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…
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.
There is an under-noticed bright spot for the Republican Party after the recent midterm election: Gains with Hispanic voters and Hispanic politicians.
IN ITS RECENT WORLD CUP CONTEST WITH ITALY, the U.S. team played what was widely regarded by the sport's connoisseurs as one of the best games ever played by an American soccer squad on foreign soil.
THE ONLY ICE to be found in the new center of the hockey world is in the mint julep cups being raised in celebration south of the Mason-Dixon, places where the average annual temperature hovers around 89.5 degrees and folks don't know a Howe from hominy.
"WHO ISN'T A 'VALUES VOTER'"? asks George Will in his most recent Washington Post column. Will's debating point is a familiar one: all voters in some sense are "values voters." A similar argument could be deployed against the terms "liberal" and "conservative," which Will uses throughout his piece.
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.
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
IT WAS SATURDAY AFTERNOON, 72 hours before the polls opened in Georgia, and President George Bush was in the state for the fifth time in 2002--three of them campaign swings for Saxby Chambliss. It was part of the last stage of a fierce drive that put Bush in 17 states in 15 days. The president took…
"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.…