Of course the supporters of Roy Moore, the Republican Senate candidate in Alabama, are standing by their candidate, despite credible charges of sexual misconduct involving underage girls. That is what partisans do. They avow principles that they say they will never surrender, then anoint leaders…
What happened to Hillary Clinton en route to her appointment with destiny? Her new book, What Happened, portrays her as a lifelong fighter on behalf of noble causes, a woman whose quest for the power she deserved was thwarted by a cabal as vast as the one she once said had been after her husband…
Picture The Clintons as a top TV series that made its debut in January 1992, as Bill and Hillary appeared on 60 Minutes on Super Bowl Sunday to refute charges that Bill had had a fling with a chanteuse called Gennifer Flowers. It peaked in 1998 with the gigantic impeachment debacle (a loser for…
Picture The Clintons as a top TV series that made its debut in January 1992, as Bill and Hillary appeared on 60 Minutes on Super Bowl Sunday to refute charges that Bill had had a fling with a chanteuse called Gennifer Flowers. It peaked in 1998 with the gigantic impeachment debacle (a loser for…
Vogue magazine and the drab world of politics are not much alike. They are prose vs. poetry, fact vs. fiction, words vs. music, dreams vs. the cold light of day. Politics is mundane and essential to the running of everything; Vogue is escape and essential to nothing, dealing in luxuries that would…
Vogue magazine and the drab world of politics are not much alike. They are prose vs. poetry, fact vs. fiction, words vs. music, dreams vs. the cold light of day. Politics is mundane and essential to the running of everything; Vogue is escape and essential to nothing, dealing in luxuries that would…
Not long after the election, the front page of the Washington Post featured a wonderful piece about how Bill and Hillary Clinton lost touch with their home base and with it the White House; along with that came a number of other good stories about how and why. So far so good, as the paper's A…
Not long after the election, the front page of the Washington Post featured a wonderful piece about how Bill and Hillary Clinton lost touch with their home base and with it the White House; along with that came a number of other good stories about how and why. So far so good, as the paper’s A…
Far be it from a recovering ex-#NeverTrump pundit to proffer advice to our 45th president, but our leader-in-waiting could do a lot worse than to call up the American Enterprise Institute and invite Charles Murray to tea. Murray is the man who in his 2012 classic Coming Apart put a name to the…
Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, and Kelly Ayotte, and of all you desperate GOP candidates, threading the needle between a working class base in thrall to a demagogue and another fairly large bloc that detests him: Ike feels your pain. So does John Kennedy, and a very large group of the best and the…
During the election of 1940, the married Republican candidate, Wendell Willkie, gave speeches from the apartment of his editor girlfriend, Irita Van Doren (who helped write them for him), while the campaign train of President Franklin D. Roosevelt made routine stops at a certain small town in New…
A lifetime ago—on June 14, 2015, for example—people who worked in politics and elections thought that they understood with a fair sense of certainty how elections and politics worked. Politics, sort of like physics, had immutable laws, rather like gravity. Demography seemed to be one of them.…
A lifetime ago—on June 14, 2015, for example—people who worked in politics and elections thought that they understood with a fair sense of certainty how elections and politics worked. Politics, sort of like physics, had immutable laws, rather like gravity. Demography seemed to be one of them.…
GEORGE W. BUSH finally became the president of Blue America around four in the afternoon on Friday, September 14, standing on rubble in downtown New York, clutching a bullhorn, telling the assembled hordes and heroes around him that the world will shortly be hearing from all of us. But by then,…
Call it déjà vu, call it old whine in new bottles, call it a tale thrice told, perhaps by an idiot; there are a lot of things one can call this Republican political season, but new is not one of them. Been-there-done-that might be more like it.
"Lemon laws are American state laws that provide a remedy for purchasers of cars and other consumer goods in order to compensate for products that repeatedly fail to meet standards of quality and performance," goes the Wikipedia definition. Republican delegates should study this carefully, as it…
All right, Trump people, you do have a point. A number of policies pushed since the 1990s by the establishment wings of both major parties may have had bad effects on millions of people. The industrial base of this country has changed in ways that eroded the financial and moral lives of…
A good-looking young senator, short on experience, is seeking the White House, after what critics say are too few years served in the job he is holding, too few accomplishments in it, and altogether too little of the experience, tempering, grooming, and seasoning they think that a president needs.…
The dynasty project is not faring well. Two relatives of three of our most recent presidents have faced early woes in their succession plans, despite layers of aides, networks of backers going back generations, and extravagant levels of cash. On June 11, a front-page story in the Washington Post…
As our friend Mollie Hemingway explains in The Federalist, Marco Rubio mopped the floor with Chris Cuomo on CNN Friday morning, finally establishing that a very young human embryo, while not self-sustaining or visibly human, is in fact human life: It is not dead, so it has to be living, and it’s…
Is the world better off than it was eight years ago?
“There’s not much Indian left in Bobby Jindal,” goes the story in the Washington Post, casting the worst of all possible lights on the steps that the two-term governor of Louisiana and current candidate for president has taken away from his immigrant past.
