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Archive
His Terms Are Always Hostile Ones
The Wall Street Journal, January 19, 2013
- Presidential inaugurations are rare and notable events, coming only once every four years since April 30, 1789, when George Washington raised his right hand and took the oath on the second-floor balcony of New York’s Federal Hall.
It’s a big day with all its pomp and ceremony, and among its p...
It’s Pirate Time for the GOP
The Wall Street Journal, January 12, 2013
- It’s official. Congress is now less popular than cockroaches and colonoscopies, though more popular than the ebola virus and gonorrhea. Really. The numbers came, this week, from a Public Policy Polling survey. The House and Senate have an approval rating of 9%.
GOP governors are the party’s m...
There’s No ‘I’ in ‘Kumbaya’
The Wall Street Journal, January 6, 2013
- We’re all talking about Republicans on the Hill and their manifold failures. So here are some things President Obama didn’t do during the fiscal cliff impasse and some conjecture as to why.
He won but he did not triumph. His victory didn’t resolve or ease anything and heralds nothing but mo...
About Those 2012 Political Predictions
The Wall Street Journal, December 29, 2012
- This was a great election year, and every political writer in the country was one way or another in the fray. “South Carolina just may go Santorum,” they’d say, or “From the turnout at the rallies it looks like Gingrich has a good chance.” Columnists, bloggers—they’re all trying to und...
When Childhood Fears Come True
The Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2012
- What I keep thinking when the subject turns to Newtown is that childhood is often remembered as a time of joy and innocence, but it’s a time of terrible fears and great frights, too. The young are darkly imaginative.
I knew a 5-year-old girl who was so afraid of ET that when she saw a picture o...
Republicans Need to Talk
The Wall Street Journal, December 15, 2012
- Viewed a certain way, the 2012 election can be seen as a gift to Republicans wrapped in ugly paper. The wrapping looked like a hostage note with a message scrawled in crayon: “We hate you.” But inside was a gift, and the gift was time. The party was given the opportunity, when it is still strong...
Beneath the Presidential Platitudes
The Wall Street Journal, December 8, 2012
- Former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson has put fresh emphasis on a major and underlying aspect of our fiscal disputes: It’s the yoots versus the coots. The young may not be aware of it, but they’ll long bear the tax burden of the entitlement arrangements the old have instituted. Mr. Simpson’s video ...
The Drawn-Out Crisis: It’s the Obama Way
The Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2012
- The president’s inviting Mitt Romney for lunch is a small thing but a brilliant move. It makes Mr. Obama look big, gracious. It implies the weakened, battered former GOP nominee is the leader of the Republican Party—and if the other party has to have a leader, the weakened, battered one is the o...
Family, Friends, Health and Freedom
The Wall Street Journal, November 24, 2012
- “Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people.” That was the acute observation of Dr. Johnson, to Boswell. It does say something about us as a people that our Pilgrims invented, Washington formalized, and Lincoln normalized the putting aside of one day each ye...
The I’s Have It
The Wall Street Journal, November 17, 2012
- We are becoming a conceited nitwit society, pushy and self-aggrandizing. No one is ashamed to brag now. and show off. They think it heightens them. They think it’s good for business.
It used to be that if you were big, you’d never tell people how big you were because that would be kind of cla...
‘People Are Afraid of Change’
The Wall Street Journal, November 10, 2012
- President Obama did not lose, he won. It was not all that close. There was enthusiasm on his side. Mitt Romney’s assumed base did not fully emerge, or rather emerged as smaller than it used to be. He appears to have received fewer votes than John McCain. The last rallies of his campaign neither si...
How Far Obama Has Fallen
The Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2012
- So where are we? A softly catastrophic storm left us, in the Northeast, shocked at the depth and breadth of its power to destroy. Everyone who could be was hunkered down Monday waiting it out, and at first we hoped it might not be as bad as we’d been warned, because we’d all seen higher wind and...
When Americans Saw the Real Obama
The Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2012
- We all say Ohio, Ohio, Ohio. But it's all still Denver, Denver, and the mystery that maybe isn't a mystery at all.
If Cincinnati and Lake County go for Mitt Romney on Nov. 6 it will be because of what happened in Denver on Oct. 3. If Barack Obama barely scrapes through, if there's a bloody and pr...
The Year the Debates Mattered
The Wall Street Journal, October 20, 2012
- The presidential debates this year have been more consequential than such debates have ever been.
They’ve been historic, shifting the mood and trajectory of the race. They’ve been revealing of the personalities and approaches of the candidates. And they’ve produced a new way in which winner...
Confusing Strength with Aggression
The Wall Street Journal, October 13, 2012
- The vice presidential debate was uniquely important because if Paul Ryan won it or did well, the Romney-Ryan ticket’s momentum would be continued or speed up. If he did not, that momentum would slow or stop. So the night carried implications.
The debate, obviously, was the Republican versus the...
Romney Deflates the President
The Wall Street Journal, October 6, 2012
- Out on a limb, where the breeze is best:
The impact of the first debate is going to be bigger than we know. It’s going to affect thinking more than we know, and it’s going to start showing up in the polls, including in the battlegrounds, more dramatically than we guess.
It wasn’t just Mi...
2012 Debates: This Is It, Mitt
The Wall Street Journal, September 29, 2012
- “Governor, the success or failure of your entire presidential campaign will come down to what happens between the hours of 9 and 10:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 3. We’re at a hinge point in history. It’s not too much to say the future of the American republic depends on how you do in that hour a...
Romney Needs a New CEO
The Wall Street Journal, September 22, 2012
- “Nothing is written.” That was T.E. Lawrence to the Arab tribesmen in Robert Bolt’s screenplay, a masterpiece, of “Lawrence of Arabia.” You write no one off. Nothing is inevitable. Life is news—”What happened today?” And news is surprise—”You’re kidding!”
But you have to l...
The Age of the Would-Be Princips
The Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2012
- No American leader’s public statements were up to the task or equal to the moment this week. Both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama were appropriately full of high praise and sentiment for the four U.S. diplomats gruesomely murdered in Libya. The four can’t be praised enough...
The Democrats’ Soft Extremism
The Wall Street Journal, September 8, 2012
- Barack Obama is deeply overexposed and often boring. He never seems to be saying what he’s thinking. His speech Thursday was weirdly anticlimactic. There’s too much buildup, the crowd was tired, it all felt flat. He was somber, and his message was essentially banal: We’ve done better than you ...
