Jeffrey Bell is a conservative political strategist and writer who contributed extensively to The Weekly Standard from 1998 to 2016. His articles for the magazine covered a wide range of topics including Republican politics, foreign policy, the Supreme Court, and the intersection of religion and public life. He is also known for his career in Republican campaign politics and as the author of works on populism and social conservatism.
I am often asked by fellow conservatives about my experience with Governor Chris Christie as the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in New Jersey in 2014. When I reply that Gov. Christie and his team, after remaining scrupulously neutral during a tightly contested four-way primary, were very…
My two years as a U.S. Army draftee expired, as it happened, during the Tet offensive, in early February 1968. The South Vietnamese Army base in the Mekong Delta I had called home for eleven months was attacked, but not with any great effectiveness, so when the time came to return to civilian life…
Most conservatives believe Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have wrong solutions to the stagnation in wages and job creation that has marked the American economy since 2000. But Trump and Sanders have proven better vote-getters than conservative candidates because, politically speaking, having wrong…
The nomination of Janet Yellen to chair the Federal Reserve has come down to this: a referendum on quantitative easing and zero interest rates. The money-printing program that Ben Bernanke started five years ago this month remains Yellen’s answer for how the economy will get back on solid ground.…
In his concession speech to Senator-elect Cory Booker in Bridgewater, N.J., on election night, Steve Lonegan announced that he would retire from elective politics and enter private business, rather than mount another U.S. Senate race against Booker next year or return to his post as New Jersey…
The Supreme Court’s rulings on gay marriage effectively leave the issue very much alive in state and national politics. The four justices appointed by Presidents Clinton and Obama clearly would declare a constitutional right to same-sex marriage in a heartbeat, if they were to get a fifth…
In the six presidential elections between 1992 and 2012, the Democratic party has regained the solid popular vote majority it enjoyed during the New Deal/Great Society era (1932-64) but relinquished in the six elections between 1968 and 1988.
When Republican strategists like Karl Rove cite 1980 as a model for this year’s election, they usually have in mind two main elements: Ronald Reagan’s question in the late October presidential debate about whether voters felt better off than four years earlier, when they elected Jimmy Carter, and…
In the July 2 issue of this magazine, we argued that anyone wishing to understand President Obama’s reelection strategy should forget about the 2008 election and examine instead his successful drive to win congressional approval of Obamacare in 2009-2010. He and his team accomplished this by giving…
Bill Clinton, who rode a recession into office and left the scene just before another one began, knows something about the blame game. Addressing the Democratic convention on Wednesday night, he made a full-throated effort to defend the Obama presidency by putting it in the context of past…
If you’re wondering how President Obama plans to get reelected in 2012—and why he might succeed—look back not to 2008 but to his successful campaign to win congressional passage of Obamacare during 2009 and early 2010.
The organization “Americans Elect” spent $35 million on a new “centrist” party and nobody came. In announcing that no presidential candidate had received the 10,000 online votes needed to qualify for its online convention, the group’s chief executive, Kahlil Byrd, said there was “an almost…
Yesterday’s overwhelming approval of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and civil unions by the voters of North Carolina underlines the growing likelihood that the issue will be a major factor in the 2012 presidential election. Consider the following circumstances:
"Republican leaders urge candidate truce on social issues” was the headline in the Washington Examiner. “Republicans retreat on gay marriage” said another in Politico. The accompanying articles, while in some respects tendentious and a bit misleading, are accurate in relaying a mindset widely…
Despite reports of Republican devastation in the contraception debate, social conservative themes show surprising signs of hanging around.
Tim Goeglein served more than seven years as special assistant to President George W. Bush and as deputy director of the White House Office of Public Liaison. By his own account, his job involved no making of public policy. He resigned in mid-2008, after admitting charges of plagiarism in the…
Three Republican presidential candidates—Herman Cain, Ron Paul, and Newt Gingrich—have at least hinted about the desirability of a return to the gold standard. The four top Republican congressional leaders recently called on the Federal Reserve to curb its interventions in the U.S. economy. In…
Freshman Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, one of the most promising of the new wave of Tea Party-allied Republican legislators, was chosen to give the Republican radio address, delivered just after President Obama’s weekly radio offering, on Saturday, January 29. This was a notable assignment for a…
The debate about Ronald Reagan has never shown any sign of ending, but it is less and less about whether his presidency was consequential. As has happened with a few other high-impact presidencies—see historian Merrill Peterson’s classic The Jeffersonian Image in the American Mind—the debate…
Thomas Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, is the only significant public official on record in opposition to the easy-money, zero-interest-rate monetary policy being pursued by Fed chairman Ben Bernanke. So there were multiple layers of irony when Hoenig journeyed to…
What will historians 50 years from now see as the most important development in American politics of the past 40 years—the period roughly encompassing the years 1970 to 2010? I believe it is the rise of two movements that between them are likely to alter the balance of political power in this…
In times like these, when conservatives are licking their wounds and trying to figure out what comes next, a helpful framework exists. It starts with a simple, self-evident fact: There is such a thing as elite opinion that is not the same as popular opinion.
