Republicans, seizing on the deficit-cutting mantra they heard from the voters who helped them gain sweeping control of the House in 2010, spent much of the last year successfully pushing for vast spending cuts and maintaining the Bush-era tax cuts for all Americans, including the wealthy.
In the run up to local elections this weekend, in which the far right is expected to make sweeping gains, the puppet appears to have cut its strings.
Here in the United Kingdom, where I've been staying for the past few days, Thursday's elections, which saw the Labour Party make sweeping gains in local councils, were widely interpreted as a referendum on the budget-deficit fixation of Cameron and his finance minister, George Osborne.
No wonder that on November 30th the army felt obliged to make a solemn pronouncement, reminding parties to follow the secular principles on which the state was founded.Even more worrying for the generals, the opinion poll also suggested that in areas affected by the Kurdish war HADEP could make sweeping gains in local elections due to take place at the same time as the national poll.
The exit polls are showing far right and Eurosceptic parties are set to make sweeping gains.
Latest polls suggest France's anti-immigration National Front will make sweeping gains in the first round of the polls, with poor predictions for Hollande's Socialist Party.
Critics call this scaremongering and fear that the White House will gain unnecessarily sweeping powers.
That would imply that either the presidential race will tighten up later, or, if Mr Gore does win, the Democrats are not likely to gain a sweeping victory at every level.
Some education experts say that Mr. Bloomberg's failure to gain more sweeping changes in work rules will limit his ability to improve instruction for the city's 1.1 million children in public schools, even with the recent agreement by state legislative leaders giving the mayor political control of the schools system.
Mr. Abbott said Labor's inability to gain a clear majority after sweeping to power in 2007 with a 13-seat advantage meant that the government had "lost its legitimacy".
Women and minorities gained slightly wider freedoms; sweeping reform of the Wahhabist-run education and judicial systems were mooted.