Alexander Hamilton can’t get no respect. First, he gets born with at least four strikes against him---in the British West Indies, not exactly the hub of the universe; poor, illegitimate, dead-beat dad, and mother dead when he was eleven; then he blunders into the first great sex scandal of the…
"The deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top,” Hillary Clinton has warned us, and she ought to know. Having been “at the top,” or close enough to it, since 1976, when her husband was elected attorney general of Arkansas at age 30—not the biggest job ever, but one with a whole lot of…
American entrepreneurship is a wonderful thing, with its emphasis on the new and exciting, so it was no surprise that the Washington Post gave a spot on page one to a creative new enterprise: an abortion clinic that seeks to present a pleasant and even soothing experience, one that looks and…
"A matriarchy is a social organizational form in which the mother or oldest female heads the family. . . . It is also government or rule by a woman or women,” runs the entry in Wikipedia, adding helpfully that it can be a description for a society in which “the culture centers around values and…
One month short of his 78th birthday, and 27 years after his self-immolation, Gary Hart has been given a present of sorts by writer Matt Bai, who in All the Truth Is Out recasts the past as Hart wants to see it, a great man brought low by a change (for the worse) in the national zeitgeist that…
All of a sudden, people have noticed that we are in trouble, and many are saying it isn’t the president’s fault. All the bad news, from Iraq to Ukraine, from Libya and Syria to the Mexican border, just seems to have happened: Obama was standing there, golfing or shaking hands with donors, and, like…
Noemie Emery, writing at the Washington Examiner:
At the Washington Examiner, Noemie Emery pinpoints why Hillary Clinton is sounding so hawkish these days:
Contrary no doubt to what she expected, Hillary Clinton has hit some serious snags in the rollout of her unannounced campaign for president. She has made Romneyesque comments about the size of her fortune, such as that she was “dead broke” when she bought her two mansions. When queried about events…
The Big Hangover is a flopped ’50s film that is better forgotten, but it is the permanent state of Barack Obama, still in his bathrobe and feeling quite queasy, due to a headache called Bush. “Six years in, Barack Obama is still battling a Bush hangover,” says Politico. “The hangover was much, much…
Call them Jillary: as in Jill Abramson plus Hillary Clinton, two women of an age, of a kind, and of a political genre, the reigning queens of modern identity politics, each rising high and becoming a model for generations of feminists who admired their guts and brashness and gall. And call him…
They had a dream. For almost a hundred years now, the famed academic-artistic-and-punditry industrial complex has dreamed of a government run by their kind of people (i.e., nature’s noblemen), whose intelligence, wit, and refined sensibilities would bring us a heaven on earth. Their keen intellects…
A number of apologists for the Obama administration declare themselves vexed at the ongoing hostility to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (which isn’t affordable, and from which many people are seeking protection), regarding resistance to its charms as a perverse and irrational…
In March 2010, Barack Obama placed a giant bet on the docility and stupidity of the American people, when he decided in the face of three huge electoral warnings to force his health plan down the unwilling throats of the American people. And by November 2013, it was clear he had lost. It was not…
Remember Black Jesus? The Lightworker? The One? The next Lincoln, the Democrats’ Reagan, the neo-FDR? He is now standing next to Tricky Dick and Slick Willie, caught in a quartet of burgeoning scandals, charged with rewriting the facts when they became inconvenient, harassing the press, and using…
By most accounts, Kermit Gosnell seemed stunned last week when a jury found him guilty of three counts of first-degree murder in what seemed to have been his routine killings of newborn babies at his abortion clinic in Philadelphia; he thought he was doing his job. Abortion is legal and is a…
The GOP may have a problem, but few seem to know what it is. Such appeal as the party had, it seems to have lost. In the later-stage Cold War, between 1968 and 1989, it won five out of six presidential elections, four of them with more than 400 votes in the Electoral College. Since the Cold War…
Vietnam veteran and ex-Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Isolation) made a stunning impression in his audition for the role of secretary of defense yesterday, though it was not quite the one that he wished. "Though he was being asked about things he had said over the course of the past 15 years, it was what…
They have a dream. For months now, Republicans have been nursing the hope that déjà vu may be on order, that their favorite year may be making a comeback, and that their nominee, after numerous trials, may be riding a late-breaking wave. Democrats scoff, and predict the mirage will dissipate in the…
Slowly but surely, the toxin of bias is being leached out of American culture, if incrementally and by degrees. A Catholic was elected president in 1960, and since then Catholic nominees and candidates have become commonplace. A Jew was nominated in 2000 for vice president, and was a help to his…
Sally Bedell Smith has a thing for kings. Or, not kings quite so much as powerful people who form courts around themselves as a function of power or wealth. Her very best books all describe these arrangements: In All His Glory, about the CBS mogul William Paley; Grace and Power, about the Kennedy…
Boy, that Mitt Romney can screw up your life. Or possibly end it. To hear the left tell it, he is not merely a vampire and/or vulture capitalist, getting rich while leaving millions of people in misery, he is also able to give people cancer, at a distance of thousands of miles and after the passage…
In the event the Supreme Court does not put Obamacare out of our misery next week, Mitt Romney ought be ready to roll with the punches and come out at once with Plan B. Plan A was to have the Court sever it neatly with one swing of the axe, but there was always the possibility the Court would not…
There is literal truth, grounded in fact; there is poetic license, which is truth stretched a little to make it seem stronger; and then there is emotional truth, which is what some people imagine must have happened, based on their view of the world. For an example of the latter, we go to Mutual…
