Cynthia Tucker – WASHINGTON — Last week, Haley Barbour, the affable governor of Mississippi, became the first to drop out of the preliminary race for the Republican nomination for the presidency. He said he didn’t have the “fire in the belly” necessary to withstand the punishing rituals of the campaign trail, but political observers added other reasons, including his family’s resistance to having their lives upended.

David Shribman – WASHINGTON — The conventional wisdom is that Barack Obama cannot be beaten. The root of this wisdom is the aphorism, sometimes attributed to former New York Gov. Benjamin B. Odell Jr. and sometimes to former House Speaker Joe Cannon, that you can’t beat somebody (Obama) with nobody (any one of the dozen Republican nobodies, male and female, Trump and trumped).

The Christian Science Monitor – The Arab Spring for freedom that first bloomed in Tunisia last December just keeps unfolding. And each new blossom in the Middle East and North Africa raises this difficult question:

The Week – Our country has long been slow to accept any public figure who seems too ‘exotic,’ says Timothy Egan at The New York Times

The Week – Birth certificate or not, diehards refuse to believe Obama was born in the U.S. Does the fact that he’s black have anything to do with it?

The Week – Until this week, 45 percent of Republicans believed the president was born outside the U.S. How did this rumor start?

Michelle Malkin – On May 1, left-wing vigilantes will target companies across the country that have committed a mortal sin: sending donations to GOP Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin. Rest assured, such intolerable acts of political free speech will not go unpunished by tolerant Big Labor activists. They’re calling for both a national boycott of Walker’s corporate donors and a coordinated sticker vandalism campaign on GOP-tainted products.

Linda Chavez – Among the challenges facing the Democrats in the 2012 election is the prospect that President Barack Obama will not be able to re-energize his base — which included record numbers of Hispanic voters in 2008. Hispanics gave Obama 67 percent of their votes, but just as importantly, Hispanic turnout was higher than usual. More than 10 million Hispanics cast 9 percent of the total vote, the largest ever.

The Week – Obama has deflected the birthers. The real danger for the president now is the GOP’s political ploy to dead-end the economy

Ann Coulter – In a priceless formulation in his budget speech two weeks ago, Obama said that Americans look at the poor and say, “There but for the grace of God go I.” And so, in the president’s words, “we contribute to programs like Medicare and Social Security.”