For months John McCain has apparently been hoping to use his selection of a running mate to shake up the presidential race. By picking Alaska governor Sarah Palin, McCain has accomplished that--and very likely a lot more than that, more than he or anyone else could have imagined.
In the guise of interpreting the California constitution, the state's Supreme Court on May 15 made certain that the issue of same-sex marriage will be a national one in the 2008 presidential race. The 4-3 decision ripped away the presumed middle ground on the issue and (assuming the court grants no…
President Bush's decision to elevate General David Petraeus to lead the Central Command is not only an act of courage, it may prove to be transformative in the global war on terror, and even in the 2008 election. God has apparently seen fit to give the U.S. Army a great general in this time of…
The failure of the Bush presidency is the dominant fact of American politics today. It has driven every facet of Democratic political strategy since early 2006, when Democrats settled on the campaign themes that brought them their takeover of the House and Senate in November 2006. Nothing--not even…
As recently as a month or two ago, political analysts were drafting obituaries for social conservatism in America. They reasoned that for the first time in several decades, no viable, credentialed social conservative was seeking the Republican presidential nomination. They noted that in the absence…
For America's social conservative movement, 1988 was a milestone year. It was the first election cycle in which conservative social issues (led by the Willie Horton prison furlough issue) clearly turned a general presidential election from one party to the other, with minimal help from economic and…
To gauge the impact of Jerry Falwell--or, more precisely, the political realignment he was a central figure in precipitating--it is helpful to review the voting behavior of conservative white Protestants in the presidential elections between 1976 and 1984, the years when Falwell's political…
THE POLITICS OF IMMIGRATION REFORM changed on March 27. That's the day the Senate Judiciary Committee approved (in a vote of 12-6) an immigration reform bill that included increased border security and law enforcement, a guest-worker program, and a path to legalization for the roughly 12 million…
THE USUAL WAY OF ANALYZING the collapse in polls of public approval of the Bush administration is to make a list of all the things the analyst believes are going wrong and attribute the decline to those things. The polls provide plausibility for this method, because the president's performance…
IF PRESIDENT BUSH GETS TO make a third appointment to the Supreme Court this year, odds are he'll be filling a seat occupied by one of the court's five liberals. Their average age is 72, while the average age of the court's four conservatives is 58.
EVENTS ARE CONVERGING TO ELEVATE the nuclear crisis with Iran into the central crisis of the Bush presidency. War presidents are graded not by circumstances they inherit, including those that lead to war. They are judged by how they react to those circumstances.
ON SEPTEMBER 11, THE United States will observe the fourth anniversary of its entry into the war on terrorism. The war has already exceeded by a few months our entire time of involvement in World War II. It's hardly too early to take stock of what we've learned about the nature of the war and the…
AS PRESIDENT BUSH EXAMINES HIS Supreme Court options, he almost certainly understands that a year from now, his performance will be evaluated mainly on whether he confirmed the unelected Court's centrality in American politics, or took a historic first step in beginning to curb that centrality.
THREE YEARS AGO, IN the 2002 election cycle, the economy was sluggish, struggling to emerge from the recession and the dislocations of 9/11. According to most polls, President Bush received solid ratings on his handling of the economy. Today, GDP growth has firmed at 4 percent a year, and several…
TWO THINGS HAPPENED LAST WEEK that cast a sharp light on the real impetus behind the Democratic/media effort to bring down House majority leader Tom DeLay. The first was House approval, by a huge margin of 110 votes on final passage, of the permanent repeal of the federal inheritance tax. The…
THE FIRST READING OF THE Catholic Church's daily Mass for Friday, April 8, 2005--the day of the funeral in Rome for Pope John Paul II--comes from the Acts of the Apostles. It describes a meeting in Jerusalem of the Sanhedrin, the highest council of the ancient Jewish nation. Peter and several of…
IN HER 1993 NOVEL The Children of Men, P.D. James depicts the world of 2021. A mysterious infection has rendered humanity infertile--the last baby is believed to have been born in 1995--yet British authorities move forward with their program of "voluntary" euthanasia for the elderly and others who…
IF JOHN KERRY HAD BEEN elected president, one of the clearest consequences would have been a bleak future for the major tax cuts signed into law by President Bush in 2001 and 2003 (most of which are scheduled to expire between 2008 and 2010). The tax issue was the most contentious issue of domestic…
IT WAS EITHER history's closest landslide or profoundest squeaker. Arriving right on schedule, in the 36th year after the post-New Deal realignment of 1968, and culminating in Ohio, home base of the McKinley realignment dear to the heart of Bush strategist Karl Rove, the 3-percentage point…
IF PRESIDENT BUSH is reelected, it's a good bet that the bloodiest fight of his fifth year in office will have nothing to do with the war or the economy. It will be over the filling of one or more vacancies on the Supreme Court.
IF YOU HAD TO PICK a single reason why the Democratic party is weaker at all levels than at any time in the last 50 years, it is the transformation of moral-values issues into an overwhelming Republican asset.