"Authenticity” has been all the rage in the Republican primary season, which bounced back and forth from one extreme to the other, with the field neatly split between the five or six people who were all too authentic, and one who wasn’t authentic enough. There was Mitt Romney, who was inauthentic…
Late in 2003, Charles Krauthammer coined the phrase “Bush Derangement Syndrome” to describe the rage of the left at our 43rd president, a loathing so intense that when the president was reelected his anguished opponents needed grief therapy simply to cope. This morphed in time into Palin…
"God, I love ’em,” wrote Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post not long after the glorious dawning of Occupy Wall Street, saying that the protests “arise at just the right moment and are aimed at just the right target” to grow into something quite big. Apparently, the stench from McPherson Square…
The tendency of liberals to define the Republican party, the conservative movement, and most recently the Tea Party movement as the latest iteration of the Old South has been persistent, if not always sane. It survived the failure to convince voters that Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were…
For a success, Barack Obama is a very bad politician, the worst politician to win the presidency by an electoral landslide, to never lose a major election, or to rise to the presidency from a state legislature in little more than four years. He has gone from sterling campaigner to put-upon leader;…
Dear Mitt Romney: Please don’t knock down your $12 million beach house in California and replace it with a new one almost four times its size. At least not while you’re running for president and your campaign has yet to catch fire. We know it gets cramped, but a lot of other people are cramped…
It’s a conspiracy! In a stunning display of harmonic convergence, the right and the left have hit on the cause of the persistent malaise that afflicts the economy: a sinister plot to destroy the country, for selfish and partisan gain. That these plots exist is the fervent belief of the most intense…
The intentions of Democrats are only the best. They want all of the old to have lavish retirements, all of the young to have scholarships, verse-penning cowboys to have festivals funded by government, and everyone to have access to all the best health care, at no cost to himself. In the face of a…
Unbroken
Once upon a time, there was success and there was failure, and one could usually tell the difference between them—the first had a thousand fathers and the second was an orphan—but those days are over: The Democrats of 2010 have come up with a new variant, catastrophic success. That’s what…
A few years ago, you met a dark, handsome stranger, with a cool, remote manner and a smooth line of talk. You didn’t know him well, but he had a certain je ne sais quoi that you found irresistible. He was yourself, only better; yourself, only cooler; yourself, as you were in your dreams. You were a…
When he signed the health care reform bill earlier this year, Barack Obama gave progressives the prize they had aimed at for seven-plus decades, an event they compared to the passage of civil rights and of Social Security. At the same time, he destroyed the best chance the Democrats had for…
A stranger moment in politics has seldom been seen. A vast expansion of government that affects every one of the country’s 300-plus million inhabitants may be passed by a hair against fierce and fiercely repeated public opposition by a Congress that no longer speaks for its voters—most of whose…
Hard as it seems at times to remember, Barack Obama never ran against George W. Bush. That pleasure went to Al Gore and John Kerry, who did not seem to enjoy the experience. Obama ran in 2008, and won the election, but in 2010, into his second year as president, he still thinks he is running, and…
When Dean Barnett died at age 40 in August 2008, it was a loss of a unique voice in politics, and those who admired him could console themselves only with the thought that he had been needed for some pressing business above. Now, a year and a half after it happened, we know what it was: Only…
"They have ardent supporters who are nearly hysterical at the very election of President Barack Obama," Senator Sheldon Whitehouse roared about his Republican opponents in the closing hours of the Senate health care debate on December 20. "The birthers, the fanatics, the people running around in…
Three times in the past several weeks, fortune has seemed to beam on conservatives, in unexpected and unprompted ways. Not that they've won much, but their tormentors keep losing. Three days in fall 2009 damaged or neutralized three liberal institutions, whose powers have now been curtailed.
For a talented man who ran a textbook campaign and was declared a great president before he even took office, Barack Obama has been having a rather hard time. The Midas Touch of 2008 has seemed to desert him. The famed oratory has not made a difference. The uniting president has turned into the…
Dear Mr. President, How nice to know you will summer on Martha's Vineyard at Blue Heron Farm, where the amenities are said to be fabulous. "The 28-acre estate, $20 million enclave is located in Chilmark," CBS told us. "The farm suits Obama to a tee with golf facilities, a pool, basketball court,…
When Gerard Baker a year ago wrote in the Times of London that Barack Obama had "Ventured Forth to Bring Light to the World," it was widely acknowledged to be a clever satire, but this past week we have broken new ground in divinity politics. Forget the comparisons to our Slain Prince (John F.…
In 1977, as in 2009, the future seemed dark for the country's conservatives, shut out of all of the conduits to power, with nary a bright spot in sight. "The result of the 1976 election was Democrats in power as far as the eye could see," wrote Michael Barone in Our Country (1992). "It was almost…
Newsweek, according to Howard Kurtz and Jon Meacham, has carved out a path that is totally new and totally different, breaking away from its old objectivity as a news magazine for the multitudes that runs down the middle, and recasting itself as an elite publication for the elite (and the liberal)…
No one knows why the chicken crossed the road, but why Arlen Specter crossed the aisle to the Democrats is a matter of rather less mystery, if intense debate. The why is quite simple: Free-range Republican, he was about to lose next year's Pennsylvania primary by a large margin, a problem he solved…
Some Democrats, from the White House on down, are pushing the idea of a "truth commission," à la South Africa, to deal with the "harsh measures" used by the Bush administration in interrogating al Qaeda detainees. Good. Let's have lots of truthtelling. Please bring it on.
