I have argued that rising unemployment inevitably imperils the political prospects of a president and his party. So I’m not surprised that President Barack Obama’s approval ratings have steadily fallen over the last year, or that Democrats have fared poorly in recent elections. And it’s fair to say that if unemployment continues to rise, or stays at the same elevated level, the Democrats will have trouble in the midterm elections this November.
In the Financial Times today, S. Ward Casscells, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense in George W. Bush’s sterling administration, and pollster John Zogby have an op-ed calling for Congress to start over and draft a bipartisan health care bill. “It is possible a Republican leader could yet emerge and resolve the healthcare impasse,” they intone. And oh yes, it is possible, too, that aliens could land is Oshkosh and take over city hall.
Say what you want about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but “he knows how to work a room.” So claims Flynt Leverett, the contrarian Iran analyst who, with his wife Hillary Mann Leverett, paid a visit to the Iranian president in New York City last fall. During the sit-down at Manhattan’s InterContinental Barclay hotel with a group of invited academics, foreign policy professionals, and other Iranophiles, the Leveretts marveled at Ahmadinejad’s attention to detail as the Iranian took copious notes and strove to pronounce their unfamiliar names correctly.
Every now and then a piece of writing captures the mood of the moment and the essence of an ideology so completely that it warrants special attention. This is certainly the case with “An Exceptional Debate: The Obama Administration’s Assault on American Identity,” an essay (and cover story) by Richard Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru in the March 8 issue of National Review. Lowry and Ponnuru’s thesis—that President Obama is an enemy of “American exceptionalism”—is hardly original. It is so widely held and so frequently asserted on the right, in fact, that it can almost be described as conservative conventional wisdom. Still, NR’s treatment of the subject stands out. Lowry and Ponnuru aim for comprehensiveness, and they maintain a measured, thoughtful tone throughout their essay, marshalling a wide range of historical evidence for their thesis and making well-timed concessions to contrary arguments. It’s hard to imagine this key conservative claim receiving a more cogent and rhetorically effective defense. Which is precisely what makes the essay’s shortcomings so striking. While its authors clearly mean it to stand as a manifesto for a resurgent conservative moment, the essay far more resembles a lullaby—a comforting compilation of consoling pieties set to a soothingly familiar melody. The perfect soundtrack to a peaceful snooze.
The latest potential Republican presidential contender is Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels. I wrote about Daniels back when he ran the Office of Management and Budget under George W. Bush, where his task was to use pseudo-populist demagoguery to deflect from the administration's disastrous fiscal record:
If you've been watching the hit TV show "Lost,"then you're familiar with the concept of parallel universes. That is, alternate realities in which history turned out differently, because people made different decisions.
It's a useful concept when it comes to thinking about President Obama's current predicament. On a variety of fronts, the Obama administration is suffering from an inability to show Americans the parallel universe in which its past policies were not enacted—and the future that will result if its current proposals bite the dust.
Glenn Hubbard, the former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under George W. Bush, has an op-ed on the budget in today's Wall Street Journal. The good news is that, in addition to demanding spending cuts, Hubbard sorta-hypothetically concedes that tax increases might be needed. The bad news is that, like any good movement conservative, he insists such tax hikes must be regressive:
A few weeks ago, in my article touting the Senate health care bill, I compared the public mood to the 2000 election. The right was inflamed, seeing a moderate liberal as a radical threat. Liberals were filled with ennui, alternating between lesser of two evils-ism and outright agnosticism. And the left had descended into destructive alliances with the GOP in the name of progressive purity. Emotionally, the mood now feels like the Florida recount.
In my article about the health care bill I noted:
Greg Mankiw, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under George W. Bush, explains that President Obama's large bank tax is pretty straightforward economics:
One thing we have learned over the past couple years is that Washington is not going to let large financial institutions fail. The bailouts of the past will surely lead people to expect bailouts in the future. Bailouts are a specific type of subsidy--a contingent subsidy, but a subsidy nonetheless.
In case you missed it, once-and-maybe-future presidential candidate Mike Huckabee traveled to Calgary, Alberta, Canada the other day and delivered himself of an address (according to his own pre-speech account, reported in the local press) focused on the terrible temptation of conservatives in the United States to tolerate diverse points of view, under the shorthand of a "Big Tent."
Michael "Mission Creep Watch" Cohen takes issue with my last print piece, which foreshadowed the growing tension between the White House and some Pentagon officials over Afghanistan troop levels.
WASHINGTON -- If you saw a woman struck by a car, would you call an ambulance right away? Or would you first ask for her papers to make sure she was not an illegal immigrant?
If someone living down the street from you were suffering from the H1N1 flu, wouldn't you want him to get immediate medical help? Would you rather see him in pain and perhaps spread the disease to others in your neighborhood?
While conservatives have raised all kinds of objections to last week's vanilla arms-control agreement, it's interesting that the emotional core of their critique has been an attack on something called the "offense-defense linkage"
In 2007, John Bolton wrote that Republicans had achieved "the end of arms control." He was referring to a string of conservative successes, sta
It was predictable. That even the faculty, or a large portion of it, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas would have qualms about having the George W. Bush Presidential Library on campus. It was obvious. Now, SMU has not actually been designated as the querulous host. Baylor University in Waco and the University of Texas, not in Austin, God forbid, but Irving are also in the running. Or maybe trying to escape.
He has met with every significant figure in the Iraqi government and even with members of anti-occupation militias. He has quietly reached out to representatives from both Syria and Iran. He has begun discussions with Jordan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia to lay the groundwork for internationalizing the Iraq crisis. According to The New York Times, he meets regularly with President Bush. It's widely expected that, after the election, he will offer the definitive blueprint for how to move forward on Iraq. Dick Cheney? Donald Rumsfeld? Stephen Hadley?
