker sat in on today’s Meet the Press panel, and during a long discussion on the economy’s impact on the 2012 presidential election, Booker made it clear he thinks the election should be focused on the economy and not on “nauseating” “crap” that has been dominating the news cycles recently. He condemned not just the Republicans’ attacks on Reverend Wright, but Democratic attacks on private equity firms to hit Mitt Romney.

On Tuesday, The Daily Caller‘s Michelle Fields caught up with ’90s kid icon and scientist Bill Nye The Science Guy who was in Washington, D.C. speaking on behalf of the Planetary Society. Fields asked Nye about his thoughts about the Obama Administration. “He has a lot of constraints until he gets re-elected. He can’t do what, certainly, my parents would have thought were routine things — social programs. This notion that government is inherently bad is new.” Nye observed. “Whoever’s in charge can’t do anything about it ’til after the election. … He’ll have a freer hand is what I believe.”

On Meet the Press today, David Gregory had former Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs make the case for reelecting President Obama in November. He preceded this question with a joke from Jimmy Kimmel‘s routine at the White House Correspondents Dinner last night, when Kimmel joked, “Remember when the country rallied around you in hopes of a better tomorrow? That was hilarious.” Gregory asked if all that goodwill has evaporated in Obama’s first term, why should he get a second one?

House Speaker John Boehner appeared on Fox News Tuesday morning, where interviewer Bill Hemmer asked him about his recent comment that this year’s election constitutes the most important of his lifetime.

CBS This Morning co-anchor Charlie Rose recently sat down with House Speaker John Boehner, asking him about his recent endorsement of presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney.

Rose asked Boehner whether the lengthy primary has had a negative impact on Romney’s election bid. “I don’t think there was any real damage done,” the Speaker replied. “It got messy, just like the race four years ago between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. It went on until June of 2008. Charlie, this election’s going to be a referendum on the President’s economic policies. It did not help the economy. It actually made it worse.”

On Fox News Sunday earlier, former RNC chairman Ed Gillespie came on to defend the record of Mitt Romney, the GOP’s presumptive nominee to go up against President Obama in the November election. Chris Wallace grilled Gillespie on Republican policies towards women, why they are doing poorly amongst Latino voters, and why the candidate is taking his time to get his tax releases out into the public square.

The “war on women” reached new heights today when Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Republican congresswoman Michele Bachmannn appeared to talk about Hillary Rosen‘s controversial comments and debate which political party is launching a war on women to begin with. Bachmann took great offense at Rosen’s words, having worked as a tax litigation attorney and a mother over the course of her life.

Shown a Washington Post / ABC poll comparing President Barack Obama and GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, Axelrod said people don’t think Romney really “gets” what’s going on in their lives where the economy is concerned. But, as host Joe Scarborough pointed out, the poll shows Romney beating the President by four points when it comes to the matter of who voters trust with “handling the economy.”

Sean Hannity dedicated a segment today to his concern that comments Bill Ayers recently made are reflected in President Obama’s health care plan, and the President’s relationship with capitalism. While Tucker Carlson, who has met and dined with Ayers, shared Hannity’s suspicion that the President is “deeply suspicious of capitalism” and unprepared for the job, Kirsten Powers argued that he had done more for health care and the economy than any Republican.

On Monday morning, the Fox & Friends crew discussed just how President Barack Obama and his campaign were using “the perception of” an improved economic climate and “continued positive job-growth… whatever that means” to help his re-election efforts. They looked in particular to comments former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs had made over the [...]

A new poll from Fox News Latino released today is proving what many pundits have predicted for some time about the 2012 election: for Republicans, it will be an uphill battle, and a Latino on the ticket would help. But as with many surveys, the devil lies in the details– namely, the finding that Latin American voters of all stripes are concerned with jobs, the economy, and education far more than with immigration.

With all the focus on the Republican presidential candidates these days, it’s easy to forget there’s another side to this too. And on his show today, Chris Matthews looked at President Obama‘s slowly-but-steadily increasing poll numbers, and compared them to the upward trends felt by both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton before they went on to win re-election. But it’s not all smiles for the Obama team, they still have issues like job recovery and rising gas prices to deal with.

In the short space of time this past week when we weren’t talking about contraception, people were going on about higher gas prices. Many Republicans are trying to put the blame squarely on President Obama, but on This Week today, George Will shut this down as “preposterous” and “economic nonsense” because the president has little control over gas prices in the first place.