Mr. Jefferson's Women
"The other night I dreamt of Barack Obama," New York Times blogger Judith Warner wrote in a much-buzzed-about entry on February 5. "He was taking a shower right when I needed to get into the bathroom to shave my legs." Indeed. There were stories that John F. Kennedy, while knocking on doors in his…
Thus far, the young Obama regime has been marred by three major dust-ups relating to three different things: the tax-skipping schemes involving nominees to the Cabinet, the flap over the disposal of his Illinois seat in the Senate, and the disposal of the Senate seat of New York's Hillary Clinton,…
Political dynasties die in different ways, and the ends are not pretty. The Adamses eased themselves out by degrees, becoming more self-absorbed and less consequential over four generations. Theodore Roosevelt's oldest son Ted made an effort to follow his father, but was displaced early on by his…
Seventy-six years ago, in 1932, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. gave a timely endorsement to -Franklin D. Roosevelt, and, as a reward, was appointed chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (and later ambassador to the Court of St. James), from which perch he launched the political careers of his…
IF YOU THINK Caroline Kennedy is following her family's lead in trying to start at the top in a big job in politics (which has sometimes been referred to as show business for ugly people) with much too much chutzpah and too few credentials, you would be right, but you might also be somewhat…
On Monday, December 1, Barack Obama, who had kicked off his campaign a year earlier touting his opposition to the war in Iraq, introduced his national security team to the public. As secretary of state there was Hillary Clinton, his opponent in the primaries who had voted for the war in Iraq; as…
Campaign 2008, which went on for four years, if not for four centuries, was rich in dramatic personae with strange tales -- candidates from Alaska, the Canal Zone, and Hawaii; mavericks, moose-hunters, and multi-racial messiahs -- but none has been so bizarre as the story of Hillary Clinton, who…
Refusing to take Ronald Reagan's famous advice--don't just do something, stand there--conservative machers are all in a swivet, reading the leaves of the 2008 verdict, plotting to pick off this or that set of voters, opining on what it all means. Actually, just standing there seems like a pretty…
"Does evil exist?" the Reverend Rick Warren asked John McCain and Barack Obama at the Saddleback Forum on August 16. "If so, should we ignore it, negotiate with it, contain it, or defeat it?"
For the past 20 years, it has been a given that many conservatives are deeply embedded in Reagan Nostalgia, longing for a return in new guise of their erstwhile leader, the unassailable image of noble perfection, against whom all other men must fall short. But the revolt of a coterie on the right…
Nice try. Well, it wasn't that nice, but it surely was trying. From mid-day on Friday, August 29, when John McCain picked the hot governor from the cold state, the Axis of Snottiness was in full cry against her, determined to sink her not only as a blow to McCain and his chances of winning, but as…
Now that the dust is beginning to settle from the whirlwind descent of Hurricane Sarah, it may be time to stand back a little and assess in perspective what the moose-hunting beauty from Wasilla, Alaska, has wrought. Things will change between now and November, but she has already had a sizeable…
As late as August 24, John McCain had reportedly not given up on the idea of putting his old friend Joe Lieberman on the Republican ticket, even though Lieberman is (a) still a Democrat, if a beleaguered one, (b) pro-choice, which would enrage and alienate some of the party's most loyal…
HEADING THE LIST of a long, long, exceedingly long--we did say long, didn't we?--list of pundits, reporters, bloggers, and publications who have been suddenly been struck by a wave of nostalgia for the "old" John McCain, or the "real" John McCain, or the John McCain of 2000, Time's Joe Klein has…
A funny thing happened this summer: John McCain taunted Barack Obama into making a trip to Iraq, whereupon the press looked around and finally noticed what those who were paying attention had known for some months now. The country portrayed for the last four years by the press and the Democrats as…
(1) Gets Bush out of St. Paul, where he would have given a speech that the media and the Democrats would have pounced on, and puts him in the eye of the storm, doing the nation's business, where he will be welcomed and greeted by friendly Republican governors.
(1) Gets Bush out of St. Paul, where he would have given a speech that the media and the Democrats would have pounced on, and puts him in the eye of the storm, doing the nation's business, where he will be welcomed and greeted by friendly Republican governors. (2) Puts the spotlight on those…
1. Steps on the story of Obama's speech (and convention), and possibly the bounce coming from them, and wipes them off the news cycle. The Sunday news shows will be all-Palin, all of the time.