THE JUXTAPOSITION last week was startling. On the same day, (a) voters in the Missouri primary overwhelmingly approved a state constitutional amendment establishing marriage as being exclusively between a man and a woman, and (b) a state judge in Washington ruled that the 19th-century writers of…
DUMP DICK CHENEY? It won't happen, and if it did, it would be a terrible idea. The president would be losing his most intelligent and experienced adviser. And conservatives would be losing one of our most consistent and effective champions, at home and abroad.
THE NOVEMBER ELECTION won't be about the future of Iraq. John Kerry's selection of John Edwards, who joined Kerry and a majority of Senate Democrats in voting to authorize the U.S. invasion of Iraq, is merely the final confirmation of the Kerry campaign's decision to remove forward-looking Iraq…
THE DEATH OF RONALD REAGAN brings to a close the most surprising political life of the 20th century. A century that through 1979 was notable for world wars, ideological mass murder, and the relentless advance of statism had a happy final act no one but he expected. If he had not lived and…
FOR GEORGE W. BUSH, it would be bizarre if the most loyal and gifted member of his cabinet were to be the instrument of his defeat in November 2004. Recent developments on the Iraq front of the war on terror make such thoughts about Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld harder and harder to put aside.
PRESIDENT BUSH'S endorsement last week of a constitutional amendment preserving the current understanding of marriage, and the decision of John Kerry and other leading Democrats vehemently to oppose it, ensures that the marriage debate will be front and center in American politics. And it will be…
THE COME-FROM-BEHIND triumph of John Kerry in Iowa and New Hampshire does more than make the Massachusetts senator a prohibitive favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination. It marks the defeat of Howard Dean's antiwar, left-populist rebellion by the quintessential candidate of the…
THERE WERE SIGHS of relief in Republican circles last week when the third quarter's economic growth rate was announced as 7.2 percent. But if the central political assumption of the Bush administration is true--that we are in the midst of a world war that is far from over--the relief may prove…
AT A TIME when even nuances of Iraq reconstruction policy become flashpoints for bureaucratic infighting, causing competing leaks to spring from almost every precinct of the administration's foreign policy apparatus, the most consequential policy struggle of all is playing out in virtual silence.…
JOSEPH WILSON, the retired ambassador who wants to see top Bush aide Karl Rove "frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs" for allegedly "outing" his CIA-agent wife, wants us to know it's nothing personal against the Bush family. He told a C-SPAN interviewer last week of his warm…
EVER SINCE the Bush tax cut passed nine weeks ago, the left has been foaming at the mouth over the supposed injustice done to low-income workers who were left behind with no income tax relief. Of course, anyone who even casually follows these debates knows the reason these workers did not receive…
THE FOCUS for the past six months on obtaining United Nations approval for the invasion of Iraq has obscured a simple, logical American strategy based on a clear premise. The premise is that the mass civilian killings of 9/11 triggered a world war between the United States and a political wing of…
IF THE LAST 180 YEARS of American politics are any guide, the 2004 election will see one of the two major parties become dominant in presidential politics for 36 years.
JUST BEFORE THE ELECTION last week, I half-attentively watched Norman Ornstein explaining to a television interviewer that President Bush was taking an enormous risk by campaigning for so many marginal Republican candidates. The reason I was half-attentive is that it wasn't the first such analysis…
IT SEEMS FITTING that the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' attempted deletion of God from the Pledge of Allegiance was eclipsed the next day by the U.S. Supreme Court's 5-4 decision upholding Cleveland's voucher plan. The finding of unconstitutionality for the words "under God," by a…
"GOD BLESS AMERICA." These words have been repeated millions of times since September 11. They have echoed in countless stadiums across the country, been sung by a bipartisan group of congressmen on the Capitol steps, appeared on hundreds of thousands of yard signs, bumper stickers, and billboards.…
WITH THURSDAY'S DEFEAT of a killer amendment on "non-severability," the McCain-Feingold reform of federal campaign finance has gained, for the first time, an air of inevitability. Still to come are final Senate passage (expected Monday, April 2), House action, a possible conference committee, and a…
It was 1975, and I found myself in the middle of a struggle of wills between John Sears and Ronald Reagan. In retrospect, this may sound interesting, but at the time it was anything but enjoyable. Sears was the most brilliant political strategist I've ever known. Reagan was the greatest man I've…
Editor's note: A look back at President Reagan, from the February 5, 2001 issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
The bizarre, heart-stopping aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, historic as it is, would never have occurred if the election had been held just one week earlier. National pollsters are nearly unanimous in believing that a George W. Bush lead of perhaps 5 percentage points at the end of…
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The 2000 presidential campaign is surprising analysts by breaking the seemingly ironclad rules of the game, and many of its oddities are traceable to one pervasive fact: The American people hold a bifurcated view of the Clinton presidency. Since early 1998, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal erupted,…
In light of the conclusion of the Senate trial of the president, the editors of THE WEEKLY STANDARD asked 22 writers, thinkers, and political actors the following questions: "President William Jefferson Clinton has been impeached and acquitted. What have we learned? What should we do now?"
Barry Goldwater burst onto the scene at the tail end of one of the least polarized eras in the history of American presidential politics. The Eisenhower-Stevenson races of 1952 and 1956, and the Kennedy-Nixon election of 1960, were virtually free of memorable issues. Much was happening in global…