Former Colorado congressman and 2008 presidential contender Tom Tancredo spoke to Hardball’s Chris Matthews about Mitt Romney‘s economic policy alternatives to President Obama. “I haven’t heard the Romney plan for the next four years to get us out of the economic challenge,” Matthews observed. “Do you think he’s running negative or positive campaign?” “Here’s what I think that Romney has been doing,” Tancredo opined. “That is setting the stage for a debate between him and Obama who can best handle the economy. Who has the best record for creating jobs and for, you know, essentially, increasing prosperity. I think Romney feels, and i think rightly so, he can make a case for that. Hell, my dog’s better at it than Obama!”

President Obama’s traditional Super Bowl interview has come and gone, leaving barely two hours before the nation takes a forced respite from politics to watch the New York Giants take on the New England Patriots in what is growing to be a rivalry of several chapters. The President sat down with Matt Lauer this year in the White House and chatted about the likelihood of a good game tonight, but also answered questions about tension between Israel and Iran and made a pitch for why he deserves a second term.

One argument for the GOP nomination Mitt Romney has over his rivals is that his time in the private sector gave him enough experience to effectively create jobs, and because unemployment figures are so dismal, the nation should put Romney in charge so he can fix it. But with the latest numbers showing unemployment is steadily dropping down to 8.3 percent, Chris Matthews wondered if Romney will be able to sustain that argument for much longer.

President Barack Obama had a virtual intimate talk with a number of Americans this afternoon in a “Google hangout,” where he received questions from an audience over the computer. One guest in the hangout asked about worker visas in engineering, and gave the President the anecdote of her husband’s three years of temporary employment despite being an engineer. “Send me your husband’s resume,” replied the President.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor appeared on Morning Joe Wednesday to go over President Obama’s State of the Union speech. Host Joe Scarborough joked (?) that he’d only allow his co-host Mika Brzezinski to say hello to Cantor, but not ask any questions.

One of the key strategies President Obama is utilizing in his reelection bid this year is to run against the “do-nothing Congress,” and on Fox News Sunday today, Chris Wallace asked House Speaker John Boehner to respond to that line of attack and the notion that Congress has been increasingly ineffective. Boehner argued that the focus of House Republicans over the past few months has been on job creation, and pointed to recent successes on the payroll tax cut and unemployment as evidence that Congress has been able to work with the president.

Surging Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum downplayed President Obama‘s role in the good news that the unemployment rate fell to 8.5% in December, the lowest level in three years. According to a tweet by Politico‘s Dave Catanese, Santorum claimed unemployment was dropping as a result of widespread “optimism that Republicans will take the White House.”

It’s fair to say that President Obama and Congressional Republicans have not had the best relationship over the past several years. Speaker of the House John Boehner has acknowledged in the past few months that while he still maintains a good relationship with the Commander-in-Chief, it has been getting “frosty” as of late. Some political analysts have predicted that because of Obama’s decreased popularity, running against an even more unpopular Congress could be a winning strategy in 2012.

President Obama has been arguing recently that not only is the economy going to take more time to come away from the crevasse, but that it would take more than one term and even more than one president to deal with the problem. Chris Wallace reminded viewers that Obama said himself he would be a one-term president if the economy didn’t turn around, and discussed Obama’s handling of the crisis with the panel.

On This Week today, George Will claimed that if President Obama should be hoping that the Congressional supercommittee convened to come up with a bipartisan plan to balance the budget and deal with high unemployment will fail, because he can’t run against a do-nothing Congress in 2012 if the public sees Congress is actually doing something. Christiane Amanpour showed a new ABC/Washington Post poll that shows that President Obama and the Republican Congress are roughly given the same amount of trust, 40 percent, when it comes to the issue of job creation.

In the latest installment of What Divisive Political Issue Has Mitt Romney Suddenly Changed His Position On This Week?, Chris Wallace and the Fox News Sunday panel parsed Romney’s words last week when he claimed we do not know what causes global warming, when he had stated the opposite several months ago.

Rep. Ron Paul appears to be getting along with conservative stalwart Sean Hannity much better this time around than during the last election, when his supporters chased Hannity down a street and pelted him with snowballs. And while the two agree plenty on economic policy and the size of government, Hannity had a bone to pick with the libertarian icon tonight– namely bringing up comments Rep. Paul made elsewhere that his own rise to prominence would be “an embarrassment” to the comparatively liberal Hannity.