1. Steps on the story of Obama's speech (and convention), and possibly the bounce coming from them, and wipes them off the news cycle. The Sunday news shows will be all-Palin, all of the time. 2. Sends Republicans into their convention on a huge head of steam. 3. Wipes out the image of McCain as…
Back in the heady days of late 2006--when Barack Obama decided on his run for president--Democrats had a foolproof plan to gain power: Use the "disastrous" war in Iraq to split the Republican base off from the center, force Republicans in Congress to desert the president, defund the war effort, and…
On the way to his rendezvous with destiny, Barack Obama consistently lost white voters, especially of the middle and working classes, to Hillary Clinton--voters variously known as Appalachians or Reagan Democrats, rural voters and white ethnics in the industrial states. Because of this, he lost…
FIRST IT WAS Chris Matthews getting a thrill up his leg when he thought of Barack Obama; then it was Newsweek giving Obama a free pass on everything; now it is Mark Halperin over at Time warning that the Charisma Machine is going to roll right over McCain in November, with the media's hand on the…
'Strange new respect' is the term coined by Tom Bethell, an unhappy conservative, to describe the press adulation given those who drift leftward, those who grow "mature," "wise," and "thoughtful" as they cause apoplexy in right-wingers, and leave their old allies behind. But no new respect has been…
No Excuses
ON THE AFTERNOON OF May 25, 1984, the rising It Candidate of the current electoral season committed an unwitting faux pas at a fundraising event for le tout California that set his high-flying campaign on its heels. As recounted by Jack Germond and Jules Witcover in the book they wrote, Gary Hart…
LAST SUNDAY, OUR friend Charlotte Allen wrote a gentle spoof for the Outlook section of the Washington Post on the general subject of feminine ditziness, suggesting that at times members of her and my gender could be ineffectual, overemotional, sometimes irrational, and, now and then, "dim."…
Last Sunday, our friend Charlotte Allen wrote a gentle spoof for the Outlook section of the Washington Post on the general subject of feminine ditziness, suggesting that at times members of her and my gender could be ineffectual, overemotional, sometimes irrational, and, now and then, "dim."…
1. John McCain: Does his appeal to independents, centrists, and Lieberman Democrats outweigh the ennui, nausea, and revulsion he evokes among those on the right of the right? In a sense, this is a row between conservatives who are politicians, and concerned with assembling a center-right coalition…
FLUSHED AND AGLOW the thrill of defeat, some movement conservatives have their crystal balls out and are busily whipping off comeback scenarios in which all will be well. They will lose now to win later on; they will give the White House to Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, and get Congress back two…
In the 1990 Senate campaign in North Carolina, there was one ad and one moment that emerged as iconic. Run by Republican Jesse Helms against Harvey Gantt, a black Democrat, it showed a pair of white hands crumpling a piece of paper. "You needed that job," said the voice-over ominously, "but they…
The comparison between senators and governors as national candidates goes only so far. John Kennedy was a senator, but he was an executive type, who went into Congress instead of running for Lt. Governor because domestic issues bored him into a coma, and his real passion was foreign affairs. The…
The comparison between senators and governors as national candidates goes only so far. John Kennedy was a senator, but he was an executive type, who went into Congress instead of running for Lt. Governor because domestic issues bored him into a coma, and his real passion was foreign affairs. The…
Our friend John Hinderaker over at Powerline is no longer listening to his favorite radio talk show. He is not a McCainiac, but "I can no longer listen to her bash McCain day after day." Over at National Review Online, our friend Byron York talks to two pro-life conservatives who back McCain on the…
Our friend John Hinderaker over at Powerline is no longer listening to his favorite radio talk show. He is not a McCainiac, but "I can no longer listen to her bash McCain day after day." Over at National Review Online, our friend Byron York talks to two pro-life conservatives who back McCain on the…
THERE IS A LEFT-WING conspiracy at loose in the world, dedicated to undoing conservative governance, only the people who see it aren't sure what it is. John McCain is in it, of course, in fact he is the cause of it, as making him president is the ultimate goal. He is blamed for running, (and…
A FEW WEEKS ago, in the New York Post, our friend Peter Wehner had some innocent fun with a book by Jacob Heilbrun titled They Knew They Were Right, the theme of which was the damage done by the neo-conservatives in driving their besotted party and country into a calamitous loss in Iraq. The tone…
Sometime back in the 1990s, when the culture wars were the only ones we thought we had going, a cartoon showed three coworkers viewing each other with narrowed and questioning eyes. "Those whites don't know how to deal with a competent black man," the black man is thinking. "Those guys don't know…
For Love of Politics
Eagerly anticipating the defeat in Iraq to which they are so much attached, some on the left have also been preparing for another contingency: the assault that they think they see coming, a drive to pin the whole wretched failure on them. Apparently, this will be "stab in the back" redux, a new…
"Mitt Romney, meet Willie Horton!" enthused Chris Matthews on Hardball, about the commotion created by the news that Romney, when governor, appointed a judge who let a murderer out of jail without supervision, a murderer who went on to kill, in this case two people, again. And there is the end of a…
"Mitt Romney, meet Willie Horton!" enthused Chris Matthews on Hardball, about the commotion created by the news that Romney, when governor, appointed a judge who let a murderer out of jail without supervision, a murderer who went on to kill, in this case two people, again. And there is the end of a…
Bill Clinton
The presidential campaign is young, yet in the lives of the candidates we already have the makings of a full season's run of Desperate Housewives. We have the ex-mayor who once held a press conference to announce to his second wife and the world that their marriage was over; his social-climbing…
The fascists are coming! Or rather, they're already here, installed in the White House, planning like mad to subvert the Constitution and extend their reign in perpetuity, having first suppressed and eviscerated all opposition and put all of their critics in jail. Thus goes the rant of America's…
First there was Dallas and then there was Dynasty, family tales of intrigue in high places, guilty pleasures that kept us couch-bound each week in the 1980s, dazed by the money, the jets, the power, the houses, not to mention the rows and affairs. Then, just as these were reaching the end of their…
Ronald Reagan is weeping. There, on the cover of the March 26 Time magazine, under the headline "How the Right Went Wrong," we see the old lion, a tear rolling out of his eye and snaking down sadly over the contours of his aging, but still good-looking, once-was-a-movie-star face. And what is he…
Next year may see the party of the Sunbelt and Reagan, based in the South and in Protestant churches, nominate its first presidential candidate who is Catholic, urban, and ethnic--and socially liberal on a cluster of issues that set him at odds with the party's base. As a result, it may also see…
WOULD SOCIAL CONSERVATIVES accept a candidate who was semi-estranged from two of his children? The question arises because of reports that Rudy Giuliani is not on the best of terms with his son Andrew and daughter Caroline.
DEMOCRATS have Kennedy nostalgia, great gusts of longing for their last president who was not a public embarrassment of one kind or another, and their last burst of mid-century glory, before the ceiling fell in on the party. Republicans have Reagan nostalgia, pangs for what seems, at least in the…
Here are the three leading candidates for president in the Republican party, a party based in the South and in the interior, rural in nature, and backed in large part by social conservatives: the senior senator from Arizona, a congenital maverick with friends in the press and a habit of dissing the…
Giddy with joy at their sudden good fortune, the Democrats have set out to embarrass the president, pushing resolutions of less-than-no-confidence, clubbing his Iraq surge plan as it lies in its cradle, and declaring defeat in advance. In some sense, they have achieved their objectives: They have…
THERE IS THE PARTY OF WAR, which thinks the Iraq war is important and justified, and the party of peace, which thinks it is neither. And then again, there is the party of petulance, a bi-partisan caucus which seems to believe that the most important thing about the Iraqi invasion is the harm it can…
1. It has to rain sometime.
Dear Senator Kerry, We have not yet met, but I feel moved now to write you, in view of the latest assault on your honor, and the cruel blows being dealt you by fate. Your life has been hell since the last election, when those hanging chads in Ohio tricked all those people into voting for Buchanan,…
Now in the sixth year of his crisis-wracked presidency, George W. Bush is perceived as being in desperate trouble, having spent the two years since his reelection falling all over his feet. His democracy project looks stalled, his drive to reform Social Security seems to have been a huge waste of…
Politics Lost
At the time he left office in January 1953, so toxic that most of his party had shunned him, no one could imagine that Harry S. Truman, common-man heir to a great wartime president, would one day be claimed by both major parties, each of them longing to be just like him. For years, Republicans…
IT IS AXIOMATIC that political families end up in time turning into their opposites, and quite often both eerie and sad. The Adamses began with John, blunt, out-spoken, middle-class, bursting with energy and fiercely ambitious, and ended, three generations and many drunks later, with Brooks and…
BEYOND THE IRAQ of political news and of counterinsurgency is a population and a civil society, trying to right itself after decades of dictatorship, followed by war. Two Americans helping them do it are actor Gary Sinise and Laura Hillenbrand, author of Seabiscuit, who found an imaginative way to…
KARL ROVE clearly is at it again. First, back in late August, the wily presidential counselor planted explosives in the New Orleans levees, so as to flood the poor and black neighborhoods just before the advent of the storm of the century. Then, he persuaded George W. Bush to react to the flooding…
Isabella Greenway
Late last week, as New Orleans was sliding into savage conditions, some talking heads were glowing with pleasure at the idea of a moral meltdown of such immense proportions that it would not only bury George Bush in its rubble, but erode forever the country's self confidence. Or, as Robert Scheer…
IN THE FOUR YEARS OR so since September 11, liberals have found a new weapon of preference, and that weapon is martyrdom. They have discovered grief as a tactical weapon. They tend to like grief they can use. They use it to arouse guilt and sympathy to cover a highly partisan message, in the hope…
THERE THEY GO AGAIN, our friends the Democrats, eager to use the social issues as low roads to power, isolating the right as religious fanatics, outside of the mainstream of American life. "We're going to use Terri Schiavo," vowed Howard Dean at a breakfast in Hollywood, pledging to exploit the…
ON MARCH 6, THE Drudge Report noted the fact that newsstand sales for the magazine Vanity Fair had plummeted by 22.5 percent during the last half of 2004, attributed by the editor to three successive covers that showed pictures of . . . men. What Drudge did not cite is the parallel fact that this…
WITH THINGS LOOKING UP for a change, this has been a rough patch of time for the Democrats. They have been suffering from Election Shock Treatment; which means the success of the Iraqi elections has shocked them into the realization that they may have to seek treatment, because of the trauma…
ONE OF THE PROBLEMS with being the son of a president with a political future is the strange sort of friends you attract.
THE DEMOCRATS' WORST WEEK AND a half since Black Tuesday (November 2, 2004, when the U.S. election returns came in) began on January 18, when Barbara Boxer took on Condi Rice in the Senate, and ended on Black Sunday (January 30, 2005, when Iraq held its first free election). In one comparatively…
AFTER JOHN KERRY'S come-from-behind win in the Iowa caucus, after Howard Dean flagged in the stretch, and continuing through much of the 2004 campaign, Kerry's fans had the temerity to compare him to Seabiscuit, the great racehorse of the mid-1930's. But one win does not make a champion, and to…
WHEN DEMOCRATS dream of the perfect presidential campaign, they dream of the war room--the magic rapid-response operation that with its targeted rage and its lethal objections turns every Republican attack back on the attackers. If only Democrats were quicker, they say; if only they were nastier;…
Dear Mr. Rather,
JUST IN TIME to brighten our Sunday, the Washington Post broke with precedent and ran a hilarious piece of satire on its op-ed page, all about the "end of network news." The crisis, it appears, is that the networks have gone too commercial and ceded coverage of the political conventions to . . .…
EVERY DAY, it becomes more and more obvious that a dreadful wrong has been done to Al Gore. No, not the outcome of the 2000 election, though that would have been gruesome for anyone. The election was a tie, each side had grounds to complain about one court or another, and each had reason to believe…
THE MINUTE the ads of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had begun to draw blood, the Democrats attacked them as a giant, malevolent plot. The same plot, drawn up by a diabolical genius of unsurpassed malice and cunning, that has been causing Democrats trouble for so many years now, always unwarranted,…
IT'S OVER. The love affair of the left with John McCain is now ending, as these things do so often, in tears. Of course, liberals' hearts have been broken before, usually as the result of some cherished illusion that a maverick Republican, who seems to them "better," will blow the whistle on the…
POOR PRESIDENT BUSH. It's not often a man with a net worth in the low eight figures is made to feel destitute. But compared with the other three men atop the national tickets, Bush seems almost indigent. This year, both ends of both tickets are rolling in lucre. Taken together, their net worth…
The Real Jimmy Carter
AT LONG LAST, after a grueling primary season attacking president George W. Bush as pro-life and too bellicose, the Democrats have come up with their dream candidate. And wouldn't you know, he's a pro-life Republican who's keen on the war in Iraq. Just what they wanted, you might say sarcastically,…
Hard America / Soft America
Spin Sisters
LOOKING BACK, there is nothing surprising about the carefully plotted spasms of outrage at the reference, in a Bush campaign ad, to the terrorist attacks of September 11 through the fleeting shot of a flag-covered stretcher, and the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center in downtown New York.…
BRING IT ON! And there they stand, thumbs in their belts, snorting at each other from opposite corners--the Vietnam vet with three Purple Hearts and numerous medals, and the commander in chief, architect of two wars, with one bad guy's scalp on his belt. Are they tough? Are you kidding? But wait.…
American Dynasty
CLOSE YOUR EYES on some days, and you can almost believe it: You're back somewhere in the mid-1980s, 1984 to be precise. At least from the Democrats' side of the aisle. There it all is: The Republican president denounced as a dunce and a dangerous cowboy; the left on a tear against corporations and…
ONE OF THE TOUGHER DAYS in the life of a book section editor must come when he or she receives a review of a book by one of the paper's own writers that the reviewer finds not up to par. Thus, it was especially brave of the Washington Post last Sunday to run a review of "The Perfect Wife," a book…
IN RETROSPECT, it should have been apparent that once Al Gore endorsed Howard Dean and his antiwar platform, and made an impassioned speech excoriating the war and the president, something big would go right in Iraq for the president, and Gore's stock would go down. After all, the last time Al Gore…
The Georgetown Ladies' Social Club
WITH ITS UNERRING EYE for what fails to matter, the Femintern seized on a PR mistake on the part of the White House to ram home a defense of its favorite project: unfettered abortion, any kind, any time. The mistake (duly noted and criticized on many conservative websites) was that the people shown…
Armey's Axioms
I LOVE GEORGE W. BUSH. I worship the man. I wake up every morning glad he is president. When annoyed by small things--traffic, the weather, an overcharge--I say to myself, "President Bush," and at once feel better. I like his worldview. I like his dogs and his wife and his mother. I think he looks…
GOVERNOR ARNOLD is bad news for the Democrats. Republicans now hold the statehouses in the four largest states. But the really bad news is that the Democrats running for the honor of contesting George W. Bush in the 2004 showdown are being picked by a primary audience that is so out of sync with…
HAVING SAVED THE WORLD many times over in one hit movie after another, Arnold Schwarzenegger now has the chance to breathe life into two real-world but comatose bodies: the Republican party of California and the Kennedy machine. Both once were fountains of power and energy. Both now are flat on…
In Praise of Nepotism
Gentleman Revolutionary
All the Presidents' Children
IN 1988, in the course of a trip to America, Prince Charles of Britain asked to meet not the sons of the country's leading political families, but Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr.--heir to the New York Times newspaper complex--and Donald Graham of the Washington Post. "The forty-year-old heir to the…
ALL THROUGH the Clinton administration and into the 2000 election, some said we had run out of history. It had been tapped out, like an overused resource. It had run dry, like a well. Then came September 11, and history came flooding back with a vengeance, swamping us all in a torrent of crisis and…
GIDDY WITH FAILURE, Democrats are breaking new ground in political strategy. Deep in a hole, they are digging still deeper. They have found a new method of dealing with setbacks: They find out what caused them, and do it again. Having unexpectedly lost four Senate seats in the 2002 midterms because…
SOME TIME in the morning of April 9, 2003, as the statue of Saddam Hussein was being hauled down in Baghdad, another statue--of Walter Cronkite, famed CBS newsman--hacked at with hammers by various bloggers, also came crashing down. Cronkite, once called "the most trusted man in America," was…
IT'S NOT OFTEN that you see an American commit hari-kari in public, but that's what John Kerry appears to have done. In one thrill-packed day--April 2--in New Hampshire, he managed to (1) blame George W. Bush for the train wreck in the U.N. Security Council, (2) take his stand with this country's…
IN AMERICAN HISTORY, there are three dire dates--December 7, 1941; November 22, 1963; and September 11, 2001--that send a collective shudder through our memory. The left also has its own special roster of days not to cherish: December 12, 2000, when George W. Bush became president; November 7,…
POLITICAL NATURES do not always descend in straight lines, or according to party. As a politician and president, George W. Bush is being compared less to his father than to Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy. Since September 11, Bush has been governing along the lines of the Kennedy inaugural…
AT THIS LATE DATE, are there things left to say of the Poets' Revolt, the literati's defense of Saddam and bin Laden? (See J. Bottum's The Poets vs. The First Lady.) Well, yes--that poets weren't always this puerile and dotty, and sometimes could tell right from wrong. Exhibit A in this instance is…
SOMETIME SOON--say, around Spring 2004, when George W. Bush begins spending his money--whoever becomes the Democratic nominee may have second thoughts about his attendance at the NARAL dinner in Washington on January 21, 2003. Or at least he may wish that cameras hadn't been present, for the images…
FINALLY THE DEMOCRATS have found their hot issue: The Confederate heart of George Bush, and of Bill Frist, who by virtue of their membership in the Republican party have indicated their desire to live in a slaveholding past. Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi--to name just three…
ANY DAY NOW, the Democrats may come to regret deeply the moment the Trent Lott disturbance caught media fire. It is now a great mess for the Republican party, but one that has the potential to turn into a great opportunity, and one the party should eagerly seize. It is a chance for the GOP to clean…
HAVING A FAMILY that rears you for greatness can be a mixed blessing at best. Now and then a George W. Bush or a John Kennedy will exceed expectations, but often the outcome is grim. John Adams and his wife Abigail desperately wanted their three sons to be famous lawyers--and president. One of them…
A BIG THING HAPPENED in the elections that you won't read about much in the papers, and the fact that you won't be reading about it is one of the reasons it did. The big story is that the pro-choice extremists took a widespread whipping, which is the one thing the press doesn't want to acknowledge,…
CHALK UP A BIG ONE for Priscilla Owen, an unsung winner of last Tuesday's election, and a partial architect of the Republican victory. Owen is the Texas judge who was a Bush nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. She was described by the American Bar Association as "highly…
"THE PAST IS NEVER DEAD, it's not even past," William Faulkner once said. He would have been right at home in the antiwar movement, where the past is now more present than ever, or at least more present than it has been since 1991. Every time war, or the threat of war, or the idea of war presents…
No Way to Treat a First Lady by Christopher Buckley Random House, 320 pp., $24.95 A WASHINGTON NOVEL by Christopher Buckley is cause for rejoicing. So are his non-fiction essays, of course--but then, his novels are much like his essays: not novels so much as tweaks on reality, which come out much…
WHEN IT ALL boiled over that day in September--with a red-faced Tom Daschle denouncing the president from the Senate floor--George W. Bush had already given the Democrats two very bad years. Two years of predictions that never quite happened. Two years of gotchas that never came through. Two years…
LIKE THE COLD WAR, the War on Terror is being defined even as it is fought, by a president who didn't expect it. In 1945, Harry Truman finished a hot war and stepped into a postwar world that seemed stable and certified: The United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China, the victorious Big Five…
Martha Washington First Lady of Liberty by Helen Bryan John Wiley, 432 pp., $30 MEN COME AND GO, but spin is forever. Like all good first couples, George and Martha Washington spun incessantly throughout their lives, and were spun by others after their deaths. The first kind of spin made them…
PEOPLE AND PRESIDENTS do not come without weaknesses, which differ in nature and kind. Richard M. Nixon's persecution fixation, which surfaced famously in 1962 when he lost the governorship of California to Pat Brown--"you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore"--led in a straight line to…
FACED WITH A Democratic Senate that obstinately blocks his judicial nominations, George W. Bush and his allies have two options: They can sit around and wait for the next blow to fall (meanwhile praying that Republicans recover control of the Senate in November). Or they can fight back. Those they…
The Natural The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton by Joe Klein Doubleday, 230 pp., $22.95 PERHAPS the only thing worse than a really bad love affair is a love affair that isn't quite bad enough--that strings one along with hopes, promises much while delivering little, and ends in confusion…
Ambling Into History The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush by Frank Bruni HarperCollins, 224 pp., $23.95 The Big Enchilada Campaign Adventures with the Cockeyed Optimists from Texas Who Won the Biggest Prize in Politics by Stuart Stevens Free Press, 298 pp., $25 SOMETHING STRANGE has happened to…
A NEW George W. Bush last Tuesday addressed a transformed country, wholly unlike the one he campaigned in, and as not quite the man who campaigned. Gone is the political dynamic of the past dozen years, gone the small presidency, gone the politics of minor entitlements, gone the burden of the…
MORE THAN TWO MONTHS after the terrorist attacks that took the lives of 4,000 people, and ripped up the lives of ten times that number, leftists in this country have found victims to cry for: themselves. It seems they are being suppressed, by a reign of terror. Exhibit A in the tale of this great…
THE EVENTS OF SEPTEMBER 11 in New York and at the Pentagon fell like an axe across old political groupings, threatening alliances of many years standing, as people realized, perhaps for the first time, how strange their bedfellows were. Conservatives discovered that there are other conservatives…
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